The more I learn about the love of Christ and the awesome nature of His grace, the more I am staggered with the thought of how much our sins are forgiven.
His grace toward us is His unmerited favour of love toward us, even when we hated Christ by our actions, hated His Father in Heaven and thumbed our noses and fists toward our God in Heaven. We by nature deserved nothing of His love and kindness, but the righteous anger and wrath of our God.
God could have wiped man off the face of the planet on the day Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden. However, God had a plan for the world. His plan was to send a saviour to the world to save us from the plight of sin and the full consequenses that sin ravished and wrought upon the world. Adam and Eve did not know the full extent of their seemingly miniscule act, in those moments on that single day. The full weight and ramifications soon were felt upon them as The Book of Genesis from the Bible so clearly portrays. Adam and Eve were first devastated with their loss of innocence and the full weight of their guilt lay on their back like a huge weight pinning them down by a weight too heavy to move. They had to face their God who came looking for them in the Garden of Eden as He did every day, teaching them how to live, act, speak and relate to each other. This day Adam and Eve tried to hide from God and hide themselves from their nakedness by putting leaves on themselves. Try as they may they could not hide from the all-knowing and all-seeing God. God found them, came to them and spoke to them with amazing love. Man and woman having turned their back on God but God still gave them love and not hate, vengeance or malice. He had a plan that was undergirded and prepared in love. But this love never once was to take away sin from the world to begin with. Adam and Eve were to live with the repocussions of sin, as horrible, messy and aweful it was to become. They were to feel the whole weight of guilt, see their sins take root, grow and bear ghastly fruit, but God still allowed it to enter the world and for mankind to receive the full brunt of their sins and evil nature. God never once thought of controlling Adam and Eve, however there were limitations to their sins and they needed to learn that sin always has ramifications and in their sins, and that in their sinfulness they were always to depend upon God for His mercies and help in a world that was soon to be full of wickedness. God had the only answer for sin, namely forgiveness in and through a saviour whom God the Father would send to the world in The form of man, even Jesus Christ. After what we call the "fall of man", when Eve took the fruit from the serpent Satan and gave some of the fruit to Adam, God rebuked Satan and said in Genesis 3:14-15 “Because you have done this, You are cursed more than all cattle, And more than every beast of the field; On your belly you shall go, And you shall eat dust All the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity Between you and the woman, And between your seed and her Seed; He shall bruise your head, And you shall bruise His heel. ”
From this time Adam and Eve knew that despite their sin, out of their seed (offspring) was someone predicted to defeat the Devil and sin through the bruising of the saviour of the world. That god predicted all this from the beginning, years ahead of the event, is nothing short of amazing. The prediction was that there would be a once and all answer for sin in the defeat of Satan as Jesus became the solution for our sins, having taken them and as Apostle Paul's book in the New Testament called Colossians says (Colossians 2:14,15) that our sins were nailed to the cross with Him.
Not only that yours and my sin was there upon Christ on the Cross of Calvary, but all the sin of humanity was upon the shoulders of Jesus on the cross. This sin, though, can not be fathomed or measured because we, in our finite brains and thinking can not estimate what the heights, lengths, depths and breadth of sin is in the eyes of a totally holy, totally righteous judge who is infinitely superior in mind and intellect than us, able to tell the future from the beginning. Jesus took upon Himself the total of all of mans disobedience to His Laws, commandments, ideals and path that we all should have trod that God laid out from the beginning and through His Word which is revealed to us in the Bible.
The world's sins, past, present and future until the time when Jesus will return to earth was all dealt with on the cross. From the sin of Eve and Adam right through to every human being on the planet the whole of the sinfulness of man in deed and thought, is all dealt with on the Cross. Even the works we should have done and didn't do, called "sins of omission", were all dealt with in Jesus as well.
Now, the act of God dealing with all the sins of the world for all time does not automatically confer forgiveness of the sins of the world. What I mean by this is that the act of Christ being the sacrifice for the whole world's sins does not automatically mean that we have forgiveness but that the world's sins are atoned for and that this forgiveness needs to be appropriated, or put simpler, taken as a gift from the gift-giver. This gift comes from the giver, namely God, and He offers salvation to the world through the death of His precious, Son, but we need to take up that wonderful gift of forgiveness and salvation. We need to receive this gift of forgiveness in order to be saved from our sins. We do this by asking Him for this forgiveness and accepting the work that God the Father has done through Jesus taking all of our sins on the Cross. And its all free!
