by Mako Kato
God has delivered us.* He has rescued us from darkness and brought us into the kingdom of His beloved Son. We can learn a lot from Moses and David, but their stories ultimately point us to the greatest story of deliverance: How God delivered us from bondage to sin through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Reading this passage we get a sense of the great power of Christ. It was through Him that we were reconciled and it couldn’t have been through anyone else. He is the image of the invisible God. In other words, He is God. In John 14:9, Jesus said, “Whoever has seen me has seen the father” (ESV).
God delivered us from our old way of life.
In Ephesians 1:7-10 it says: In Him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in him, things in heaven and things on earth. (ESV)
Christ fulfills the plan of God for His relationship with us. It was a plan that spanned generations. Throughout His plan God used people like Moses, who complained about not being good at speaking and people like David, who we talked about yesterday. Shady characters like Samson, Balaam, Rahab, and Bathsheba were all involved. In many cases we see God working despite the people He is using.
But this isn’t the case with Jesus, since He is God. In Jesus we see God delivering people not through flawed and weak characters, but through a powerful person. But this powerful person, God himself, “being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself and became obedient to death – even death on a cross!” (NIV)
Death on a cross was an excruciatingly painful thing, but Jesus did it out of obedience, because it was the only way to deliver us from the sin that used to rule our lives.
Like it says in Romans 3:23-24: For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. (NIV)
Like we talked about on Tuesday, God delivers us from evil. I appreciate those times when God has delivered me from difficult situations, but the most important thing for us as Christians is that God delivered us from sin. We, as Christians are a new creation in a relationship with a God who loves us. We used to be alienated from God, but Christ reconciles us to Him. Hooray!
*The Greek word translated as “rescued” in the NIV in this passage is the same word (ruomai) which we looked at on Tuesday.