“But now He has reconciled you by His physical body through His death, to present you holy, faultless, and blameless before Him” (Colossians 1:22 HCSB)
The death of Jesus changed everything for us, especially how we relate to God. We can see some of those changes in the verse above:
It reconciled us to God. We needed reconciliation because our relationship with him was completely broken; in fact we were God’s enemies (Romans 5:10). Jesus took the first move and dared to die for us before we even responded (Romans 5:8).
It made us holy before God. Holiness is associated with absolute purity and perfection; the angels worship God for his holiness (Revelation 4:8). And now that same perfect holiness applies to us, even when we don’t feel it. The truth is still true even when our emotions say otherwise. We have been made permanently holy in God’s sight, as it says in Hebrews 10:10: “We have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once and for all” (the word “sanctified” means “made holy”).
It made us faultless in God’s eyes. Satan, the Accuser (Revelation 12:10), tries to make us look at our faults and feel like failures who will never change. But God says our sins will never be held against us (Romans 4:8), we have been washed clean of all sin (2 Corinthians 6:11) and there is no condemnation for us ever again (Romans 8:1).
It also made us blameless. Paul repeats this thought in Ephesians 1:4: “For He chose us in Him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight.” Without even asking us, before we were even born, God chose us and decided to treat us as though we were totally without sin.
This was the only way we could ever have relationship with him; we could never make ourselves acceptable by our own efforts. So Jesus did everything that was needed to make us OK, and gave us his very own holiness and perfection – and it worked! We have now been made right with God permanently, as a free gift that we had nothing to do with. All we could do was to accept it. And the moment we did, we became his forever.
For reflection
1. How do you usually respond to feelings of accusation? What truths can you remind yourself of to silence the Accuser? (Revelation 12:11)
2. What would you say to someone who agrees that our past sins are forgiven, but believes that when we sin as Christians, our sins are still held against us by God until we confess them?
3. There are many ways of saying “reconciled to God”: we are his closest friends, we have returned to his loving arms, there is no barrier between us now and nothing can ever separate us again (Romans 8:38-39). God’s priority is clearly to be close to us. Spend some time with God reflecting on these ideas and receiving his love for you.
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