And from the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man, He made a woman and brought her to him.-Genesis 2:22

In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” – Genesis 22:18. 

For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”-Hebrews 12:12

Reconciled by the Blood of His Son

I have no reason to be sad, 
No reason to be anxious, not one.
For the God of the universe has saved me,
Reconciled by the blood of His Son.

I have every reason to be thankful.
Every reason to be filled with peace.
For at that moment, I said yes to God
All the fear in my soul was released.

As He welcomed me into His family,
I put my sins at the foot of the cross.
And God became my true north
And I have never again felt lost.

I have every reason to be joyful,
For the first time, I don’t need a mask.
For the God of the universe has saved me
And in His Son, my salvation is fact.

He’s given me more reasons to be grateful
Then I have the capacity to count.
He has filled my life with so much love
There is no room left for doubt.

And each time, I’m hit with this truth
It drives me to my knees, and I weep
Tears that express awe and gratitude,
That through His grace, I’m one of His sheep.
Linda Troxell ©11/14/2022.

Reconciliation

Mark Twain said: “The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you find out why.” We have all had the first; all of us were born. But our purpose for being born proves to be more elusive for most of us. There are two questions often asked with irony, “Why am I here?” and “What’s the meaning of life?” Not surprisingly, most people have an idea about how to answer those questions; some serious, others not, some reasonable and complete, some not. I also have an explanation for why we are here. It all comes down to our relationship with God. 

Our God is a God of love and unity. He has lived and will live eternally in love and harmony with the others of the Trinity. So, it isn’t surprising that He would want to create unity, love, and peace in His paradise. In Genesis chapter one, the Bible begins with God, the creator, creating. The pinnacle of His creation is man. But right away, He sees there is something not quite right. He realizes He has created no suitable companion for man. No other of His creations can provide man with love and unity, both necessary to provide for peace and shalom, in the garden. So, with the awareness that man needed another like himself to meet his need for love, God created women. And from the rib that the LORD God had taken from the man, He made a woman and brought her to him.-Genesis 2:22, and God’s first family was created.  

To fully understand God’s plan for the garden, we must understand the word, shalom. Most of us are not fluent in Hebrew, and we think of this word as a greeting used in the Hebrew language that translates into English as peace. That is true, as far as it goes. But while Shalom does mean peace, it means so much more than that. One English word cannot contain the full meaning of shalom. The dictionary definition of peace is the absence of tension or war. In comparison, the Hebrew word Shalom means prosperity, welfare, tranquility, harmony, wholeness, and completeness with God, others, and all creation. 

To translate shalom as peace loses the essence of its meaning, stripping it of its beauty and depth. Just as believing God planned only for peace underestimates God’s glory. After all, the garden is paradise; paradise has to be more than just the absence of tension and war. God’s eternal plan for His world was for a perfect synergy of all His creations in support of His masterpiece, humankind.  

When we dive deeper into God’s plan, we find one more element necessary to create and sustain perfection in God’s plan. It is humankind’s dependence on God for their significance, meaning, and sense of personal value. God meant for us to find these things through our relationship with Him. Our first parents recognized their dependence on God, and they found everything they needed for their health and happiness in their relationship with Him. Right up to when sin entered the garden. We know the outcome; sin caused division between God and Adam and Eve. Ultimately the division caused God to expel Adam and Eve from the garden. And sin followed them out the gate.

Sin and division quickly spread throughout humanity. Therefore what God created in unity became disunity and division. Once the first family left the garden, sin caused them to forget that without God, they had no way to meet their need for meaning and value. And that need for God has never been clear to humans since. Very few people clearly understand that God designed us to find our purpose, significance, and sense of value from our relationship with Him. Fewer still understand that because God created us to meet those needs through Him, they cannot be met permanently in any other way. But like us, our first family still needed to find significance, meaning, and value somewhere. So, they sought to meet their needs outside their relationship with God. 

As we read on in Genesis, we see humans, now separated from God, becoming increasingly sinful in their search to find personal meaning and value. Finally, in Genesis chapter 7, God sees humanity as entirely evil, so He causes a flood to wipe out all life but for the family of Noah. Noah and his family then repopulate the earth, and God enters a new covenant with them. As part of the covenant, He promises never to again destroy the world by flood. Flash forward to chapter 11 after the flood, and we come to the story of the Tower of Bable. Humans are, again, sinful and prideful. In their effort to make a name for themselves and their town, they attempt to build a tower that reaches heaven, eliminating their need for God. 

God decided there was nothing to do but make humankind so different from one another that they could not cooperate to complete this tower. He caused humanity to speak various languages, destroying their ability to understand one another, thus ending the building. The result was chaos forcing groups with a common language to come together. Eventually, each group moved to a different part of the land. This destroyed God’s plan for unity and established competitive clans, each having a proprietary sense over the regions in which they settled. 

This division began the enmity between groups of people that still divides us today. Differences in nationality, education, language, family name, origin, and economic status that, in God’s plan for love and unity, would have been celebrated as diversity became differences leading to hatred and jealousy. As sin grew, the divisions solidified. Differences once cherished by God became opportunities for humanity to demonize and devalue one another in pursuit of a false sense of their value or even superiority.  

God has always wanted to meet our spiritual needs through a personal relationship with us. His plan from the beginning was to meet all humankind’s needs to eliminate any sense of lack. This, in turn, would eliminate any reason to search outside the relationship to satisfy our needs. It is God’s nature to unite. When sin entered the garden, it caused a division that eroded Adam and Eve’s trust in God. The erosion led to their suspicion that God was not giving them everything they needed. They began to look outside their relationship with God to meet their needs. It is sin’s nature to divide. 

Even today, sin stands in the way of humankind’s understanding that for our life to have meaning in any permanent way, it must come from God. The same goes for our sense of personal value and significance. If these things do not come from our relationship with God, we will constantly pursue artificial means of feeling “good enough” if not superior. We will devalue one another as we chase achievement at school or work, the accumulation of expensive things, or a promiscuous lifestyle that makes us feel desirable. The problem with trying to meet our spiritual needs artificially, outside a relationship with God, is that temporarily satisfying those needs requires more and more affirmation as time goes by.   

It would be understandable if, after Bable, God had given up, leaving humanity to face the consequences of their sin and depravity. Perhaps start over with new people with less free will. But God did not give up on His plan because He loved the humanity He had already created. Realizing they were all slaves to sin, He made a unique and brilliant plan of redemption. And God entered into another covenant to support His plan to use one nation as the vehicle to reconcile every nation in the world. And the rest of the Bible is the story of God working to bring His creation back into the right relationship with Him. 

The Bible tells us that Abram was a man of God, and he and his wife lived in Harran with his father’s family. God told Abram, “Go from your country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you. “I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.- Genesis 12:1,2. This promise God made to Abram would become the covenant to support God’s plan of redemption. 

As we read further in Genesis, we see that Abram proves to be faithful to God in every way. Then in chapter 15, God comes to Abram in a dream and tells him, “Look up at the sky and count the stars—if indeed you can count them.” Then he said to him, “So shall your offspring be.” Abram believed the Lord, and He credited it to him as righteousness. Genesis 15:5,6. On that day, God also promised Abram that his descendants would own the land from the Wadi of Egypt to the Euphrates. It was from these promises God would make His covenant with Abraham.

Then in chapter 17, God completed His covenant by changing Abram’s name to Abraham, signifying that he would be the father of many nations. God mandated that every male descendent of Abraham be circumcised, thus completing God’s covenant with Abraham. God had not given Abraham many responsibilities as his part of the covenant. It seems that his faith was all God would ask of him. Abraham had proven to be faithful to God by obeying God’s directions. But, eventually, God did test Abraham’s faith more severely.

God directed Abraham to take Isaac, Abraham’s only son, to the land of Moriah and offer him up as a burnt offering. Abraham demonstrated the strength of his faith by obeying God’s directions. He took his son to the place God had directed, built the altar, arranged the wood, bound Isaac, and reached out his hand to slay Isaac. Abraham trusted God’s promise to make his descendants as many as the stars so fully that he believed if he killed his son at God’s direction, God would raise Isaac from the dead. But God stopped Abraham at the last second and provided a lamb for sacrifice. After Abraham displayed such faith, God told him that through Abraham’s line would become one nation by which all nations would be blessed. In your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you have obeyed My voice.” – Genesis 22:18. Thus, God began His redemption plan through covenant number two of the five mentioned in the Bible.

Of course, we are all still living in the division from the original fall. All of us have experienced the pain of being devalued for our differences, some experiences more devastating than others. But in our faith, we have hope because we know that God’s covenant with Abraham set the stage for the new covenant in which we all will be justified by the blood of Jesus. Still, many seem to be unsure of what the “new” covenant” is. In short, it is the message of the gospels. But for those who need a more detailed answer, in Hebrews 8:8-12 three promises define what God will do in the new covenant. 

1. He promises to reconcile Himself to us by putting His laws in our minds and writing them on our hearts. This, while not replacing the old laws, does abridge them making them easier to remember and follow. I will put my laws in their minds and write them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. Hebrews 12:10

2. He promises to reveal Himself to us: No longer will they teach their neighbor or say to one another, ‘Know the Lord,’ because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. Hebrews 12:11

3. He promises to forgive us by forgetting our sins: For I will forgive their wickedness and will remember their sins no more.”-Hebrews 12:12

With these three promises, God told us that He understands that we could not meet the requirements of the preceding covenants, and he knows that sin proved too great an adversary for us to vanquish. But He also tells us that everyone sincerely wanting to be part of His eternal kingdom will be able to through this covenant. Because this time, the Covenant Maker Himself came from heaven to earth to shed His blood to defeat sin and death for us.

Living in America or other individualist cultures, we have been indoctrinated to believe the individual is more important than the group. We are told that our purpose in life is to meet our own needs without thought for the group. Unfortunately, we have adopted that belief toward our salvation, believing our purpose on earth is to pursue our own salvation. Spoiler Alert: that is not why we are here. Finally, we come to the part where I tell you my complete and reasonable answer to the question,” Why are we here?” And it is all about our relationship with God as His church. 

In Ephesians, Paul tells us that Jesus did not come only to save us individually. Yes, He came to save us individually, but our individual salvation was a means to fix a bigger problem. God gave us two parallel messages through the life and ministry of Christ in the gospels. We must understand the first message to understand the second. Fortunately, because the first message gets more attention in Christian teaching, it is widely understood by Christians. Even the newest Christians understand that Jesus came to earth, led a sinless life, took our sins upon Himself, then died to redeem our sins, allowing us to be reconciled to God. The first message of the gospels, then, is we would be forever lost without Jesus.

The gospels show Jesus being inclusive in His life and ministry. Whether He was healing, socializing, teaching, or celebrating, He accepted and even reached out to those marginalized in the Jewish culture. This inclusivity is a model for eliminating hatred, rejection, and marginalization pervasive in humanity today. The second and more significant of the gospel messages is that, but for Jesus, the world would forever remain divided. Isn’t it Ironic that this overarching and more important message of the gospels has itself been marginalized in Christian teaching? 

The healing portrayed in the gospels tells the story of Jesus fixing what sin has broken. It is an illustration and a metaphor for eliminating the division sin has created among humanity. And humanity must be united before what’s broken can be fixed. We are told in scripture that the religious authorities rejected Jesus for associating with sinners and criminals. Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.”-Luke 15:1-2. As exalted as they considered themselves, they had no fundamental understanding of God’s love.

But knowing the pain of being disqualified for who one is, Jesus intentionally reached out to those who were rejected and devalued for who they were. In His ministry, Jesus continually went against the Jewish culture and customs of the time to be inclusive. He scandalously defied the patriarchy by reaching out to women and taking them on as His students. This directly opposed the cultural norms of the time when women were viewed as no more than property. He often saved women’s lives by deflecting the anger and hate meant for them onto Himself.

Consider the story of the adultress Jesus saved from being stoned to death. …But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground. John 8:6-8. Some people believe that what Jesus was writing in the dirt while considering His answer was the sins of the men threatening the woman. But, whatever their reason, after Jesus’ challenge, they all walked away, no longer focused on killing the woman but on their fury at Jesus. 

Likewise, Jesus went against the norms by reaching out to and valuing those not valued in the Jewish culture. He reached out to the pariahs, tax collectors, adultresses, and demon-possessed, bringing them into His circle. Jesus ministered to the Sumerians, who were longstanding enemies of the Jews. He even ministered to the Gentiles, who the Jews considered heathens. Jesus healed Jews, Romans, and Gentiles alike. He even healed lepers, the most marginalized. Considered too dangerous to get close to, they were never touched. But Jesus touched and healed them. Instantly, they were suitable to rejoin society. In being inclusive, Jesus united them all in His Father’s love. He modeled how to live the way God intended, in unity, love, and shalom. And He demonstrated the new covenant He came to earth to live and die for. 

Jesus came to save each of us but for a specific reason. He came to reconcile all of us to God to fix the problem from which sin was born, disunity. By erasing the boundaries between groups, Jesus was making one new united group, the family of God. He came to restore our connection to our heavenly Father, so we can once again find our identity, meaning, and value as it was always meant to be in our relationship with God. Once we are restored to God, we will no longer have a need to devalue one another. This is how unity will return to the world. This is the finished work of the cross.

By being reconciled to God, we become members of God’s family, brothers and sisters living together in the safety of His love. We become a diverse community unified by our differences instead of alienated by them. We begin to understand that God made us different because He cherishes our differences, and we will start to cherish them too. We will look at each other, and rather than seeing differences, we will recognize our shared story of pain and rejection. And, too, we will recognize our common savior who delivered us from that story of pain into a new story of redemption by grace through faith and adoption into God’s family.

In Ephesians 2, Paul tells us that God’s unified church, one community reconciled in love, is an exhibit to the world and the “rulers and authorities in the heavenly realms.” It demonstrates that after millennia of division, rejection, and hatred, Jesus is powerful enough to reconcile a hostile world divided by disobedience and love of worldly sins. Powerful enough to transform it into a single-family alive in the love of Christ, focused on the kingdom of God, and unified by love, obedience, and God’s will. 

So the next time someone asks you or asks in your presence, “Why are we here on earth? You can respond with a complete, reasonable, and biblically accurate answer. We are here to demonstrate the power of Jesus to reconcile all humanity into one family, no longer divided by our insecurities but unified and interdependent in our dependence on God. We are here to glorify God as one family united in His love.

Let’s Pray

Lord, we have all wondered about our purpose on earth. Why am I here is a persistent question. We know we are here to glorify you. But we needed to understand the importance of our unity. Lord, thank you for bringing that information to us. Please help us to remember that You want unity in Your family. Help us to remember that it does not glorify You when, as Your church, we argue and point fingers at one another to see whose sin is greater or which doctrine is the most important. Please help us to guard the unity we have and to strive for more. Lord, we are thankful that you did not choose to abandon mankind long ago but that you were patient as you protected us from our sinful natures. Thank You, Lord, for your sacrifice so we could all live under the new covenant as a unified family. Lord, we ask you to lead us to where we can serve you most. We pray this in the name of Jesus. Amen! 

Points for Prayer and Pondering
Or
Perhaps for Putting Pen to Paper

1. If you have been raised anywhere in the Western world, you are probably, at least, aware that Jesus came to earth to bring each of us salvation. But were you aware that the more significant reason for Jesus’ life was to unify the world in God’s name

A. If you were aware, where and when did you learn it?

B. If you weren’t aware, why do you think you weren’t? For example, no one taught you, or you needed to pay attention, or something else. Write a bit about this.

2. If you were unaware of Jesus’ larger mission, does this knowledge change how you see your purpose in life?

A. If it does change your idea of your purpose, how does it change it? 

B. If it doesn’t change your idea of your purpose, how does this information impact you? Write a bit about your thoughts. 

3. Write a paragraph about what you believe is your responsibility, and the responsibility of every Christian, in helping God to reconcile the nations into one nation of God’s family.