What follows is an entry from my journal. I delayed sharing it because I thought it might be too controversial. It is hard enough for us to accept God’s forgiveness, but to accept ourselves as perfect (in biblical language: righteous) feels like dangerous heresy! But as scandalous as it may appear, by his own actions, God has declared us righteous.
“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” -2 Corinthians 5:21
“For if, because of one man’s trespass, death reigned through that one man, much more will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness reign in life through the one man Jesus Christ. Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.” -Romans 5:17-19
This is not a polished blog post, just honest thoughts. I hope it inspires your own mediation on your redeemed perfection!
I am at home with who I am! Matters of the heart can take years to resolve, and the mind can have long since accepted something that the heart continues to ignore. I knew that I was forgiven. I got that. But now to see that I am perfect….wow! I am perfect. And so are you! There is no fatal flaw, no bug, no mistake in our beings. We are as we were meant to be, and we were meant to be godlike! I am safe because I am known and trusted. I’m trusted not based on my past behavior, but based on my true nature. Who I am is trustworthy! Who I am fits into who he is with perfect ease. There is no need to try to shove a square peg in a round hole, and no need for Jesus to pretend he’s us so that the Father can tolerate us. We are not righteous by a shell game, or by some substitutionary trick…we are righteous first by design, and second by redemption.
At creation, God made man and woman, and said that we were “very good”. He said that we were made in His image. We were his children. Yet at the fall we get this sense that there must be some mistake. The fact that Adam and Eve sinned means they must have had some flaw. Then Adam and Eve had children who had children who had children who had children, down through the line this sense of inadequacy continued. We believed ourselves to be inadequate, we acted badly, and then used our bad actions to prove our inadequacy, thus trapping us in the sinner’s catch-22. A good metaphor would be the common racist attitudes that many white people had (and perhaps still have) towards black people. We enslaved them because we decided they were subhuman, didn’t educate them because they weren’t worth it, and didn’t empower them because they were not smart enough. Then when these uneducated, unequipped people acted uneducated and unequipped, we used that as proof of the inferiority of their race. What many whites did to many blacks is what the cycle of sin has done to all of humanity. We sin because we believe we are damaged, imperfect, only human, then use the fact that we sinned as evidence of being damaged, imperfect, and only human. Our belief produces an action that proves the belief…but does that make it true?
With Jesus, we finally get some clarity! At the cross we see all of mankind failing Jesus. In killing Jesus religion sacrificed love to maintain control, politics did the necessary evil to maintain the status quo, the crowds who worshiped a hero gladly crucified a villain, and the radicals — the Jesus lovers, the sold out believers — ran and hid for cover. At the cross is the utter failure of humanity to do anything right! Surely, if nothing else, it once again proves our belief that we are inadequate, imperfect, broken? Surely this proves God made a mistake? And yet in our worst showing of all time, when humanity condemned our hope to death on a cross, the words “forgive them” and “it is finished” preceded a resurrection from the dead! And what did the resurrected hope do? He found his friends, empowered them, and let them loose to declare the forgiveness of sins and redemption of mankind to the ends of the earth! It turns out that even at our worst, God counts us worthy of the precious blood of Jesus! It turns out that while the fall distorted our understanding and distanced us in our hearts from knowing God, sin did not have the same affect on God! Even while our hearts and minds were in hiding because of our guilt and shame, God was ever loving us and valuing us according to the incredible worth he gave us at creation! If we were perfect then, we are perfect now! Sin did not change our nature, it only darkened our understanding!
In beginning to see this and accept this, I am finding freedom from self-suspicion. While religion promotes ruthless self-analysis as a means of rooting out sin, it turns out that finding oneself forgiven and redeemed restores innocence, and innocence is a much stronger power than self-suspicion! Forgiveness frees us from guilt so that we can enjoy God instead of hiding….and this is good! Discovering that there is nothing wrong with you enables you to make no more excuses, and to no longer assume the worst of yourself. Sin is not a fruit of my nature, only a fruit of a darkened mindset! As I feast on my true nature and the perfect fellowship I share with Jesus, I am unwittingly inoculating myself from the dangers of temptation. Childlike innocence is the greatest defense!
Stephen Fulton 