Whose Faith? Part Three

Chosen Before We Believed

            “We get right with God when we receive Jesus,” Paula said. “We are taken out of Adam and placed into Christ when we believe.”

            “But what do you do with the apostle Paul’s description of our origination in Him?” I asked her. “He says that we were chosen in Christ long before we believed in Him. In fact, Paul says we were chosen in Him before we were even born.”

            Here is the verse I read to Paula to make my point. Take special note of when this verse says that we were placed into Christ. “He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him” (Ephesians 1:4). The New Living Translation renders this verse, “Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes.”

            It wasn’t our choice of Him that put us into Christ. It was His choosing us! We were chosen in Christ before anything was even created. When, then, do you find your origin in Christ? Was it when you prayed a prayer? Was it when you believed? No, your origin in Him precedes time and space, reaching all the way into eternity. Before one member of Adam’s race showed up on this planet, even before the first taint of sin entered the world, our God had already chosen us in Christ and dealt with the problem of sin.

            “So you’re saying everybody is in Christ?” Paula asked incredulously.

            “I’m not just saying everybody is in Christ. I’m saying everybody and everything is in Him,” I replied.

            Young’s Literal Translation of Colossians 1:16-17 makes this clear.

            Because in him were the all things created, those in the heavens, and those upon the earth, those visible, and those invisible, whether thrones, whether lordships, whether principalities, whether authorities; all things through him, and for him, have been created, and himself is before all, and the all things in him have consisted.

            The sentence structure is awkward in places, but the literal translation of the New Testament says that everything in existence was created in Him. Jesus Christ is the Creator and Sustainer of everything in existence. Look at the last phrase of verse 17: “the all things in him have consisted.” Everything that exists is held together in Him. You can relax because you are at home in Him, and nothing exists or happens outside Him.

           

Living a Lie

            I’m not suggesting that everybody has a conscious relationship to Christ, because they don’t. But this verse clearly shows that everybody and everything is related to Him through a union about which they may or may not possess knowledge. He is “before all”—that doesn’t refer to priority, but to placement. It refers to His immediate presence in the whole cosmos. There is no distance between God and man. Any perception of distance is an illusion caused by the whispering lies of ghosts from Adam’s shadowy past, ghosts still haunting those who haven’t seen the light of the gospel.

            What happens when people don’t know the truth of the gospel? They base their lives on this lie of separation. Paul described it, saying, “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, of the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience” (Ephesians 2:2).

            Without knowing the truth, humanity’s default setting is to live the lie. Unbelievers are living out of a lie and not walking in the truth. The truth is that what Jesus did, He did for everybody, and its success doesn’t depend on our agreement. It didn’t happen when we believed but when we were still dead and incapable of believing. Ephesians 2:5-6 says, “Even when we were dead in our transgressions, [God] made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”

           

God’s Work Came First

            So which is it? Is it the work of Jesus Christ or the response of man that brings the benefits of the cross into existence? Grace would insist that His work and not our response to it gave birth to these things. Faith in Christ certainly links us to its reality, but there would be nothing to link us to if it weren’t already real beforehand. We are reconciled, and that is why we can be reconciled (see 2 Corinthians 5:19-20). Theologian William Barclay helps us understand this.

            First and foremost, Paul sees the work of Jesus Christ as above and beyond all else a work of reconciliation. Through that which he did, the lost relationship between man and God is restored. Man was made for friendship and fellowship with God. By his disobedience and rebellion he ended up at enmity with God. That which Jesus did took that enmity away, and restored the relationship of friendship which should always have existed, but which was broken by man’s sin.

            It is to be carefully noted that Paul never speaks of God being reconciled to men, but always of men being reconciled to God. The most significant of all the passages, 2 Corinthians 5:18-20, three times speaks of God reconciling man to himself. It was man, not God, who needed to be reconciled. Nothing had lessened the love of God; nothing had turned that love to hate; nothing had ever banished that yearning from the heart of God. Man might sin, but God still loved. It was not God who needed to be pacified, but man who needed to be moved to surrender and to penitence and to love.

            Here then we are face to face with an inescapable truth. The effect of the cross—at least in this sphere of the thought of Paul—was on man, and not on God. The effect of the cross changed, not the heart of God, but the heart of man. It was man who needed to be reconciled, not God. It is entirely against all Pauline thought to think of Jesus Christ pacifying an angry God, or to think that in some way God’s wrath was turned to love, and God’s judgment was turned to mercy, because of something which Jesus did. When we look at it in Paul’s way, it was man’s sin which was turned to penitence, man’s rebellion which was turned to surrender, man’s enmity which was turned to love, by the sacrificial love of Jesus Christ upon the Cross. It cost that cross to make that change in the hearts of men.⁸

            In Christ our God has reconciled the world to Himself. It isn’t something we accomplish by our faith. It is simply a matter of receiving something that has already been done. Karl Barth elaborated on this point in his book Christ and Adam.

            In His own death He makes their peace with God—before they themselves have decided for this peace and quite apart from that decision. In believing, they are only conforming to the decision about them that has already been made in Him.⁹

            This reconciliation He accomplished is the exchanged life. The biblical use of the word reconciled denotes the idea of exchanging coins for other coins of equivalent value. The full message of the exchanged life is that Jesus has exchanged the life of all of humanity with His own. In Romans 5:10 Paul affirms, “we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son.” The word reconciled is used in a way that suggests this reconciliation happened to us because of God and is a reality that exists independent of anything we ever do or don’t do. In fact, the word means it happened to us because of an outside force without us having done a thing. We are the objects of reconciliation, not the subjects.¹⁰ This is true of every person for whom Christ died, which is every one of us, without exception. Regardless of whether we know it, believe it, or even like it, we are all included.

            Our God isn’t angry with us, because His acceptance of us isn’t contingent on a proper response on our part. An improper response or no response to His love will undoubtedly impact our lives in negative ways that are too many to number, but that problem is on our end, not His. When we turn our attention to Jesus hanging on the cross for all humanity, we hear the passionate shout of Eternal Agape crying out in divine love for every one of us. We see the tangible evidence in space and time of the Trinity’s resolve to reconcile every wandering soul into the warm embrace of a love that will never die.