Friends of God

Monday, July 01, 2013               Friends of God

“But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him.”

Romans 5:8 The Message

In the Kingdom to come, when I get an opportunity to talk with the Apostle Paul, one of the questions I want to ask him is how he worked out his faith in the divinity of Christ. He doesn’t say much about how he got to this place in his writings, but it is clear that Paul’s faith was grounded in God being fully present in Christ. Returning again to the supremacy of Christ we can see Paul’s faith on display: “Christ is the visible image of the invisible God. . . He existed before anything was created and is supreme over all creation. For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself” (Colossians 1:15-20, selected verses). Meditating on this passage is helpful to fully appreciate what Paul is saying in Romans 5:8.

I like the rendering of Romans 5:8 in Eugene Peterson’s translation, The Message, because it identifies three essential principles of our life in Christ. First, God’s grace for us is risky. As Jesus pointed out in the parable of the lost sheep (Luke 15), the 99 sheep were left alone in the field while the shepherd went to look for the one lost sheep. God made Himself vulnerable by loving us, because we are free to refuse, to reject His love for us.

The second principle Paul identifies is the divinity of Christ. It is God’s love that is put on the line through the sacrificial death of Jesus, because as Paul states in Colossians 1:19, “all (God’s) fullness was pleased to live in Christ.” Often I have heard people complain that God is mean because He sent His son Jesus to die for us. If that were the case, I might agree with them. But God did not send someone else to do His bidding. It was God Himself who went to the cross for us while we were still sinners.

That we were still sinners when Christ died for us, or as Peterson puts it, “while we were of no use whatever to” God, is the third principle. In Romans 2:16, Paul makes the case “that the day is coming when God, through Christ Jesus, will judge everyone’s secret life.” For those unprepared for this Day of Judgment, this notion causes fear. But those who “have been made right in God’s sight by faith” (Romans 5:1) “can rejoice in our wonderful new relationship with God because our Lord Jesus Christ has made us friends of God” (Romans 5:11). WOW! From sinners who were of no use whatever to God, to friends of God, all made possible because God showed his great love for us by sending Christ to die for us.

  

Sē’lah

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(Selah is a word that appears in the Book of Psalms that I often use as the Complimentary Closing in my correspondence. Its meaning, as I use the word, is to pause and think about these things.)

These meditations are written by Alex M. Knight as he seeks the life in Christ as his way of life.  In addition to this BLOG they are distributed on the Constant Contact email server. You may subscribe to this email service by sending an email to: amkrom812@gmail.com. The BLOG is also available on Amazon Kindle, by subscription

Publications by Alex M. Knight:

·        Seeking the Life in Christ, Meditations on the New Testament and Psalms has been published and is now available at Amazon.com. The Kindle version will follow soon.

·        The second edition First Think – Then Pray has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.

·        Meditations on The Story of My Life as told by Jesus Christ has been released as an e-book on Amazon Kindle.