Reconciled in Christ

Yet He has now reconciled you 

in His body of flesh through death, 

in order to present you before Him 

holy and blameless and beyond reproach…

–Colossians 1:22 NASB

God is for us, all of us, from before time all the way beyond time’s end. All of us. Those who are Christ-followers already and those who will be before the end. And as in Adam all die, so in Christ all are made alive. God’s acts for us include choosing us before time (predestination, election) for adoption, then drawing us toward faith with hidden influences in our life, then gifting us faith and making us new creations (regeneration), delivering us from Sin and Death, and—now—reconciling us.

Reconciliation is misunderstood. The wrong version goes like this: God has been angry with us and Jesus stepped in between us and God to reconcile us to his Father. In the true and actual meaning of reconciliation, the barrier between us and God has to do with the presence of evil, the twisting and perversion of what is good. The potentiality of evil has to run its course and be put away forever. 

Death is God’s solution to evil. Resurrection is God’s solution to death.

And it is vital to understand, reconciliation is not God’s “Plan B,” but was always and from eternity past his “Plan A.” All creation awaits the renewing and perfecting God is bringing. 

Have we been separated from God? Yes, in the sense that the presence of evil in our thinking, the perversion of our will into self-destructive sins, the evils of human society seen in violence, oppression, disgusting avarice, overweening pride, and slavery to base appetites that pervert love. If God were a permissive parent, allowing evil to continue, that would not be reconciliation but divine compromise. The price of such compromise would be the loss of what the Father longs for: a timeless New Reality where love rules, where beauty predominates, and where joy colors every every experience perpetually—a communion between all creatures and the Triune God.

Reconciliation is a divine act—initiated and instituted by the Father at the hands of the Son through the power of the Spirit—repairing the breach between creatures and Creator, healing the problems of Sin and Death that stand between us and loving communion with God.

Jesus is reconciliation. The Word of God (Jesus) is the Gospel. The one who made reconciliation known to us is Jesus. The one who effected reconciliation is Jesus. The basis of reconciliation is Jesus and its operation is by Grace, it is free, given without condition, a gift from the Father by means of the humiliation and suffering of the Son and the resurrecting power of the Spirit.

In assuming the condition of death—which was foreign to God—Jesus brought about the death of death. In returning from death to a new kind of existence (Jesus was changed in the resurrection, as we will be also), Jesus caused us to be raised as New Creations. In God’s timeline (he is beyond time) we already exist as resurrected New Creations.

Writing to Rome, to people he had never met, Paul addressed a kind of fear being used by manipulative rivals to recruit people away from the Jesus-movement. The fear they engendered is common to all of us, religious and non-religious people alike. They used guilt, shame, our angst about violations of our conscience. They warned people God would only accept them if they made themselves acceptable. They caused the Romans to doubt God’s love and forgiveness.

To them Paul said:

Therefore, having been justified by faith, 

we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 

through whom we also have obtained our introduction by faith 

into this grace in which we stand; 

and we celebrate in hope of the glory of God.

–Romans 5:1-2 NASB

We have already been justified by the faith of Jesus (not by our own faith, see “The Faith of Jesus”). We already have peace with God. But in case the Romans reading his letter did not see what he meant, Paul used another argument:

Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, 

we shall be saved from the wrath [of God] through Him. 

For if while we were enemies 

we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, 

much more, having been reconciled, 

we shall be saved by His life. 

And not only [this,] 

but we also celebrate in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, 

through whom we have now received the reconciliation.

–Romans 5:9-11 NASB

Paul’s argument is simple. If Jesus had compassion on us “while we were enemies” of God, how much more then, now that we have been delivered (“justified” is too weak a word) from Sin and Death, how much more God must love us. He loved us when we were enemies. Why would we imagine he will be wrathful with us in the future when he delivered us in our offensive condition.

We are no longer God’s enemies. When we appear before him we will find that we have been reconciled to him completely. And not only us:

… and through Him to reconcile all things to Himself, 

whether things on earth or things in heaven, 

having made peace through the blood of His cross.

–Colossians 1:20 NASB

God is reconciling all things, creatures and creation, humans and time and space, all that is. When God made us and the universe, this was already his intention. His love eliminates our waywardness and rebellion, our perverted thinking and disastrous infatuation with violence. His love purifies, transforming deceived, enslaved human beings into divinely endowed free creatures characterized by love and joy. 

Let me end by sharing a citation from an essay by Rev. Lauren R.E. Larkin (source: https://mbird.com/theology/wake-me-up-inside-part-2b-karl-barths) in which she briefly comments on some statements by Karl Barth (words in quotation marks are Barth’s):

Reconciliation is the fact that the distance has been crossed once and for all; and in this initiation by God humanity “finds himself accused… humbled … judged by his God, but also and primarily received by Him and reclaimed as His possession and hidden in Him and sustained by Him and addressed and treated as His friend and indeed His child.”. . . The whole of reconciliation is completely dependent on God’s activity and not on what humanity did, do, or will do; it comes to humanity from above independent of what occurs below. . . . “…[Humanity] is and remains always a recipient, a state in which he not only does not cease but can never do more than begin (and he will always be a beginner) to beg and to reach out for it in his poverty , in order that in that poverty he may be rich.”

God has made us rich in what truly matters, reconciling us through the deliverance effected by the death and resurrection of Christ.