When my two daughters were young, about twenty years ago, they used to play a computer game called The Sims. In the game, they would create a house from scratch, and perhaps alter it until they got just what they wanted. They would create an environment to set it in, gardens and so on. Then they would introduce people to live in the house and introduce relationships between the people. The game had no ‘goal’ or ‘target’. There were no points to be won or different levels to achieve. It was simply about allowing imagination to produce interconnecting characters in a setting designed by the player.
It is interesting that my girls never started with the people. They started with the environment which they created ready for the people.
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth…[and] planted a garden…..and there He put Man. Genesis Ch’s 1 & 2.
The garden was created with the inhabitants in mind. And when you read the first couple of chapters you can see the enormous amount of preparation. First there was a Universe prepared, then a world and then finally a garden. In ‘The Sims’ you could always go back and add in things that were necessary but that you had forgotten. In the real world, our world, God had thought of everything at the start.
The completeness of His love is shown by the completeness of His provision.
God has created all this, with us in mind, for His pleasure and for our pleasure too. One thing about God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit; they all know how to enjoy Themselves. They understand pleasure, and they intend for us to understand pleasure too. And there are no levels to achieve, no performance is necessary.
Because, even at the very beginning, free will was vital if Adam and Eve were to discover true pleasure in God and God in them; the door was left open for the possibility that they might choose to walk away from God, and go a different way. And they did.
For God this was not an out-of-the-blue catastrophe that ruined everything. It was always a possibility. If you give Adam and Eve free will, then this is always a possibility. It comes with the territory. And being the Brilliant Creator that He is, there was a contingency plan. Father, Son and Holy Spirit were not outfoxed. Not in the slightest. “Love always perseveres. Love never fails.” (1 Corinthians 13).
The completeness of His love is shown by the completeness of His provision.
His provision for the situation was the Cross. Just as there had been much thought and care put into preparing the way for the setting of the Garden (the creation of the universe, the world etc), so there was equal preparation to set the scene for the Cross and to make the Cross a complete answer to the problem.
Sometimes, Salvation is seen as simply warehousing people for Jesus. As if the point was to ‘get people saved’ and then keep them safe (not lose any) by keeping them in church and behaving nicely until it’s time to ‘go home’. Almost as if the Cross provides a “safe conduct” pass to get us through this world and through the turnstile into another realm. The truth is that the Cross has provided a complete reversal of the effects of what Adam and Eve did to enable us to live now.
There are two fundamental things we are told that Jesus came to do:
The first is that He came so that we could have life and have it in its fullest most complete meaning. He came so that we could be free from the power of Sin over us, not just slightly insulated, but completely free. There is no more distance between us, we are completely one, united always no matter what. Because of the Cross we can be FREE, free from fear, free from worry, free from the power of Satan in any area of life, free to walk with God, free to hear God, free to live.We are not “holding on”, we are not simply existing, or just getting by, we are free to live.
The second fundamental thing that Jesus came to do was to destroy the works of the evil one Satan. That is still an ongoing process. We get to work with Jesus in destroying the enemy’s work in peoples lives and in society. We get to bring LIFE and His power wherever we go and to whoever we meet. And there is nothing missing in His provision for us.
We are not meant to be warehousing people for Jesus. We are not in the Storage business. We are in the Explosives business, blasting a hole through the works of the enemy, and as we do it we are meant to be the most chilled, most relaxed, most laughter filled people on the planet as we enjoy LIFE, knowing that everything we need for every situation has already been provided. We are totally safe and we are totally secure because the completeness of His love is shown by the completeness of His provision.
His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.
2 Peter 1v3
Church is out there 