Pastor's Power Points

The Condition that Requires Reconciliation

 The fundamental issue of all mankind is reconciliation to God, for whom… and by whom are all things (Heb. 2:10). It is the God of grace who initiated and made possible this reconciliation by coming near to us as one of us in the form of His Son, Jesus Christ, who suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God  (I Pet. 3:18).

The need for reconciliation necessarily requires a degree of estrangement. In terms of relationship between persons there has been a hostile division. This alienation from God is what first must be recognized any man before he can be reconciled to God. This is the task that proves difficult in an environment of such great “comfort” and apathy in which we live. Not many have the “felt need” for God because, either life seems to be just fine (for now) or because on has found other means from myriad choices to meet those felt needs. But what is at the end of it all?

We read in Genesis 3:24, So [God] drove out the man….” This is when man first knew alienation. But there was something that man knew before this – good and evil in an experiential way. The tempter promised that if man pursued his own desires and pleasure contrary to the precepts of the Creator (who was ostensibly holding out on them!), he would be like God and know good and evil. The tempter was right, only he failed to leave out a vital bit of information – that such knowledge would not be desirable. Satan led man to focus on his limits and attempt to go beyond them (i.e. become like God). Man’s willful choice to act independently of God’s loving boundaries led him to an outcome he neither expected nor desired – alienation.  John Sailhammer says it well:

 Even though man’s quest to “be like God” was obtained, the goal itself proved to be undesirable. Man, who had been created “like God” in the beginning, found himself after the Fall curiously “like God” – but no longer “with God”… The author has shown that man’s happiness does not consist of his being “like God” so much as it does his being “with God,” enjoying the blessing of his presence.

 We have recorded in human history, that, because man was alienated from the Life of God, his understanding was darkened. Though man was made upright (able to recognize the righteous command of God) he has sought out many schemes (Ecc. 7:29) – attempts to shortcut God’s design for life (i.e. find fulfillment in all the wrong places) following futile and pointless pursuits.  Where does this leave mankind?  Because of his accountability to the holy gaze of an infinite Creator, he does not like to keep God in his knowledge (Rom. 1:28), but has a mind hostile toward God, not subject to God (Rom. 8:7) – children of wrath (Eph. 2:3)

Knowing evil by experience (actively and passively) the natural man stands alienated from holy God; condemned to eternal separation (death) and in desperate need for reconciliation to the holy, loving, gracious Creator.  Here the words of Immanuel (which means “God with us”):

 The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.
Luke 19:10