“Since that day it has never been quite enough to say that’ God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world;’ since the rumour that God had left his heavens to set it right.”
G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man
God is working every moment of our lives in our past, present and future, and is using every atom throughout all of creation, to demonstrate the glory of His being so that we become more like His Son. It is God who created us so that our significance, our purpose, our security and identity would all be met by Him.
Ephesians 1:7-8 states, “In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished upon us in all His wisdom and insight.” This perfectly summarizes what God has done for us. When God revealed His perfect qualities and sovereign attributes to the world at the Cross it broke the bond that held the world in its grasp and satisfied our every need.
Because of God’s limitless goodness, He knew through His perfect wisdom exactly what to do to amend our situation. That is He used His perfect freedom to exercise His absolute authority over sin and death. God being the ultimate in power, overcame sin’s power over us by paying our debt through His blood spilled on the Cross in the form of Christ. He did all this out of His love for us. God would have been perfectly right to leave us in our sinful condition because He is a God of perfect justice and holiness. And it’s not that God’s love and grace overruled His holiness and justice by redeeming us and adopting us. ON the contrary all of God’s perfect qualities, his unconditional love, His righteous justice, His all sufficient grace and His unapproachable holiness all intersected each other at the Cross with God’s sovereign attributes of power, wisdom, freedom and goodness to meet all our needs break our bondages to bring us from our depraved condition into His divine presence.
Chesterton described how the old world’s pagan beliefs could not contain the Cross. The symbol of paganism is a perfect circle formed by a serpent eating it’s own tail. When the cross was placed at the center of the pagan circle, it extended out in each direction, breaking paganism’s constricting grip of superstitions, falsehood, idolatry and ignorance. Imagine now instead of a pagan circle, a four-link chain that surrounds the world. God broke through the chains that enslave us by exercising His sovereign attributes and revealing His perfect qualities at the Cross. Just like the archaic pagan belief systems were overwhelmed by the cross, the bondages of the world are completely shattered by God’s sovereignty and perfection.
We have been given all that we need to be free and that is Christ Himself. When we realize that we are free to be loved and have the freedom to love. By forgiving us, He freed us from sin’s penalty and through His grace we need not be enslaved to sin any longer.
God allows us to exchange the shackles of this world that is the bondage of conformity, the curse of superficiality, the crushing pressure of self-indulgence and identity crisis for His goodness, His freedom, His power and His liberty. This will give us purpose for our life will not be our own but will be given to God for His glory and our benefit. When we do He will provide our security by meeting our every need and allow us to realize our significance because we are made in His image and are loved and treasured by Him. And God will transform our fallen identity to the perfect likeness of His Son.
