The Chasm Bridged # 2

Before Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden the promise was made of a way of salvation for the whole human race which had been plunged into moral and spiritual ruin through sin. It was not man's way but God's - Salvation through a Saviour.

The Cross in God's Eternal Purpose

But just here we may ask - and reverently so - "Did Adam's and Eve's sin take God by surprise and did He have to think out a way of escape for man after his fall?" Here we come to the very acme of the infinite grace of God. May the Holy Spirit grant each reader spiritual understanding to apprehend "the breadth and length and depth and height of the love of God which passeth knowledge."

No, Adam's sin did not take God by surprise, nor was God's way of redemption an after-thought. God knew even before the foundation of the world and the creation of man the sad and tragic devastation sin would work in the human race. God had anticipated the fall and was ready for it.

The Cross which was to bridge the chasm made by sin was set up in love in the dateless eternity of the past before it was set up in promise in Eden or in history on Calvary. "The divine redemptive movement, in purpose anterior to creation, once determined upon, never paused until it victoriously expressed itself in the language of Calvary. The atonement in principle and in God is dateless, but as taking effect on man it is historical, though dateless. Redemption then, in the large, is anything but an afterthought, a mere appendix to make good an unexpected disaster which had overtaken God's universe. Both sin and redemption were foreseen from the beginning."

There was a Cross set up in heaven before it was ever set up on earth. The atonement for man's sin made visible, effectual and historical on Calvary, was wrought out in purpose and in principle in the heart of the triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the dateless past.

Revelation 13:8, "And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the book of life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world."

Ephesians 1:4, "According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before him in love."

Acts 2:23, "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain."

2 Timothy 1:9, "Who hath saved us, and called us with n holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own purpose and grace, which was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began."

What can these words mean but that in the counsels of the triune God in the eternity of the past the awful tragedy in Eden was foreknown and that, then and there, the wondrous pan of salvation through the Son's redemptive work was formed by which God-in-Christ should reconcile a lost, sinning race for Himself?

Revelation of Redemption

The Bible is the Book of Redemption, its one theme from the beginning to the end is "salvation through a Saviour".

Luke 24:27, "And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself."

Luke 24:44, "And he said unto them, These are the words which I spake unto you, while I was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled, which were written in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms, concerning me."

All through the law, the psalms and the prophets, God is unfolding to man His plan of salvation through a Saviour. By the sacrifices of the Old Testament He foreshadows the one supreme Sacrifice. By pen pictures and prophetic promises He foretells Him who is "The Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world."

The story of His life with the record of its words and works; His death, resurrection and ascension as recorded in the Gospels; His doing as continued in the history of the Acts; the deeper revelation of Himself as the living, victorious, glorious Lord in the Epistles, and the promise and prophecy of a coming King in the Revelation; all have but one underlying purpose: namely, to reveal Him, not as the founder of a new religious order, nor as the propagator of a new ethical code, nor as the teacher of moral principles, nor as the reformer of man's external environment, but to reveal Him as the Saviour of mankind. The Father announced the coming of His Son as the coming of a Saviour.

Matthew 1:21, "And she shall bring forth a son, and thou shalt call his name JESUS: for he shall save his people from their sins."

Luke 2:11, "For unto you is born this day in the city of David, a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord."

Jesus Christ did not come only to tech or to preach or to heal: He came to SAVE. Jesus Christ came for but one purpose which He Himself states in these words,

Luke 19:10, "For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost."

He came to bridge the chasm which sin made between God and man. No one else and nothing else could do this.

~Ruth Paxson~

(the end)