December 25, 2016
As the bumper sticker rightly says “Christians are forgiven but not Perfect”.
Remember that the Big problem addressed by Christianity is that we all are sinners. God is perfect and we are not. How can sinners who are imperfect and unloving have a relationship with a holy righteous loving God? This is the greatest problem in the universe! Every false religion (including fake Christianity) is man’s sincere but prideful effort to solve the emptiness and alienation which we feel because we are disconnected from God, our Creator. But all such efforts are doomed to failure. The essence of sin is being self-centered, and all these efforts are essentially self-centered, they actually move us towards ourselves and not towards God. We have no solution to this problem unless God provides one. Thankfully He has because of Christmas!
Quite apart from the multitudes of “fake” Christians, even the most genuine Christlike Christians will be imperfect. Christianity should be judged by Christ, not by His so-called followers! Until we genuine Christians get our new resurrection bodies (which will be like Christ’s resurrection body) we will continue to be sinners (See 1 Corinthians 15) . We will get our new bodies on His return, It is called “glorification” and at that time the devastating effects of the fall will be fully reversed. We will be as perfect as Christ is perfect, and the New Heavens and the New Earth will be even better than the Garden of Eden was before the fall. Our glorified bodies will also be superior to even the earthly body of Adam before the fall. We will be superior to the Angels (Hebrews 1 & 2) and like Christ after the resurrection we won’t need, donkeys, or horses, or cars and planes to get around.
In evaluating a religion or belief system we should take into account the primary person of that religion. Nobody has ever been able to point out any fault or sin with Jesus Christ (unlike Mohammed, Buddha, etc, none of whom claimed perfection and none of whom claimed to be God). No religion, other than Christianity offers any hope of forgiveness and justice and only Christianity offers a solution to the problem of sin!
Christmas means that God Himself entered time and space and took on a human nature at the same time as maintaining His divine nature. He is one person with two natures. As a man he was able to be tempted and experience everything we humans are tempted to do or think, and even die. It is important to know that during his earthly life he laid aside all his power as God and lived like a mere man. He did not know everything and had to study the Scriptures just as we have to. He lived by faith just as we have to! Even his miracles were done by faith and not done by using His power as God. In fact His greatest temptation by Satan was to use His power as God, but He did not do so because this would have disqualified Him from living a life and dying a death as “our substitute” (See Philippians 2:5-11).
Jesus, is the 2nd Adam (Romans 5) but unlike the first Adam he did not sin but lived a perfect life. Thus he qualified to be our SUBSTITUTE and because he was genuinely human He was able to die and be punished in our place and in exchange offer us as a free gift forgiveness of sin, and even a free gift of his perfect righteousness, which we will get in full at our glorification. Our sin was debited to His account and His righteousness was credited to our account, if we receive it. Accepting this free gift of forgiveness and the righteousness of Christ restores our relationship to God. Immediately as we accept this free gift we are completely forgiven now, and we are “declared” perfectly righteous in Christ, and immediately our relationship with God is restored. However, we will not be perfectly righteous in our own bodies on this earth until we recieve our new glorified bodies when Christ returns.
“For our sake he [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21)
