The present world we live in is deeply, deeply wrong in every respect. The lives we live in it are for the most part unsatisfying and unfulfilling, marked by sadness and sorrow, anxiety and anger and ultimately death. For many of us it is a life of quiet desperation in which we give most of our time and resources to the pursuit of some moderate level of happiness, a few moments of joy in a world that offers us everything we think we want, but nothing that we will ever need to truly satisfy our deepest needs, longings and desires.
Most of us, if we are honest, are discontent with who we are, how we act and what we look like. And well we should be, as we are all members of a severely flawed race of beings, created in the image and likeness of God, for the glory of God, yet fallen from that lofty status. Both our bodies and souls are marred and corrupted because of sin, our rejection of God’s purpose for and rule over our lives (Genesis 6:11-12). As members of a cursed (Deuteronomy 28:15) and condemned race (Romans 5:12), the Bible refers to our bodies as vile, our minds as depraved or debased (Romans 1:28-29), our intentions as mean, selfish and self-serving, our passions and desires as ungodly (Jude 1:18), and our worldly pursuits as mostly foolish (Jeremiah 4:22).
We can see evidence of our sin corrupted bodies when we look into the physical mirror and see the disfiguring impact of sin on our countenance and appearance, and on our diseased, aging bodies. At the same time we can look into the mirror of our soul, God’s word (Hebrews 4:12-13), and see that we are spiritually dead (Ephesians 2:1), cut off from the glorious life with God for which we were created, corrupted and defiled at the very core of our being, what the Bible refers to as our heart (Jeremiah 17:9), a corruption that is displayed in all of the evil of this present world (Mark 7:21-23) (Galatians 1:4).
In addition, all of nature, all of the earth, which was magnificently designed by God to display His goodness and His glory in its wonder, beauty and harmony, and to be enjoyed and ruled over by man, has been cursed by God because of man’s sin, (Genesis 3:17-19) turning against man as man turned against God (Romans 1:18-23). It is thus an increasingly dangerous world, with man himself being the most dangerous and destructive of all (Romans 3:10-18). Hurricanes, earthquakes, floods can kill hundreds, even thousands of people in one event, but men start wars that violently and purposefully kill millions.
We are essentially a sorrowful, angry, grieving race of people – grieving over the loss of the glorious life with God for which we were created (Romans 3:23). We have fallen from grace, now striving through our own efforts to get back to the Garden (Genesis 2:8-16) – to regain paradise lost and to restore ourselves to the glorious beings we were created to be in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27). And of course we are failing miserably in these endeavors as we pursue all of this independent of God and in opposition to God, becoming increasingly in our minds our own god, which is what got us into this dire situation in the first place (Genesis 3:4-5).
However God, our good and gracious and merciful creator, our sovereign Lord and King (Exodus 34:5-7) determined from the foundation of the earth (1Peter 1:18-21) that He would not leave His creation (1 Colossians 1:16), most importantly mankind, in this desperate, dire and condemned condition, but would make a way to justly redeem His world, restoring both mankind and nature to the glory in which it was created, and even better, because there will be no threat of sin ever again bringing the corruption, destruction and misery into His new creation that it has brought to His old (2 Peter 3:13) (Hebrews 9:26).
That redemption would be accomplished by God himself, God the Son, Jesus Christ, coming into this world as a man, so that through His sinless life, sacrificial death and miraculous resurrection He could reconcile those who would repent of their sin and believe in Him, back to the glorious relationship with God for which man was created (John 3:16), restoring them to His glorious image and likeness (1 John 3:1-2). while renovating the corrupted natural creation to the beauty and magnificence in which He first called it into being, establishing a new heavens and new earth as it is described in Revelation 21.
Our new life however begins long before the completion of this cosmic renovation. We are told that our transformation into justified men and women made perfect (Hebrews 12:23) begins in this world, when we put or faith in Jesus, identifying ourselves with His death and resurrection (Galatians 2:20). At that time, we come into intimate union with Him such that we immediately, in the eyes of God, have a new standing before and new relationship with God (2 Corinthians 5:17), wherein we are declared righteous (2 Corinthians 5:21) and are adopted by Him as His beloved child (Romans 8:15). All things that identified us with this world and its condemnation are in the mind of God passed away, and we now live the remainder of our life in this world becoming who God says we are in Christ (2 Corinthians 3:18), a transformation that will be completed with the resurrection of our body at Jesus’s second coming (Philippians 3:20-21).
How this glorious transformation takes place in our lives and how it will be displayed in the new heavens and new earth will be the focus of my next post.
Grace and Peace ×