One of the things that has helped me the most in my walk with God is understanding the
Courtesy of CreativeCommons.org
Out of all of them, I think it was the word reconciled that created the biggest shift in my thinking. It was another of those words that I’d heard my whole life. I thought I understood it, but I’m not sure I ever did.
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
(Romans 5:10)
That’s a really deep verse and could occupy a mind, my mind at least, for a long, long time. Let’s just deal with the word, reconciled.
Reconcile: To conciliate anew; to call back into union and friendship the affections which have been alienated; to restore to friendship or favor after estrangement. Basically, reconciliation means what we thought it meant. We are brought from a state of disagreement into a state of agreement.
That definition’s all well and good, but the real question I had was this was, “To what are we reconciled to?”
Being reconciled to someone means that you had to have been at one time friendly with that person. Let’s look at that in the context of our salvation.
It stands to reason that when I’m first saved I’ve never known God. If I’d known God before, then I wouldn’t be getting saved for the first time. Our salvation is our introduction to God, that’s the starting point.
How, then, are we reconciled? If we’ve never known God we cannot be reconciled to Him. You can’t be reconciled to someone you’ve never known.
Ok, so let’s broaden our thinking from a single human to humanity.
Thinking of humanity we can go back to a time that we were friendly with God. It was in the beginning when God breathed life into man.
On the sixth day of creation God created mankind. God formed Him, breathed His life into Him. At the end of that day God looked over everything He made and said that it was good.
God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good…
(Genesis 1:31)
So God looked upon mankind and said that we were VERY good. It was after this that the fall took place. Mankind sinned and we have been living under the curse of that sin ever since.
It was this sin that created the break in our friendship which required reconciliation.
But now we’ve been reconciled in Christ. So what does it all mean?
It means that through Christ and our salvation we are brought back to a pre-fallen state. God has given us His righteousness through justification so that we are seen as good once more.
We now have the same access that Adam had in his communion with God. God is right there just as He was at creation. When we pray we are not praying through miles of atmosphere but are speaking to our Creator who is walking with us and is speaking with us.
We are new creations. God has breathed, once again, His life into us. We are reconciled to the God who looked upon us and saw that we were very good.
Remember that when you pray. It’s not an idea of God that we’re praying to, but is, in fact, our very Creator who hears and responds.
We have been reconciled.