Reunion with God

Good Morning Living Word. It is a good day to be in the house fo the Lord,and I’d like to say that we are still celebrating the fact that our Savior lives, amen! We certainly celebrated it last week, but we remember that He is alive all the time, not just on Easter,and we are here to celebrate a risen savior. This morning I want to swap things up on us a little bit and start a new series that we’re going to call “Because He Lives”

I was watching a show one time, and the premise for the characters was what would they do if they only had 24 hours to live, and then went through all sorts of things, one partied, one ought flashy things, one tried to go back to people they were estranged from and correct mistakes from the past, etc......./but the point that I want to make is that this whole show was built on the premise that if you KNEW that, north thought it, not said it, but REALLY believed that you had a shortened amount of time left, that it would somehow lend a fervency to your actions. That you wouldn’t waste time on frivolities, that you would be intentional in doing the things you always wanted or especially, in doing the things that matter.

I want to propose the premise for the next 4 weeks of this series, that when we say that we serve a Risne Savior, that it is not just a phrase, it’s not just something we say, it is a fact that we serve a risen savior who has defeated sin, death, hell, and the grave, and is right now at the right hand of God as our intercessor. If we TRULY believe that, it should affect how we act. Much like those people who were lent fervency to their actions by knowing they were going to die, that we, knowing that our God is alive, that it should change our priorities and outlook on life.

So that Raises the Question what should change if we act like we believe that He Lives?? The first thing that I want to discuss today is our Reunion with God.

Salvation

Certainly when we talk about our reunion with God, the first place our minds go is salvation. When we begin to interact with the results of Christ’s work, this is the foremost. It all starts here. It was foretold for generations, most prominently in the book of Isaiah, and offered to all through God’s chosen people, even to the point of Jesus’s time on the cross (Luke 23:42). However, our general understanding of salvation, as we ought to think of it, may be quite limited.

Luke 23:42 ESV

And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Freedom From or Freedom To?

When we think about Salvation, “Due to the New Testament’s frequent parlance of the term ‘salvation,’ our general thought process surrounding salvation has been heavily guided in a single direction—that is, we think of salvation chiefly as deliverance from eternal damnation. And we would not be entirely wrong to think of it as such.

We would not be entirely correct either. The earliest understanding of salvation was actually thought of as ‘freedom from limitation.’ What’s interesting is that this does not necessarily mean freedom from one place. It can also mean access to a place, in which we were not previously permitted. Like much of Christianity, salvation shouldn’t be thought of as “freedom from” as much as it should be thought of as ‘freedom to’” (I. Howard Marshall, et al., ed. New Bible Dictionary, 3rd ed. [Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1996], 1049).

Philippians 3:20 ESV

But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ,

Reunion More than Deliverance

The weekly text tells of the immediate happenings after Christ’s death:

Matthew 27:50–51 ESV

And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit. And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split.

Matthew’s account of the Gospel tells us that the very first thing to happen at Jesus’s final breath was the removal of separation. Of course, we must consider the conquering of death (also displayed in verse 52 of this passage). It is an essential element of salvation. But it is not the foremost. The foremost aspect of salvation is not deliverance, but reunion. Sure, we are free from death, and we are free from hell. More importantly, though, we are free to walk with God once more.

Early church leader Clement of Alexandria wrote, “Wherefore the greatest and chiefest point of the instructions which relate to life must be implanted in the soul from the beginning—to know the eternal God, the giver of what is eternal, and by knowledge and comprehension to possess God, who is first, and highest, and one, and good. … For ignorance of Him is death; but the knowledge and appropriation of Him, and love and likeness to Him, are the only life” (Revelation 21:8). Fellowship with and knowledge of God is life eternal (Clement of Alexandria, “Who Is the Rich Man That Shall Be Saved?,” in AnteNicene Fathers, vol. 2 [Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Company, 1885], https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0207.htm). Removal from hell is not eternal life; it is merely an escape from the second death.

Salvation represents for us the final undoing of humanity’s misdeeds. Jesus, who is called the second Adam

1 Corinthians 15:45–49 ESV

Thus it is written, “The first man Adam became a living being”; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. But it is not the spiritual that is first but the natural, and then the spiritual. The first man was from the earth, a man of dust; the second man is from heaven. As was the man of dust, so also are those who are of the dust, and as is the man of heaven, so also are those who are of heaven. Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we shall also bear the image of the man of heaven.

(1 Corinthians 15:45–49), was all that the first Adam was meant to be during his life. Where Adam was given the chance to have a close relationship with God and squandered it, Jesus passed that chance down to us. The inheritance that was meant to be ours through Adam became ours through the work of Jesus. The curtain of the temple was torn, and God’s presence was no longer found in a place of limitation, accessible only to the select few once a year but in all places, for all true worshippers.