Opening illustration: A woman who restores valuable paintings says many works of art that seem hopelessly damaged can be saved by an expert. Rebecca McLain has brought color and life back to dulled oil paintings by carefully removing dirt and discolored varnish. But she has also seen the damage done when people attempt to clean their own soiled art with oven cleaner or abrasive powders. Her advice? If you value the art, take it to an expert in restoration.
The same need exists in lives soiled by sin. Our efforts at ridding ourselves of the guilt and defilement of sinful actions and attitudes often end in frustration and despair. In our attempts to get rid of guilt, we sometimes blame others. Or we simply give up, thinking that we cannot be any different.
But Jesus our redeemer is the expert who can restore the most damaged, defiled, and discouraged person. Christ died so that anyone who by faith receives Him can be completely forgiven and restored. With His own blood He will cleanse us (1 John 1:7) and make us a new creation, God’s own “workmanship” (2 Corinthians 5:17; Ephesians 2:10). [David C. McCasland, ODB]
Introduction: The Bible uses a variety of words to describe the salvation we have in Jesus Christ words like rescue, ransom, forgiveness, redemption and propitiation.
Bible commentator Gordon Fee calls redemption “the least metaphorical” of the whole bunch. That is, they are all figures of speech in some way, but the word redemption is the one that is the closest to reality. Another way to put it is that all the other terms indicate something done for a reason, but reconciliation is the reason. God forgives us, for example, not because forgiveness is a purpose in itself, but because forgiveness enables the real goal, which is a relationship between God and us. But reconciliation means restoring a relationship back to God, and it is not done for some other purpose, but the relationship itself is that purpose.
The whole point of salvation is not that we will live forever, but that we will live forever with God. Relationship is central to the whole purpose and plan, and reconciliation is the term that describes what God is doing. So even though the Bible does not use the term very often, it is an important concept for us to understand.
How has God RESTORED us?
1. Christ becomes our Punishment (vs. 14-15)
Now that is good news: we have all died, because Jesus died for us. Paul is not talking about physical death (as we can see by looking around us). We are all very much alive – some of us more alive than others, but all of us are alive. And Paul is not talking about being “dead in trespasses and sins,” like he does in Ephesians. The death of Jesus did not cause us to die in that sense. So what is he getting at? It’s that the penalty, the natural consequence, of sin is death and Jesus as our Creator has paid that penalty for us. He died for us, so his death counts for us. His death pays the penalty of sin for us. We are all paid up, so to speak, because Jesus has paid it all for us. It was a substitute for us; he did it on our behalf. And there was an exchange: he gets our penalty, and we are freed from the penalty, and that’s the good news about the love of Christ that Paul wants to share with others. That’s why Paul preaches.
And how should we respond to Christ’s death for us? We get our answer in verse 15: Paul is one of those people, so he lives and preaches not for himself, but for Jesus, because Jesus died and was raised for him. This verse encapsulates the gospel and the response that all of us ought to make: Jesus died for us, so we are to live not for ourselves, but for Jesus. Our goal is not to get as much as we can for ourselves, but to do what we can for Christ. Our life is not about us – it’s about Jesus; he is the reason for our life. And as Paul says elsewhere – we are not the ones who are living, but Christ is living in us. If we do anything worthwhile at all, it’s because Christ is living in us, initiating it and energizing it. And we get the pleasure of participating in it.
Illustration: Don Miller is a writer from Portland. He was teaching a class in Canada. His students were all freshman college students who had grown up in the church. The class was called "The Gospel and Culture." He started the class with an experiment. He told the class that he was going to share the gospel of Jesus, but was going to leave something out. He wanted them to figure out what was missing from what he was going to say. So he told them about sin, about how we are all fallen creatures. He told some stories and used some illustrations. He talked about repentance, and again told some stories. He talked about God's forgiveness, and then he talked about heaven. He went on like this. Listen to what happened:
“When I finally stopped and asked the class to tell me what I'd left out, after twenty or more minutes of discussion, not one student realized that I'd left out Jesus. Not one. And I believe I could repeat that same experiment in Christian classrooms across North America.”
The same thing is possible today. We can share our testimonies, which is good. We can talk about sin and forgiveness and heaven and hell. But until we talk about Jesus we haven't talked about the gospel. The heart of the gospel, the heart of the message of reconciliation, is the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
2. Christ becomes our Mediator (vs. 16-19)
When we look at others from the worldly view point our perspective is physical and our standard for gauging everything is the world perspective. We look at others and ourselves through the periscope of the accomplishments we have made, the families we come from, the jobs and status quo we hold or aspire, the education and power we have acquired and so on … but when we have a godly (Kingdom) point of view, everything flips and we see others and ourselves in need of a Savior for the sin that has been imputed upon our lives. We are under bondage and chained to the world and sin that freedom becomes impossible till someone mediates for us. Actually we should be punished for our sin but God has raised a mediator through Jesus Christ Who will take our punishment and free us from bondage.
Paul once looked at Jesus simply from a physical perspective, and from that standpoint Jesus looked like a failed Messiah, a Messiah who got killed. In fact Christ’s death was a stumbling block for the Jews and foolishness to the Greek (1 Corinthians 2:23) but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. The resurrection of Jesus changed the status of all humanity – or at least Paul could see, from the resurrection of Jesus, that the real potential of all human beings is different than what Paul had thought before. When Paul looked at a human being, he knew that there was more to the person than just the flesh that he could see. It was a person for whom Jesus had died.
Paul here does not say “all” – instead, he is talking about those who are “in Christ.” There are two ways to understand this. First, it is to follow the logic and conclude that everyone in the universe is actually in Christ. And there is a sense in which that is true. In Christ, all humanity has a new start. But when Paul uses the phrase “in Christ,” he implies those who have put on Christ and there is evidence of Him living in them. Although everyone in the universe has the potential for this new start, this new basis in life, not everyone is actually experiencing it or putting it into action.
On one hand, God says, “Jesus died for your sins, so you should live in a new way” and some people respond, “I don’t care what you say – it’s not going to affect the way I live.” God says that the death of Christ has certain results, and on the other side we see that those results are not necessarily happening – at least not yet. God says, “You are a new creation,” and some of the people don’t respond – they continue to live in the same old way. God says, “You are forgiven,” and the people say, “I don’t feel forgiven.” From God’s perspective, forgiveness is a fact, but from the people’s perspective, it is not. They don’t believe it, so for them, it’s not true. There’s a difference between the objective truth of God and the subjective receiving of that truth by human beings. When we realize that we were slaves under bondage and are free now through Christ, we will deliberately pursue the ministry of reconciliation (restoration) to free others because you know what it is like to be in bondage.
We cannot do the act of reconciling (restoration) on our own. God alone can do it. From the worldly perspective we think we have to pursue to have it all and many do but from the godly perspective we have it all only when we are reconciled to the Father through Jesus Christ. God reconciled us (all) to himself through Christ, by not counting our sins against us. He forgave us all our sins because of what Christ did on our behalf. He suffered the result of our sins, and so God does not count them against us. They have been paid in full – by Jesus Christ – and it was all done well before we repented, well before we committed the sins, and well before we were even alive. It’s all quite astonishing, in a way, that God would do all that for us in advance. But we have to remember that God’s perspective on time is different than ours. It is not like God was just seething with anger and wanting to punish everybody up until the point that Jesus died and paid the penalty for us. And then all of a sudden God says, “Well, now I feel better. The price has been paid, so I guess everybody is OK now.”
No, that would make God look like an ill-tempered human being. No, when it comes to reconciliation, we need to remember a couple of things:
(a) God is the one who initiated all this. He was the first one to seek some reconciliation, and that means that he was already reconciled in his own mind even before the deed was done. He didn’t want to punish us – he wanted us to escape the punishment, because he wants us to live rather than die. When the Bible talks about the wrath of God, it is not meaning to say that God is seething with anger and wants to destroy us. No, the truth is that God loves us and wants us to escape the consequences of sin. There is a punishment for sin, but God wants us to escape that punishment. God made Christ to become that punishment for us and His wrath for our sins was spilled on His only begotten Son.
(b) Jesus Christ was slain from the foundation of the world, as it says in the book of Revelation [13:8]. Even before time began, the plan was for Jesus to die for everyone, so that everyone would die in him and be able to live as new creations. God’s attitude towards us has always been that he wants us to escape the punishment of sin.
Illustration: Let’s suppose that two lovers have a quarrel. Maybe they have been married a long time, and they have a fight and they get mad at each other. But after a while they begin to realize how stupid this was, and they regret what they have done. And one of them says to the other, “I am sorry. I forgive you. Will you forgive me?” The first one opens their arms wide and says, “Can we kiss and make up?” That person has, in their mind, been reconciled to their spouse. There is no animosity; there is a desire for good relationship. But will this reconciliation be received? It is up to the other person. The first person might be reconciled in their own mind, wanting peace instead of fighting, but the other person may not be reconciled in their mind. One person can have desires of peace while the other has desires of war. There is a reconciliation, but on only one side.
3. Christ becomes our Sin (vs. 20-21)
Who was it who “knew no sin”? It was Jesus, who never committed a single sin. And yet God made Jesus to be sin – he did it for our sake. He was doing it on our behalf, dying for our sins, dying for us, dying for the sins of all humanity. It’s the great exchange: he became poor so that we might become rich, and he became sin so that we might become righteousness.
Jesus Christ is the only person who ever lived who was sinless. But at the cross, Christ became so identified with our sins - all the guilt and all of its consequences - that in essence, the sinless one became sin for us. One person puts it this way:
“In a sense beyond human comprehension, God treated Christ as "sin," aligning him so totally with sin and its dire consequences that from God's viewpoint he became indistinguishable from sin itself.” (Murray Harris)
God assigned responsibility for our sins to Christ, which makes it impossible for us to be punished for our sins. God reckons our sins to Christ's account.
And in return, God transferred Christ's perfect record to our account. "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." God now reckons Christ's perfect obedience to our accounts, so that we are counted as having kept the law perfectly. God does not count sins against those who have put their faith in trust.
In Jesus, our trespasses are not counted against us – they are gone. We are counted as righteous, completely righteous, and as righteous as God himself is, because God himself has decreed that it is so. And we will forever be living evidence of the righteousness of God, that God is so faithful to his children that he will go to the ends of the earth to draw us back to himself. From his perspective, from his side, everything has been done. The path is clear, the door is open, and the arms are open wide.
Application: The question for us is: Will we run to him, or run away? And from the preacher’s perspective, I can’t just leave it as a question. No – I need to exhort: “I implore you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God because He is the Expert Restorer.”
When it comes to cleansing the canvas of our souls, we cannot do it ourselves. Only Jesus Christ can. Call on Him today for expert restoration. Only God can transform a sin-stained soul into a masterpiece of grace.
