God's Gracious Provision # 2

Life On The Highest Plane

It Is A Life Saved Through God's Gracious Provision

Such a salvation is the gracious provision of God in Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ no man can be saved; in Christ any man may be saved to the uttermost because in Christ incarnate, crucified, risen, ascended and exalted, God found everything needful to restore a believing sinner to fellowship with Himself.

Acts 4:12, "Neither is there salvation in any other; for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved."

2 Timothy 2:10, "Therefore I endure all things for the elect's sake, that they may also obtain the salvation which is in Christ Jesus with eternal glory."

The provision that God made in Christ for every believer is threefold. He sent Him to die on the Cross as our Saviour; He raised Him from the dead to make Him the Head and the Lord of the Church, His Body; and He exalted Him to His right hand and gave Him all power in heaven and upon earth that He might share Himself and His possession in the heavenlies with His joint-heirs on earth. The one who has reached the goal of life on the highest plane has accepted Christ as his Saviour, yielded to Him as his Lord, and appropriated Him as his Life.

It is a Life Conformed to God's Perfect Pattern

Complete conformity of the penitent, believing sinner to the image of his perfect Saviour was the purpose of the wondrous plan of salvation wrought out in the eternal counsels of the triune God before ever the world or man was made.

God laid the foundation for such an achievement in the creation of the first man in His own image. In His second Man God gave mankind the perfect Pattern to which He would conform every believer in Christ Jesus. May we see, then, what were the constituent elements of the life of this perfect Pattern that we may fully understand and quickly respond to the operation of the Holy Spirit as He works to fashion us according to it.

We have seen in our study on the incarnation that the life of the God-man was a truly human life in every sense in which our life is human, except in its sinfulness. He lived in the same kind of a world and was involved in the same kind of relationships. So the constituent elements in His moral and spiritual character that enables Him to be a perfect pattern to all mankind must be in us if we are fully conformed to His image.

The God-man's surpassing perfection is seen most clearly in His relationship to His Father which was one of unimpaired obedience and of unintermittent dependence. The will of God was the center and the circumference of His life and all that took place from His birth in the manager to his death on the Cross was the execution of His Father's will. He came, He lived, He died, that His Father's will might be done on earth as it is done in Heaven. Obedience was the invariable, unalterable rule in the life of Christ on earth. He always said "yes" to God. Self-will had no place in His life.

Hebrews 10:9, "Then said he, Lo, I come to do thy will, O God. He taketh away the first, that he may establish the second."

John 6:38, "For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me."

John 4:34, "Jesus saith unto them, My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work."

Christ, the perfect Pattern was also absolutely dependent. Self-trust had no place in the life of the God-man. The last Adam lived the life of dependence which the first Adam refused to live. Never was a life lived on earth so dependent upon God as was His. His thoughts, His words, His works, were those of His Father. He was a Sent One and He did only what He had been sent to do. He never initiated or executed anything which had its spring in Himself for His was a life "insulated in God's will." In His utter dependence upon God the last Adam was the perfect Pattern.

John 5:30, "I can of mine own self do nothing: as I hear, I judge: and my judgment is just; because I seek not mine own will, but the will of the Father which hath sent me."

John 14:10, "Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me? the words that I speak unto you I speak not of myself: but the Father, that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.

~Ruth Paxson~

(continued with # 3