Our need and God's plan

    

In the first post I uploaded I focused on two points: God has to exist because creation can’t exist without him, and we are accountable to God because he created us. 

But why did God create us? And why is the world we live in now so full of evil and suffering?

First off, God didn’t create us because he needed us. Simply put, he created us for his pleasure (Gotquestions.org). God created us in His own image to expand his glory through us, not because he was lacking in anything. 

God is a personal God and he created beings which he could have a personal relationship with, however, he recognized that any relationship would be meaningless unless humans chose to have a relationship with Him, so he gave us free will, the ability to choose whether to live in relationship with Him and follow him or to not follow him and go our own way. God created us to love him and rule with him, but he doesn’t force us to; we have a choice. 

You’ve most likely heard the story of Adam and Eve but to summarize it, God placed the two first humans, Adam and Eve, in His perfect creation, giving them everything they needed, however there was one thing they couldn’t do. God gave them a single command, but Adam and Eve disobeyed the one command God gave them and rebelled against God, choosing to live their own way instead (Genesis chapter 3). 

Adam and Eve were meant to bear God’s image and bring glory to it by working in his creation and living in relationship with God, but instead they chose to rebel against God and try and glorify their own image. 

This act against God brought sin (anything against God) into the world. Now to be clear, God is perfect, incapable of any wrong. That means he is both perfectly loving and perfectly just. God’s perfection means he has to judge sin as justice requires.

Now all humans are imperfect because we are all descended from Adam and Eve. Their sin infected all their descendants, the entire human race. We are all naturally sinful because of their choice but along with that we ourselves choose to live our own way rather than God’s. 

Think about this. If God has to punish all sin because of his perfection and all people are sinful by nature and by choice, then literally everyone is deserving of punishment from God for their sin. 

Now, while you’re reading this, it’s likely you may be thinking “well I’m not that bad. At least not bad enough where I deserve punishment from God.” Most people think they’re pretty good people, at least compared to others; but God gave us what’s called the moral law (a standard of his perfection) to show us how far we are from perfection. Those are called the Ten Commandments.

Here are a few of them:

• Thou shall not lie

• Thou shall not steal

• Thou shall not commit adultery

• Thu shall not murder

At first glance you might think you’re doing pretty good because you haven’t murdered anyone or commited adultry, but God tells us that his standard of perfection is so high that he considers hate murder and looking with lust adultery (Matthew 5:21-22, 27-28)

 

Have you ever lied, stolen, hated, or looked with lust? I know I have, and I know you have too because we all have. It's our nature and our choice. 

Romans 3:23 “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God…”

Our imperfection separates us from God’s perfection.

The punishment for sin is death according to  Romans 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death…” The reason for this is because when we are separated from God, we are separated from the only place we can have true life and thus we die spiritually. (Gotquestions.org, “What does it mean the wages of sin is death?”)

 

We all justly deserve death for our rebellion against God.

The Invite

But thankfully that isn’t the end of the story. God loves us so much that he made a plan to save us from our own sin. 

He sent his son, Jesus, as the solution. Jesus lived a perfect life, never sinning once, and then he willingly died as a sacrifice for us. 

The wages for our sin is death and Jesus paid for that by dying. He took our place, paying the debt we owed. 

But then God raised Jesus from the dead, defeating the power of death over us. In contrast to how Adam’s sin and death caused all humans to sin and die, Jesus’ perfection and resurrection give all humans another chance to choose God rather than choose sin. 

Jesus was fully man and fully God at the same time (very confusing but nothing is impossible when you’re God). When he died, he died representing human beings, bearing all the sin of the world; but when he rose, he rose representing God, offering us righteousness in him by putting our faith in him. 

Jesus opened the door to a relationship with God for us. All we have to do now is walk through it. We do this by acknowledging our sin and need for Jesus, believing in him and his resurrection, and choosing to follow his way of righteousness rather than our own sinful way. 

Romans 10:9

“If you confess with your mouth ‘Jesus is Lord' and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”

 

When we do that the perfection of Jesus covers us so that when God sees us, he doesn’t see our sin, he only sees Jesus and his perfection. The standard for having a relationship with God and getting to heaven is perfection. We can’t be good enough on our own, but Jesus was good enough for us. 

2 Corinthians 5:21

For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ."

If you are reading this and don't have a relationship with Jesus, I very strongly encourage you to really think about this and take it seriously. You don't know when you're going to die and face God, and you need to make a choice, so don't postpone it. 

God wants a personal relationship with you, and you have the opportunity to accept that and live with him in heaven forever. 

That is the Gospel. That is the truth.