God and Sinners are Reconciled

bethlehemReconciled – transitive verb
: to restore to friendship or harmony
: settleresolve
I am pretty sure that my favorite Christmas song is ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing’, and my favorite verse is ‘God and sinners reconciled’.  Four words that I use to help me understand the enormity of God’s divine genius in fixing what mankind had broken in that ancient garden.  C.S. Lewis has a chapter in Mere Christianity that explains it so well  it is called The Perfect Penitent.  In essence it seems better to say that God (in Jesus Christ) paid our debt for us rather than to say he was punished for us.  And mankind’s only hope to be reconciled with God is through repentance.  But man is sinful and needs help to repent.  Only God can truly help us by repenting with us to show us how to repent perfectly.  But He can only shows us as humans if He is human:
“….But supposing God became a man-suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God’s nature in one person-then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God’s dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all….”
All to restore our friendship.  All so that we could once again commune with Him…Sorta makes you wanna sing!

 

2 thoughts on “God and Sinners are Reconciled

  1. “…my favorite verse is “God and sinners reconciled”. This is quoting Romans 5:10.

    This is indeed a wonderful thing, while we were sinners we were reconciled. It had nothing to do with us!!

    “…and mankind’s only hope to be reconciled with God is through repentance”.

    Hmmm…I thought the bible just said that we were already reconciled? (through Jesus’ work on the cross) 🙂

    Repentance is very very important…but it isn’t so we wii be reconciled.

    Bryan

    • If you think about it as reconciling a friendship or relationship it makes sense. Reconciliation requires good faith from both parties – and most likely change. Reconciliation gets us back to talking to one another – it is a process and not an event. Only repentance can forge the relationship to where it was and needs to be. For instance, you can be saved but that is only the beginning. Salvation is ongoing…Galatians 5 talks about that – “For you brothers are called to freedom (salvation). Only don’t use your freedom for gain to the flesh, but through love be servants to one another.”

      How about, ‘reconciliation through salvation gets us in the door, communion through repentance gets us to the table’…?

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