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God's Purpose for our Redemption
The popular teaching about God's purpose for our redemption (and the one I grew up with) is that Jesus took our sins upon Himself. He took our punishment and died as our substitute, so that our sins could be forgiven and we could go to heaven after we die. In order to avail ourselves of this great salvation and be rescued out of eternal hellfire (a word that is not used in a correct translation of the scriptures), we had to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ.
This teaching left me with many questions. For example, how could three days in death and hell substitute for an eternity in hell? If eternal hell was our punishment, how could Jesus get away with three days? The answer that, because of Christ's innocence, three days was a sufficient substitute for humanity's eternal torment left me with more questions. I also questioned where Jesus was after His death. To the thief on the cross He said, "Today you will be with Me in Paradise." How could He be in hell if He was in Paradise? Can these two concepts be reconciled? Then there were the many things Jesus told us to do, which to my knowledge, were a complete impossibility this side of heaven. Why were we to be holy, even as God is holy, when we could never be that holy before we die? Why would God tell us to be something He knew was impossible for us? How could physical death make us holy and perfect? Why would God, knowing the result, create man when most of humanity would spend eternity in physical agony too gruesome to even contemplate?
Let's examine the scriptures to receive more light on this subject. In order to receive truth, we have to begin with truth. We have to quit spinning our wheels in the lies of tradition, and receive truth and move on in truth. We have to stop putting our own interpretation to what the scriptures declare, and hear what the Spirit is saying. As we do this, we will be filled with awe and amazement at God's great purpose for us, and we will marvel at the wisdom of our God! We will see that His purpose is infinitely higher than the doctrines of men can ever conceive.
To understand God's purpose we have to begin with Genesis 1:26 where God said, "Let us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness." In order to accomplish this, He had to make a spiritual man who was connected with creation, yet have the same nature that God has. He had to know evil, yet not desire it; he had to know the depth of love and be filled with love and light even as God is, and how could he know the vastness of love without knowing evil? Even though God knew everything that was involved in making man in His own image, He wholeheartedly purposed to make a creature that would be like Him, for He said, "Let us make man."
To accomplish this purpose would require a great sacrifice on God's part. God has revealed Himself to us as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. That is His name - these are not names of three individual entities. It is a three-fold revelation of the one God. This concept is difficult for us to understand. We can understand that a son can be a father, a husband, a grandfather, a great grandfather, etc. He can also have other work-related titles. Each title brings a new revelation of who He is. So it is with God. The name Father tells us that He has a Son, for He cannot be a Father without having offspring. The name Son tells us that He has the Father's DNA, and that there is a Father-Son relationship. The name Holy Spirit tells us that He is Spirit, and that He is one with the Father. The natural mind cannot understand the unity that there is in the spirit realm, so it has invented three Gods, namely, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. However, only God knows who He truly is, so we have to believe God's revelation of Himself, and He emphatically declares that He is one God.
God knew that in order to make man in His image, it would require a great sacrifice of His complete being. So He said, "Let us make man." As Father, He would have to give His Son to be a sacrifice; as the Son (the Word made flesh), He would have to give His life; as the Holy Spirit, He would have a great work to do in the hearts of sinful humanity.
Now let us look at the process God used to create this man. In Genesis 1 we see the finished spiritual man prophetically. Everything was good and no restrictions were placed on him. He could eat whatever he wished, and he was given dominion over creation. This is not the case in chapter 2. Here God began the process by forming (not creating) Adam out of the dust of the ground - out of preexisting material. Then He blew His breath into his nostrils, and Adam became a living soul. He was a creature of light, full of wisdom, and enjoyed his relationship with God. Although Adam was sinless at the beginning, he was not fully in God's image, for he did not know evil, nor did he understand love and forgiveness, and he was a mixture of dust and spirit. He was an earthy image of God, but not yet a spiritual one. He was the beginning of the process to make man in God's complete and perfect image.
To acquaint Adam with evil, God planted the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the midst of the garden. The serpent belonged in the field, but he had access to the vicinity of this tree. Adam had received instruction from God, and was told that if he ate of this tree he would die. If Adam would pass this test, he would prove that he did not desire evil, and he would remain in life, but he would not know what evil is, and he would not know the true depth of love. So God had purpose in letting Adam fail the test. He failed it because he was a mixture, and the earthy part of him birthed a desire to become like God by his own good choices. By listening to a voice other than God's voice, something within him died, and his whole understanding of God changed. Instead of enjoying fellowship with God, he now was afraid of God, and hid from God. He now had the idea that God was out to punish him. In Adam's mind, God had become his enemy instead of his friend. Since Adam had listened to the serpent and obeyed a voice other than God's voice, he received the serpent's mindset - the mindset that is against the Spirit.
God did not change, but man's idea of God had changed. God still loved Adam and Eve. He forgave them and gave them hope. However, humanity continues to view God as its enemy. Man is now wrapped in self and selfhood, and thinks he can, of his own free will, make right choices. He does not realize that he does not have a free will, for his will can be, and is influenced by his emotions, desires and situations. A will that can be influenced is not a free will.
Religion has forged many myths, and humanity and organized Christianity continue to preach its doctrines. The scriptures teach that we are God's workmanship, that God has chosen us, that salvation is not by works but by grace, and that no man can come to Christ unless the Father draws him (Jn. 6:44,65), yet man claims he can independently decide whether or not he will follow God. How can those who are dead in their trespasses and sins make right choices? Let's give God the glory, and thank Him for waking us out of our deadness and drawing us to Himself!
When Adam sinned, it looked as though God's plan had failed. But God's plan never fails, and He never has a plan B. It was God's plan to acquaint man with evil. Now that humanity had come to know evil, and was dead in its trespasses and sins, it was God's responsibility to provide a way for man to get out of this dilemma. God's justice is not against the sinner, demanding eternal condemnation, but for him, insuring his salvation.
Man's failure did not come as a surprise to God. God had the plan for man's redemption before He formed Adam from the dust of the ground. His plan was greater than just a restoration of man to his former state; His plan was to take humanity out of its former state and bring it into a higher state - a spiritual state of life in which there was no death. Inherent in this life would be the nature of God - the very essence of His being of love!
To accomplish this, the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us. Through Mary, Jesus Christ received a body of flesh, so He was joined to humanity. Jesus identified Himself as the Son of Man. Since Jesus Christ was joined to humanity, He could die for humanity; He could take all of humanity with Him in His death.
To understand this better, let's look at 1 Cor. 15:22 where it says that, "In Adam all die." It's not hard for us to understand that in Adam all die because we see both physical and spiritual death in humanity. The seed of all humanity was in Adam, so in Adam all die. Jesus Christ is not the continuation of Adam's seed, for He is the last Adam, for Adam died in Christ. Adam is the first man and Jesus is the second man. So there can be no man between the first and the second man. This means that everyone is either in the first man or the second man. In other words, Jesus Christ is the beginning of a new generation that has nothing in common with the old Adam generation.
The death of Jesus Christ began when He left His glory with the Father. In Romans 6 we read that Jesus died to sin. This death continued throughout His lifetime, and culminated on the cross! His death was a glorious victory over every desire that could rebel against the Father's will. He could have come down from the cross, but He didn't, because He knew it was His Father's will for Him to stay on the cross.
The pain Jesus suffered is unimaginable! His back was bloodied and torn by the many stripes of a whip that had pieces of flint inserted in it, His head was pierced by sharp thorns, His face had the beard pulled out, and His hands and His feet were nailed to the cross! During this intense physical suffering, people were making fun of Him. He became a sin-offering for us, and God had to hide His face from Him! In the midst of dying a physical death, Jesus gloriously triumphed over sin as He remained obedient to the Father's will, praying, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do." So we see that Jesus died two deaths on the cross: a physical death and a death to sin. Our death to sin brings us into the image of Jesus Christ.
This helps us to understand the process God was using to make man in His image. God planned to get humanity out of the flesh realm by making it possible for him to be born again through faith in Jesus Christ. This new birth brings us into the spiritual realm, and we become a new creation in Christ. This new spiritual creation knows what evil is, but does not desire it. The resurrection power that now resides in us in the Holy Spirit enables us to overcome evil in all its deceptive forms.
We see the unfolding of God's great plan to make man in His image when He sent His Word made flesh to dwell among us. As the Son of Man, Jesus overcame every temptation. He walked in obedience to the Spirit, died to sin, and was put to death in the flesh. He overcame death and rose victoriously. This marked the beginning of a new generation - a spiritual life-giving generation in which there is no death but the death to sin. To become a part of this new generation, we have to repent of our sin and be born of the Spirit. Believing in the Lord Jesus Christ puts us into Christ, into the second man. We have been born of an incorruptible seed - the living Word of God.
This new creation is devoid of flesh. Flesh cannot enter this realm because it is always against the Spirit. In 1 John 5:18 w read, "We know that no one who is born of God sins…" We find it hard to identify with this statement because we know we still sin even after we have experienced the new birth. How can we reconcile these facts? Paul gives us light on this in Romans 7 where he makes a distinction between the spiritual man and the flesh man. Sin dwells in the flesh, but the new creation man that we are in Christ, does not have flesh, for he is a spiritual creation. So it is not the new man in Christ who sins, but the old flesh man, that we no longer are. We are no longer in the old Adam man, but we have not yet been entirely delivered from his thinking. Overcoming the old thinking brings us into maturity. So we see that God's purpose in our redemption is part of the process of creating man in His image.
In order to be in God's image, we also need to know the essence of His nature. This is revealed to us in His work for our redemption. It is a revelation of God's love! Without this revelation we would not know what love is, and we would not know that God does not need to be reconciled to us. It is a revelation of the perfect unity between God and His Word working together to bring about man's reconciliation to God. It reveals that God did not need to be reconciled; He loved us so much that he initiated this reconciliation, and gave His only begotten Son to die for us and as us. It was God in Christ that brought it about.
Furthermore, it is a revelation of God's justice. Having an innocent man die for a guilty man, is not justice. To think that God's wrath against sin could only be vindicated by the death of an innocent man is against all moral reasoning. God's justice is revealed by the fact that He was responsible for getting humanity into this sinful state and therefore He is responsible for getting humanity out of it. If only a small percentage of humanity would be delivered, God's plan would be a dismal failure. God in Christ is completely dedicated to this task of delivering humanity out of its sinful state, and we know that He is able to perform His will!
It is also a revelation of Christ's identification with humanity. He died as the Son of Man, taking all of humanity with Him in His death. We were crucified together with Him! He did not die as our substitute, but together with us, and for us. He did not die to save us from the penalty of sin, but from death itself. He died to deliver us out of the death we were already in, and to bring us into life. His resurrection life and power in us overcomes all our wrong thinking. God's power in us will keep on working until we come into the perfect image of Jesus Christ!
God's plan is so much greater than we could ever have imagined! We thought His redemption was just to save us from the penalty of sin and get us into heaven, while God was doing away with sin, uniting us with Himself, and giving us His nature! How we rejoice in His wisdom, purpose and ability to accomplish His will!