WHO IS JESUS? (PART 7)

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

For God in all His fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through Him God reconciled everything to Himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross.

This includes you who were once far away from God. You were His enemies, separated from Him by your evil thoughts and actions. Yet now He has reconciled you to Himself through the death of Christ in His physical body. As a result, He has brought you into His own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before Him without a single fault.

Colossians 1:19-22 NLT

This ends this reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Every created person is a sinner and has fallen short of God’s favor (Romans 3:23).

God hates sin and anyone who is a sinner is in opposition to Him, the One who is omnipotent and the righteous Judge of all created things.

For a sinner, it’s a bad place to be, one that is hopeless because no mortal being has a chance when up against God. As we read in our scripture passage today, all sinners are “enemies” of God,  “far away” and “separated from Him” by “evil thoughts and actions”.

Thankfully, God, out of His great love and compassion, made a way for every single created person to be made right with Him and He did it through Jesus.

Therefore, Jesus is the great Reconciler, the perfect Mediator, the only One through which someone can come to God the Father (John 14:6). This is the final answer to the question we have covered in this series, “Who is Jesus?”.

Through the Law, God required a sacrifice to atone for sins. These sacrifices were prescribed with regularity for the people of Israel because they unfortunately continued to sin, even after repenting and having their transgressions forgiven. It was a temporary band aid placed on a spiritual would that could never heal. There was never any permanence of peace between God and His chosen people, and the Gentiles weren’t even in the sin forgiveness picture, although many of them did believe in God. We know this because at the temple in Jerusalem, there was a designated court where the Gentiles could come to pray, the court where Jesus would overturn the tables of the money changers and merchants (Matthew 21:12-13).

And so God, out of love, enacted a new covenant, this one with all people, whether Jew or Gentile (John 3:16). All a person had to do was simply believe and confess in Jesus and they would be saved (Romans 10:9) and receive eternal life.

We learned from this series that Jesus was one with His Father (John 10:30), the visible image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15a). “God, in all His fullness, was pleased to live” in Jesus as He “reconciled” all created people to Himself “through the death of Christ in His physical body” and “made peace” with them “by means of Christ’s blood on the cross”, the blood that washes sin away and leaves the sinner cleansed (Isaiah 1:18).  

As a result, God brought every believer in Colossae as well as every other Christian “into His own presence”, making them “holy and blameless...before Him without a single fault”. There’s a fancy theological word for this called justification and the easiest way to always remember its meaning is through breaking it down like this:

Through God’s redeeming work through Jesus, a person who believes in Jesus as Savior is made justified or just-as-if-they-had-never-sinned.

Jesus, the one who is in absolute supremacy and sovereignty over all created things is also the only one who can bring reconciliation for sin and the subsequent salvation for anyone who will submit to Him and believe He is the Savior of the world.

This is the heart and substance of the Gospel set by God the Father who is found in all His fullness in Jesus Christ. It’s what Paul wanted the church in Colossae to remember and it’s what the Lord wants us all to remember today.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark

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