WHY DID JESUS COME? – 2

“God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them…” 2 Corinthians 5:19.

Jesus’ coming to reveal the Father was the first step in the process of restoring the broken relationship between God and His estranged family. Who would want to be in fellowship with an angry God? It was imperative that God come in person to show people what He is really like.

Bu that was only the beginning. There was a huge obstacle, called sin that blocked the way back to the Father. Sin is an unpayable debt, an unbridgeable chasm that separates us from Him, violates His perfection and prevents us from fellowship with Him. God is a just God and requires just payment for the debt we owe Him. He cannot brush sin aside and ignore the penalty He demands for transgressing His law. To cancel the debt required a perfect human sacrifice for which no one qualified except Jesus because He alone lived a perfectly sinless life as a human being and then willingly laid down His life in our place.

He rose from the dead to break death’s power over man, to prove that He was innocent and that the Father’s justice was satisfied. He was ready and qualified to carry out the next step in His assignment – to reconcile us to the Father. It is one thing to know that there are no more obstacles between us and the Father, but quite another to remain estranged from Him because we have not personally been reconciled to Him.

Paul tells us in 2 Corinthians 5:19, that God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, but the effectiveness of that reconciliation is only felt by one’s personal appropriation of what Jesus has done. It is tragic to know that millions of unbelieving people have never availed themselves of the right to fellowship with the Father through Jesus’ death for them because they don’t know or because they refuse to receive His gift!

When two parties are estranged because of offense, it is the offended person’s responsibility to forgive by cancelling the debt, and the offender’s responsibility to seek reconciliation based on the offer of forgiveness. God, in Jesus Christ, not only paid the debt Himself so that He can hold out the offer of forgiveness, but He also takes the next step by initiating the reconciliation that will restore us to full and unrestricted fellowship with the Father as His sons and daughters.

Although there is still another step in the process of restoring the human race to God’s original purpose, which will be explained in another article, up to this point we have seen that the obstacle of sin has been removed, the chasm bridged by God Himself through Jesus, and the way wide open for anyone who believes in Jesus, to return home and to be accepted and embraced as a son or daughter of God in His forever family.