Just like for the disciples, it’s easy for us to hear Jesus’ words and attempt to fit them into our current understanding. Or even to skew his words to make them less challenging. But if we are to be his disciples in our Jerusalem, our Judea, our Samaria, and to the ends of our earth, we need revelation knowledge. We need the Spirit’s voice of instruction. We need to have our eyes opened to the radical work of the cross, of the resurrection.
It’s a common, but mis-guided, approach to search God’s Word solely for theology, soteriology, hamartiology, or epistemology. The core of His Word is not an ‘ology.’ It is a Person. A Person desiring a relationship. And not just any person, but the God of Creation, the Eternal One, the Author of our Salvation. He reveals Himself in His Word, in Jesus. And He’s wanting not just a Master/servant relationship, but that of an adoptive Father with his chosen children. What we, in our sinful state, were incapable of setting in order, He did forus to make it a reality.
2 Cor. 5:17-18, MIRROR – “Now, in the light of your co-inclusion in [Jesus’] death and resurrection, whoever you thought you were before, in Christ you are a brand new person. The old ways of seeing yourself and everyone else are over. Acquaint yourself with the new.”
Jesus did not reveal a ‘potential’ person, he revealed the truth about us so that we may know the truth about ourselves and be free indeed. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God did not redeem a compromised replica of us; He rescued the original, blueprint us, created in His radiant mirror likeness. We are reconnected with our original genesis through the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. François de Toit, MIRROR Translator, from pp. 604,605.
“This is the divine exchange; he took our sorrows, our pain and our shame and birthed his righteousness in us. He took our sins and we became his innocence.”
Romans 8:30, MIRROR: “Jesus reveals that mankind pre-existed in God; He defined us. He justified us and also glorified us. He redeemed our innocence and restored the glory we lost in Adam.”
As believers, we aren’t so much makeovers as restorations. Restorations are painstaking, well-researched, details of the original, taking away everything false and shabby and out of character and putting back, usually at great cost, what was first there. Our salvation is complete, a full restoration, causing us to be showroom shiny, of inestimable, eternal worth. All because of Jesus. In him we are glorious. Got a mirror? PD
