Hold the Catch-up

Our God is a relational God. He would still be a relational God if He had never made another being, angel or human. His relationship is expressed within Himself – between the Persons of the Godhead and it is entirely self-sufficient, needing nothing from any of His creatures. But He has chosen to make creatures nevertheless. In His creative love, He has purposed to make beings who can delight in Him.

We were, in fact, made in His very image. We were endowed with the faculties that make us conscious, rational, moral beings who could willingly relate to Him in love. The fall corrupted all of that. The redemption restores it. Yet redemption goes even further because it discloses an attribute of God that we could never otherwise have known, whereby He can be loved for His grace towards those who despise and reject Him.

Though God is not the cause of evil, He is certainly the permitter of it. And His wisdom had to have known, before He even made him, that man would fall. God did not cause man to fall, but he made man able to fall. Yet, despite what many might think, the redemption was not a "Plan B" devised to react to the unforeseen. God does not play catch-up. Though we cannot know the secret things of the Divine Mind we can be sure that God, Who knows the end from the beginning, made mankind even though He knew he would fall.

Only Omnipotence and Holiness could possibly encompass such a course of action. For He already knew, without being the proximate cause, that millions would be consigned to a hell of eternal damnation as a result of His creative act. What could possibly be worth such a debacle? Whatever it is, it must be something unimaginably wonderful and glorious. And it must be something in which the Living God will be vindicated as blameless, holy and loving, because He cannot act contrary to His nature.

And I am convinced that this glorious thing that God is doing from before the beginning of the world is in nothing less than revealing his grace through Jesus Christ, His Son. We are told that He is destined as the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. We know that those who are in Christ were chosen before the foundation of the world to be vessels of His righteousness – holy and blameless before Him. It is inferred that the names of the elect were written in the book of life before the world began.

God had a plan from before the beginning of the creation that is centred in Jesus Christ. The Bible tells us that all things are from Him and through Him and to Him. We are told that all things were made by Him and that in Him was life, and the life was the light of men. He is before all things and all things hold together in Him. He is worthy to receive blessing and honour and glory and power forever. He is the very image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. He came to make the Father known and to show us the Way by being the Way. He is the centre of all history and the reason for all existence.

He is the expression of the wisdom of God. Crucified, submitted, empty of self. He is alien to fallen humanity, which is unwilling to die, rebellious and full of self. And He came to forge the means and the way by which many sons would come to glory. It is His grace that makes it all possible. His willingness to be emptied of all the glory of His rightful Godhead. To live as man ought to have lived, even in the midst of a world that hated Him, surrounded by strong bulls of Bashan in the form of the evil spirits bent on His destruction. All of His own creation was against Him - conspiring, opposing, rebelling – and still He came, lived and died ignominiously as a criminal for the glory of the Father and the sake of the saints He came to save.

For this reason God has highly exalted Him and given Him a Name above all Names. He has shown us the Way. Emptiness of all self and the putting to death of the flesh – the expression of the most abject humility as the pathway to glorious exaltation at the hand of God. There is no glory without the cross. No salvation. And what was true of God in human form is no less true of His mere creatures.

Now should we bow down in awe. For this has been the purpose of God from eternity. That through the rebellion of His creation His most glorious attributes of grace, mercy and love should be displayed towards those who are being saved.