Whatever judicial consequences there might have been of the fall, the stark reality for man is that it brought about a fundamental and radical alteration in his relationship to God.
From the presence of the Creator, man was suddenly cut off and alienated in a world in which God’s intimacy, which brought such peace and blessing and plenty, was removed and the irredeemable enemy of God and man, Satan, now had authority. Denying God and enthroning self brought moral dislocation and untold suffering upon the whole race.
Removed by sin from the environment for which he was made, man floundered in a moral wilderness, beset on all sides by ferocious enemies whose primary task was to ensure that no readmission to the divine presence was possible; man was lost. But then came Jesus and “…now, in Christ Jesus, those once being far off, are become (ginomai) near in the Blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:13). It is in this Blood that we are able to be reconciled to God and to draw near; but that is not the end of the story.
If man is to be saved, he is to be saved from himself. It is the self that has enslaved and corrupted the man and holds him in bondage. Deliverance from this state comes only by denial of that self; “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matthew 16:24). There is no other way for man to be saved.
The continuous and unembarrassed interchange of love and thought between God and the soul of the redeemed man is the throbbing heart of true faith. The intercourse between God and the soul is known to us in conscious personal awareness; it is personal in that it doesn’t come to us through the body of believers as such, but is known to the individual and thence to the body through the individuals who comprise it; and it is conscious, in that it doesn’t stay below the threshold of consciousness and work there unknown to the soul.
We are in little what God is in large, our sins excepted. Being made in His image we have this capacity to recognise Him and the moment the Spirit begins His work of regeneration in us our whole being senses its kinship to God and leaps up in joyous recognition. That is what it is to be born again and without it we cannot see the kingdom of God. But that birth is, in itself, not an end but a beginning, and where the end is no man has discovered.
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