God has revealed himself to man. that He is always, loving, always forgiving. In the light of this knowledge, He wants man also to be like Him, having demonstrated this nature by portraying Christ as like Himself, being His own Son, in revealing the suffering and hurt that disconnection from God causes, and showing that He Himself has taken the results of man’s avoidance of Him, which we call sin, into His own heart and being, and dealt with it all.
Having in this way declared that sin and death and punishment have been dealt with, and that man no longer needs to hide from Him, He calls for everyone to leave behind the life that resulted from their estrangement from Him. He calls for recognition of the futility of a life lived without love, which is Himself, His very nature. He has shown that without Him, only death results. He has explained that love and life are freely available, because fear and death are conquered.
It is the reliance on His overcoming of fear and the fear of death, and fear of Him, and the utter and complete separation from sin and death that He and His love have provided, and continues to provide, that empowers man to live a new life. To recognise and to “know and rely on, the love that God has for us”.
This results in a situation where people live in the moment, not living from a reliance on their past experience to establish who they are, but living day by day in the understanding and comfort of His loving environment. Not drawing upon the negative experiences of the past, other than that they may bring to mind those things which now have been defeated, because they have no power to condemn, since He has removed the condemnation.
Every situation of a negative nature is now confronted with the declaration that Jesus has dealt with it, done with it, in His own body. He has risen to permanent life to live forever, and from which position He has been empowered to encourage us to a strong belief in Him and the greatness of His love which dealt the spiritual death blow to death itself, thus enabling us to move forward in and of the immediate moment, free from the entanglement of those destructive thought patterns which are built upon our prior vulnerability to accusations which are empowered by the prior rightful claims of what we otherwise would deserve.
Those claims are now negated, removed, rendered powerless by His action of love in taking the responsibility for our sin upon Himself, even though we do deserve, in a legal sense, to wear the consequences of our actions. But HE chose to take those consequences upon Himself, through His Son, and He did this to free us from enslavement to the notion that He is anything other than pure love, pure benevolence, pure forgiveness. To reveal that we need to rely on His love and forgiveness constantly, that we may by so doing, be empowered to follow what He wants us to do, that we do HIS will, not our own.
He gives us the great example, that we also may liberate others by our example of following His example, and forgive and love even our enemies, that love may overpower all that is against Him, against His world of love which is soon to be revealed in its final outcome.
CROSSROMAN 