The Perfect Savior 2

            The actions of Jesus highlight unerring fidelity to the one right course of action no matter how difficult it is or how high the cost in the Garden of Gethsemane and at Calvary the next day

            All of the other moral concepts and virtues are secondarily derivative to the primary concept of God-sovereignty, of following God’s leading in our lives rather than going our own way as autonomous independent agents (Isa. 53:5-6).

            The blood that Jesus Christ shed on the cross is not just to improve our moral performance in the areas of honesty, integrity, tolerance, and the capacity for unselfish love.

            The ancient, primary reason for the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice is to focus and home-in on the remedy and removal of rebellious sin, of going our own way apart from God. 

            When I became a Spirit-born Christian at age 18 in 1970, I was not instantly transformed into a morally perfect person, possessing sinless virtue incapable of making any mistakes from that time forward.

            After the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and after the Day of Pentecost the early church Christians went-out into the Greco-Roman world with the Great Commission gospel message that eventually conquered the world. 

            Yet they do so while exhibiting imperfect virtue and fallen yet redeemed natures.

            I have never heard anyone ask the question why this is so, of why salvation through Christ does not instantly produce inner perfect virtue and flawless character.

            Why would it be the case throughout the Old and New Testament journeys of faith life-scripts of Abraham (not discounting Enoch and Noah) through Paul, that God works His “magic” of blessing mankind through people having imperfect characters?

            The answer is that God uses His divinely timeless foresight matched with the creative insight of being an ingenious master strategist, to be able to turn mankind’s fall in the Garden of Eden into a positive.

            This is a profoundly unexpected validation of the brilliance of God equal to the fine-tuning of the physics in the universe and the nanotechnology of the molecular machinery we now discover in living cells.

            Humans were simply outwitted in the Garden of Eden, ill-equipped to divide and parse genuine truth from cleverly disguised disinformation (Gen. 3:1-6). 

            I was outwitted by the strong pull of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking, in choosing to go the culturally acceptable wrong way of humanistic self-sovereignty, of trying to self-validate my worth and value through personal achievements, until I was saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ.     

            The God of the Bible is so brilliant He can take the imperfection of human beings and in an instant of time flip this into a positive asset.

            Through the ingenious program of redemptive salvation, the God of the Bible enlists our fallen nature and transforms it into the high-quality of the perfect vehicle to take us through an in-depth research program into the knowledge of good and evil.

            Without the lens of an imperfect, moral character we would not be able to decipher and understand the subtle nuances of the broad array of moral concepts involved within the knowledge of good and evil.

            This remarkably places Old and New Testament believers in the sweet-spot of humility regarding the flawed nature of this human research vehicle. 

            This safely precludes the self-inflated pride of self-righteousness, the very character trait that kills the ability to take the salvation message of the gospel out to the world-at-large in the spirit of love (Jn. 15:13).