The title to this post may seem like a silly question, especially this Easter weekend. Christ came to forgive our sins, to give us eternal life, to raise us from the dead and dozens of other wonderful things. But how does the coming and living and dying and rising of Jesus relate to God's ultimate purpose for creating us? We saw in my last post as Paul began to explain the gospel of Christ to the idol worshipping, religiously pluralistic inhabitants of Athens, that God makes each of us and sustains our lives and gives us everything we have for this one purpose, that we would seek him. That is, that we would believe that to know God and to be known by God, to live in a relationship of love with him is the best thing that could happen to us. He made us so that our our highest joy, our greatest delight would be him, alone. All other pleasures would only be pleasures because we experience them as the fruit of his love for us and not because we love these other pleasures more than him. The Psalmist expresses this purpose in Psalm 73:25-26, "Whom have I in heaven but you? Earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever."
Anyone who is paying the least attention to their own heart, to the things they desire and love will immediately recognize a problem. The first thing we see is that I cannot honestly say what the psalmist says. I have desired many things other than the God who made me. I spent over 20 years of my life hardly even thinking about God, let alone desiring him more than anything else in the world. Even now when I say that is what I want, I don't always live that way. I prefer all kinds of things to God on a regular basis.
Here is the problem that I and every other human being has. God made us to seek Him. Therefore, to not seek God with all my might is a sin of the highest proportion. It is, in fact the chief of all sins and the root from which all sin flows. (You can read Romans 1:18 through 3:20 to see Paul's extensive argument to that end.) Thus, I need to be forgiven for not loving God, glorifying God, delighting in God, desiring God, etc. But also, I need a new heart. I need new desires. I need a power that is able to overcome my resistance to seeing God as the greatest treasure in the universe so that I will love him most of all and seek him as I ought. The simple fact is, I am not able to love God.
So what Christ has done is this. He, from the womb, always loved God, sought God and desired God above all other things. He perfectly obeyed God's purpose for human beings. Then he willingly gave up his life on that cross, bearing all of God's wrath against every believing sinner for not seeking God as we ought. As Peter says in his first letter (3:18), "Christ died for sins, once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring us to God." Christ died to make us fit for God. His death obtains pardon, forgiveness for our many and great sins and his perfect obedience is credited to our account so that we are perfectly righteous in God's sight. We are, on the basis of what Christ has done, through faith alone, justified before God, to use the Bible's words (Romans 3:21-31).
But none of this would matter to us if not for the second great fruit of Christ's work. Think with me for a moment. If a person whom you do not like, who has treated you in ways you do not like and whose personality you find offensive says to you, out of the blue, "I forgive you. I plan on spending all my time with you so we can be best friends forever." How will you feel? How will you react? You will be offended that he would "forgive you." You would have no interest in being his BFF. This is our condition apart from the work of Christ in relation to God. It is not simply that we do not love God more than everything else; we actually hate God in our natural condition. We are his enemies. The chief proof of this fact is what we did to God when he showed up in the person of Jesus Christ. We killed him.
So, the second great fruit of the work of Christ is the coming of the Holy Spirit, who gives to us a new heart, who glorifies Christ to us, that is, he causes us to see the beauty and wonder and glory of the Triune God so that we now want him, we now love him, we now seek him. Not perfectly in this life because we still have remaining sin. But, as God promises in the prophet Ezekiel, (36:26-27), "And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statutes and be careful to obey my rules." God's greatest commandment is that we love him supremely. This we being to do from the moment of spiritual birth and by the Spirit we will do this perfectly in the new heavens and the new earth.
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