This is the love of God among us – pt9

The atonement of Jesus: alienated in Adam, reconciled in Christ

Romans 5:6-14

You don’t have to live for very long on this earth before you run into serious conflict with another person. It might be a bully on the playground. Later maybe a neighbor or a co-worker or boss or employee, or perhaps a family member. Sometimes a little schism in your own heart, fractures into a gully, through suspicion or overt unfriendly words, lies, or action into a gulf of irreconcilable differences. Relationship can migrate from warm and cozy or at least amicable, to a kind of severe, chop-your-limb-off kind of frostbite.

The Scriptures present such relationships gone bad. Very bad. Fatally bad in some cases. And we can all learn from those. But there is one soured relationship that towers above them all in holy writ, and in fact explains all the other lesser ones. And that is the once wonderful fellowship between our good and loving and holy Creator God and the first man and our original father, Adam. And the early chapters of the book of the Genesis of the world record the beauty and satisfaction of that once pristine relationship in Eden that fell into enmity, hatred, fear, judgment and death. And it fell entirely through the fault and actions of one party, that of our father Adam. They say it takes two to Tango, but in this case there was only one dancer making the fatal moves.

The results of the original fall of Adam into sin and rebellion were not just devastating for him, but it chopped up, morally, spiritually and physically all mankind – every one of us who descend from him bear the black mark of Adam in our hearts and in our bodies - death. And not only us, but all nature fell into death and hurt, and slavery to sin and God’s judgment, and suffers to this day. Amazingly, the Bible records all this dreadful chain and it explains us to a “T”.

But God, in His great love and mercy, did not leave us to rot in our enmity and estrangement from Him, as He justly could have done. Instead, He initiated an undeserved and unmerited rescue, He gave of Himself, His own precious Son to reconcile us perfectly back to Himself. “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” 1 John 4:10