“The trouble comes when we forget that the Son of God is born into our old human nature.

It is one thing to recognise what God is doing with us, but another thing to deliberately accept it as His appointment.

We can never accept the appointment of Jesus Christ and bear away the sin of the world, that was His work; but He does ask us to accept our cross.

What is my cross?

The manifestation of the fact that I have given up my right to myself to Him for ever. Self-interest, self-sympathy, self-pity—anything and everything that does not arise from a determination to accept my life entirely from Him will lead to a dissipation of my life.” - Oswald Chambers

Christians believe that we must be born again. There is no other way we can be rescued from our downward spiral. And then, we have our task (our cross).

Baptism is the act of dying and rising again while also publicly proclaiming our rebirth.

At the same time, without this rebirth, we are dead men walking.

So, how does a just and good God redeem a corrupt people without destroying them, when that is what we deserve?

The new nature worked out in us, seems to be our clue.

Several years ago, I had a visual metaphor for this new life as it contrasted with the old.

What I pictured was a black orb that was the core of my being. This was my old nature and I sought to cover my black orb with white goodness. So while I wanted to embody goodness and truth, my essence was not that and I strived to compensate.

And then in an instant, this orb switched from black to white disrupting everything I had constructed around the black orb and the construct came crumbling down.

This profound visual is hard to convey, but it helped me see old and new nature swapped out by God and how this new nature was no longer compatible with the external embodiment that crumbled away. This new white orb was a core change inside myself and now that required a new external embodiment.

By placing our faith in Jesus and allowing the spirit to rebuild us, we are a new creation. The new creation is to be identified with the crucified and resurrected Jesus.

“That is the final purpose of his dying, not merely that we might be forgiven, or...saved from hell. Rather, it was that a new people might be formed, a new humanity, a new creation, and that a new kingdom be set up, consisting of people like Himself.” – D.M. Lloyd-Jones.

There are two parts of us, and the old version of us needs to be transferred into the new version. 

Jesus made it possible for us to make the transfer, allowing for the destruction of the old and the growth of the new. The cross allows him to transform us, but it's uncomfortably done through the valley of death, through a hellscape that we travel to the other side (like Jesus in the passion).

This turmoil also makes possible our redemption. 

Placing our faith in Jesus is to ask him to make the transfer.

But our old nature and the dark forces of this world want to obscure and make that as difficult as possible. They want to prevent it, slow it down, or stop it altogether. And, we don’t usually want to lose some parts (or benefits) of our old nature. But as God redeems us, we can see and experience the new in contrast to the old, and that makes letting go of the old easier. 

Grace is required. Tension is created.

“Will I let God identify me with the cross of Christ until I can say not merely with my lips but by my life: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Galatians 2: 20)?” — Biblical Ethics / The Moral Foundations of Life / The Philosophy of Sin: Ethical Principles for the Christian Life by Oswald Chambers

The pathway is from fully corrupt to fully redeemed. There is no escaping the abyss transit zone.

The Apostle Paul is a prime example of this transformation, in a dramatic clear series of events.

Acceptance & Rejection

“Then he said to the disciples, “Anyone who accepts your message is also accepting me. And anyone who rejects you is rejecting me. And anyone who rejects me is rejecting God, who sent me.” - Luke 10:16

My parents are terribly unreliable in taking my kids to school every day (they live in another state). 

My neighbors are unreliable in mowing my lawn (I've never asked them to).

Our HOA president is unreliable in delivering our Amazon packages (Why would he?). 

God’s reliability can seem random when we don't understand who God is, how he operates, and to what aim. If God’s primary objective with humans is to protect us from suffering and death, then yes he’s unreliable in delivering that outcome. That god is a miserable failure and unworthy of worship. In the face of tragedy, that belief and that god must be let go. 

Perhaps we are imposing our expectation of God disconnected from the reality of who He is and the reality we inhabit. We want God to operate in a way that maximizes our benefits and diminishes our downsides. Ultimately, that is the case, but we don't want to go through the suffering cross to get to that outcome. We want the benefits without the growing pains. We want a teleportation to that outcome. Instead, a renewal is needed.

"First, it seems clear to me that once we replace the common vision of Christian hope ("Going to Heaven") with a Biblical vision of "new heavens and new earth," there will be direct consequences for how we understand both the human problem and the divine solution.

Second, in the usual model, what stops us from "going to heaven" is sin, and sin is dealt with (somehow) on the cross.

In the Biblical mode, what stops us from being genuine humans (bearing the divine image, acting as the "royal priesthood") is not only sin, but the idolatry that underlies it.

The idols have gained power, the power humans ought to be exercising in God's world; idolatrous humans have handed it over to them.

What is required, for God's new world and for renewed humans within it is for the power of the idols to be broken.

Since sin, the consequence of idolatry, is what keeps humans in thrall to the nongods of the world, dealing with sin has a more profound effect than simply releasing humans to go to heaven.

It releases humans from the grip of idols, so they can worship the living God and be renewed according to his image." - NT Wright, The Day the Revolution Began, Page 68

God meets us in that suffering and death on his way to the cross. And he rescues us from the spell of our idols. God frees us from our idolatry, a misplaced and counterfeit allegiance to a lesser god. We need to worship something and if our sin breaks our ability to worship God, we turn to counterfeits.

Without this liberation, we're slaves to our idols. After God reconciles us, we still want to retain our idols for what they give us, and because of that, we don’t want to easily give them up. Our shortsighted grasp misses what’s found on the other side of regeneration. Sometimes we can't see it until we're on the edge of the abyss, or more likely, descending into it. But when he catches us in our dissent, it's incredible. And we may, finally, see the light on the other side.

“He will swallow up death forever! The Sovereign LORD will wipe away all tears.

He will remove forever all insults and mockery against his land and people. The LORD has spoken!” - Isaiah 25:8 NLT

This is the basis of redemption — in contrast to tragedy — that ought to drive all Christians. But that tragedy is everywhere and threatens to distract us from what matters most. It's impossible for the tragic spiral to pull us into it, as both victims and perpetrators.

"The basis of things is not rational, it is tragic, and what Jesus Christ came to do was to put human life on the basis of Redemption, whereby anyone can receive the heredity of the Son of God and be lifted into the domain where He lives." - Oswald Chambers, Psychology of Redemption

Thankfully, redemption pins tragedy down.

“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” - Paul, the Apostle, Galatians 2:20

Let us choose the light, on the other side of tragedy and journey through the valley of darkness.

That is the life of Christ living through me.

“God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.

But supposing God became a man-suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person-then that person could help us.

He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God.

You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man.

Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man.

That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.” - CS Lewis, Mere Christianity