“For as by one man’s disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous.” (Romans 5:19)
God loved us when we were nothing. From the time Adam sinned, we became “Ichabod.” Man departed from God; and God, man’s glory, departed from man. What was God’s pronouncement? Man, at his best state, is altogether vanity. (Ps. 39:5)
Our problem is not simply what we have DONE; it is who we ARE; or rather – what we are NOT. Our disconnection from God leaves us devoid of His nature. He is Just. We do unjustly because we are unjust. He is Love. We hate because we are unloving. He is Peace. We rage because we have no peace. Not only have we sinned, but we have fallen short of God’s glory.
Before we receive God’s good news, we must accept the bad news. The bad news is God’s judgment upon us. He has weighed us in His balance scale and found us entirely wanting.
According to God’s standards, there is no beauty in us to be desired. We are accursed. We are despised and rejected of God. His wrath abides on us. We are worthy of perishing. And yet God so loved us that He gave His only begotten Son, that if we would believe on Him, we would not perish, but have everlasting life.
The Father sent His Son into the world, to live the life we should be living. To be the man Adam should have been. To possess and display the glory of God. Jesus is the brightness of God’s glory and the express image of His person. And yet, He was despised and rejected by us. There was no beauty in Him that we desired. We deemed ourselves better than Him. We counted Him a transgressor – accursed, smitten and afflicted of God. But He was not Ichabod; He was Immanuel – God in the flesh. He who knew no sin became Sin, that we might be made the Righteousness of God in Him.
Let us acknowledge our utter poverty apart from Christ. Woe unto us! We are undone without Jesus. Our problem runs far deeper than what we do. At the most fundamental level, the level of our being, we are lost, ruined, ready to perish without the rescue of God. Jesus is the Savior of mankind. He restores for us and in us what Adam lost for and in us – the very image of God.
The death of Jesus not only dealt with sin, it dealt a death blow to the sinner. Christ died on the cross, but so did our old man who was bereft of God. He either dies on the cross, or he continues to exist in his wretched state for all eternity. But if he dies, we are risen, as new creatures in Christ, empowered now to walk in newness of life. Filled with the Spirit of Christ, partakers of the nature of God, we have now passed from death to life, from shame to glory.
Not unto us be glory, but unto God be all the glory, for His willingness to be nobody that we should be somebody. He bore our shame, that we might be partakers of His glory. He wore our shameful, sinful image, that He might restore to us God’s glorious image and likeness.