In seeking fulfillment through self-effort, we become destructive and we are separated from God; but God is the source of life, significance and love. There is a problem here. If we do not understand this problem, we will never understand this life. The problem is that we cannot live without God, but we also cannot live with Him in our destructive state. Further, we need God in order to be rescued from our destructive state but we, as destructive people, have no natural ability to approach Him. We have a problem that we cannot solve. We cannot cure ourselves. We cannot become people of life and love by ourselves. We need the source of life and love and God is that source. God understood this problem from the beginning and He had a plan to solve it. We need to know this plan.
The Beginning:
The book of Genesis gives us the beginning story. God, an infinite, all-powerful, perfect, spiritual being created a physical world with a human family and God came as a physical person, into the world He created, with all of his glory, which is His power in love. Adam and Eve were born innocent and because they had a relationship that was both spiritual and physical with God, they had a perfect life. Their physical life was free of toil, obstacles, disease and conflict. They lived in a perfect climate with an abundance of food and animals as companions. Spiritually, they had a perfect love for God and for each other, and they experienced joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. (See Galatians 5:22-23.) Because of God’s presence, they began sinless and had the possibility of remaining sinless. However, love requires freedom. They had the freedom to choose to live for themselves or to give themselves for the benefit of another. They had the option to rebel against God.
They rebelled. Eve was deceived by Satan when he enticed her to want to know about evil but Adam freely chose to disobey God. Therefore, Adam is charged with the sin. God then drove them out of the Garden and removed His powerful presence from the World. God did this in order to protect the first family and everyone who came after them because God’s power in love was so pure that it would physically destroy any being that rebelled. This caused the end of the perfect creation. Moreover, without the presence of God, none of us born into the world could possibly please God through our righteousness. Moreover, without the presence of God, we were born into the world self-centered and, therefore, producers of evil.
Now, the evil of man would greatly affect the physical world so that making a living would be difficult and the world’s natural systems would deteriorate. Until this phase of life, in which we are currently living, is over and Jesus returns to earth, in all of His glory, the physical world will not be right again. Also, mankind, in his rebellion, could not approach God spiritually without being transformed to the image of Jesus. The rest of the story is how God brings us back to himself spiritually while we are still living in an evil and broken physical world.
The Present State of Mankind:
We now live in an evil world both spiritually and physically. On the spiritual side, most people are self-centered and cannot love rightly. On the physical side, we live in a world where nature is blighted and man produces acts of violence. Every person is seeking both the spiritual and physical fulfillment that Adam and Eve had in the Garden of Eden. Physical fulfillment cannot happen just yet without destroying every person who does not walk with God. But the spiritual fulfillment of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control can happen now through following Jesus. We will explain how God made that a new possibility.
Why Jesus?
Many wonder: why all the emphasis on Jesus? It is difficult to put our faith in a person who we do not understand. We might ask why Jesus is the only way to find fulfillment in this life and in the life to come. These are all good questions, and they are not always given satisfactory answers. We are often told just to believe. It is, in part, a mystery, but there are some explanations which will help us to trust Jesus more. When Jesus came to us as a human person and died on the cross and was raised from the dead, he became the way for us to be accepted in the Kingdom of God.
This is what He did: Jesus came into this evil world and earned, in His humanity, the righteousness that we need. In coming from the Father, he had the possibility to be righteous but as a human person He also had the possibility to rebel and establish His kingdom. (See the temptation in Mathew 4.) As a righteous person, He could have avoided death as He did in Nazareth. (See Luke 4:28-30.) God had decreed that sin is the only reason to die. (See Romans 6:23.) However, Jesus, in obedience to the Father, lent himself to the destructive forces of evil.
The Bible speaks of the destructive forces of evil people and the broken natural world as God’s judgment. Evil will not go unpunished by God but the irony is that evil, devoid of the love of God, destroys itself. This, of course, is according to God’s will. So, on the cross, evil killed the righteous son of God in opposition to the law of God which states that death is the result of sin. In that very act, evil and death were impeached and condemned. And now Jesus continues to bear within himself both His human righteousness and the condemnation of evil. Now Jesus has the power to produce in us death to our self-centeredness. Moreover, further, since Jesus ascended to the Father, the Holy Spirit can now produce in us the human righteousness of the person Jesus. The problem is now solved but the solution is Jesus alone. In response to His leading, we can accept Jesus by letting him remove our self-centeredness and provide His righteousness. However, just like Adam, we have a choice. We do not have to accept Him but we will never get there on our merit.
We are given access to a relationship with Jesus, and it is only in that relationship that we are transformed to His image. At Rescued For Love, we believe that we cannot find fulfillment in life, significance, and love without the daily input of God’s power in love through our relationship with Jesus. We are lost without the rescue of Jesus. We read in Galatians 1:3-4 “Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins to rescue us from this present evil age, according to the will of our God and Father, to whom be the glory forever and ever. Amen.”
Please let know how we can continue this conversation.