Why Jesus Came

Continued from here.

So, if Jesus did not come to make bad people good, what did he come for? To make dead people live! That is the good news that if we really grasped, we would experience joy and peace every minute of every day for the rest of our lives! (And, no, I am not there yet, either.)

God told Adam and Eve that they would die if they ate the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil. When they ate it, they did not physically die. However, they did spiritually die, and that is what Jesus came to undo.

From the moment Adam and Eve ate the fruit, their perspective shifted. Instead of seeing the world in alignment with God, they aligned their worldview with Satan, whose worldview is in direct opposition to God. Sadly, we have all inherited this skewed worldview, causing us to naturally behave in ways that are counter to God. Our problem is not that we are “bad.” The problem is that we are DEAD! This is why God told the Israelites through Moses to “choose life” rather than to “choose to be good:”

This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. ~ Deut. 30:19-20

Don’t be deceived – your default setting is death. If you do what comes naturally, you will consistently choose death over life. That’s the consequence of the Fall and why we live in such a broken world today. God gives us another option – to choose life, and He sent His Son to die for us to make this possible … not in our own strength but through the equipping of the Holy Spirit.

Continued here.

[Graphic: Cartoon of Grace looking through a lifesaver and saying, “Ur a Lifesaver.” Courtesy Bitmoji.]