The Perfect Savior 3

               Redemptive salvation is operative today as much as any time in human history.

            The blood that Jesus shed on the cross at Calvary covers my sins past, present, and future.

            This enables me to step-into a risk-filled adventure of faith following the God of the Bible, in which I am certain I will make many mistakes along the way, but absent the threat that I can jeopardize my eternal salvation as a result of my imperfect performance.

            The God of the Bible is so brilliant that He has proactively crafted the redemption through the cross and resurrection of Christ so as to provide impunity from the condemnation that should accrue through my blunders and mistakes.

            The precise purpose of redemptive salvation is to guarantee upfront a safe-conduct through the God-composed journey of faith life-script He has written for me. 

            This allows me the God-sanctioned and authorized freedom to experience a first-person exploration of the knowledge of good and evil, within the approved vehicle of an imperfect yet redeemed moral nature (Rom. 7:15-8:4).

            Atheists criticize Christians for not being perfect.  But we are not supposed to be perfect, just better than we were.

“But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.”          (2 Cor. 4:7)

“If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed.”                                                                                 (Jn. 8:36)           

            The only way we could discover and understand the knowledge of good and evil is for us to take it out for a test-drive, within the research vehicle of a redeemed yet fallen imperfect nature.

            The hypothesis that the God of the Bible is trustworthy, truthful, loving, has own best interests at heart, and that we can know Him on a personal basis is something that can be tested and found to be either true or false.

            A God-composed journey of faith life-script having the upfront impunity of redemptive salvation leads to factual findings that are as empirical as it gets, being in importance far above the findings of modern science in discovery of the workings of the natural world.

            God flips our imperfect moral natures into the microscopic and telescopic lens needed to see into the mysteries of the knowledge of good and evil, while engaged within a God-guided journey of faith that also infuses more virtue and goodness into our characters through the indwelling Holy Spirit (Jn. 16:13).

            This answers in large part the fundamental question of the purpose of this life and why we are here.

            Only the real living God could set this all up.

            In The Sermon on the Mount recorded in Matthew 5:6, Jesus does not say blessed are the morally perfect, but “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness: for they shall be filled.”

            By becoming born-again (Jn. 3:5-6, 10), the people of faith in the Old and New Testaments are given new spiritual hearts and minds that can comprehend the knowledge of good and evil, while still inhabiting imperfect characters, through the deliberate preplanning and foreknowledge of God (Prov. 3:5-6; Isa. 55:8-9; Jer. 29:11; Eph. 1:7, 2:8-10; 5:8).

            This is one of the many reasons why the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ are the most important events in all of history. 

            This is far above Jesus as Messiah expelling the Romans from Israel in the first-century as was popularly expected at the time.

            If God Himself is not internally consistent in this fundamental moral concept of freely choosing God-sovereignty over self-sovereignty, in Gethsemane and at Calvary, within the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit…then justifiably God could not ask us to make the difficult, Holy Spirit assisted transition from self-sovereignty toGod-sovereignty in the course of our lives (Jn. 3:14-21).

            This is the fundamental issue under consideration for all human beings.

            The God of the Bible is telling us through the life-script of Jesus Christ that He was willing and able to get out in front of us in this regard of the bond of unity, tested within a human life incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth the Son of God, within the personal interrelationships of the Trinity.

            This is why Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life.

            This is why there is no other way to come to the Father except through Him (paraphrased from John 14:6), because Jesus is the perfect bridge of God-sovereignty that connects us in the right way within a personal walk with God in our own lives. 

            Allowing God to displace our ways with His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 46:9-10; Jn. 12:24), to achieve in some measure in our lives this same divine unity-of-purpose (Jn. 17:21), sets in motion God flipping our imperfect natures into fully redeemed, 4-wheel drive vehicles.

            This enables today’s Christians to venture-out into empirical research programs of lessons-learned traversing through the rough terrain of the knowledge of good and evil in a fallen world.

            God identifies for us in the Garden of Gethsemane that Jesus Christ is operating at the apex, at the highest pinnacle of morality and virtue, when God reveals with incredible honesty and candor His own difficulty at the far outer-edge of virtuosity, counterintuitively in the unexpected area of God-sovereignty (Lk. 22:42).

            This unbroken fidelity to God-sovereignty restores our severed relationship with Him on the highest terms of true and right justice yet at the greatest cost to Himself, being the cost of the unprecedented death of Jesus Christ on the cross and His resurrection three days later.

            In my opinion, this answers the question of how we would know today with certainty that Jesus Christ is the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for mankind’s sins, being morally perfect and having sinless virtue to qualify as the Messiah in the first-century and now.