Not quite ready to follow Jesus yet?
Read on.
In the very first chapter of the very first book of the Bible is a very telling statement:
So God created human beings in his own image. In the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Genesis 1:27
The Master Craftsman creates us in His image. This is perfection! A complete, whole being existing in a state of perfect mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual well-being AND engaging in behaviors that promote the continuation of said state due to being created without blemish. At the beginning of creation, we were whole because He is whole. God created us out of His Goodness.
A. W. Tozer highlights the Goodness of God as:
“that which disposes Him to be kind, cordial, benevolent, and full of goodwill toward men. He is tenderhearted and of quick sympathy, and His unfailing attitude toward all moral beings is open, frank, and friendly. By His nature, He is inclined to bestow blessedness, and He takes holy pleasure in the happiness of His people. That God is good is taught or implied on every page of the Bible and must be received as an article of faith as impregnable as the throne of God. It is a foundation stone for all sound thought about God and is necessary to moral sanity...The goodness of God is the drive behind all the blessings He daily bestows upon us. God created us because He felt good in His heart, and He redeemed us for the same reason.”
The triune God, three in one, is a picture of wholeness and completion.
God is mentally whole: For just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9).
God is emotionally whole: God is Love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. (1 John 14:16b).
God is physically whole: [Jesus] will take our weak mortal bodies and change them into glorious bodies like his own, using the same power with which he will bring everything under his control. (Phillippians 3:21)
God is spiritually whole: For I am the Lord your God. You must consecrate yourselves and be holy, because I am holy. (Leviticus 11:44a).
And we were made In. His. Image.
But then.
Humankind didn’t make it through the third chapter of Genesis before sin entered the picture, and humans were whole no more.
Brokenness becomes the new state of existence.
We can see the deterioration of Emotional, Mental, and Spiritual Health immediately as Adam and Eve cover their nakedness from shame and run to hide from God. Their decision to desire fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil more than desiring an honest relationship with God resulted in disaster. In His Wisdom, God explained some of the repercussions to them: pain in childbirth, marital strife, arduous provisioning, and onerous work. Additionally, because of their debasement, He banned them from the Garden so that they could not also eat of the Tree of Life and live forever.
In one fell swoop, Adam and Eve went from complete and whole to broken and dejected.
Mentally, Adam and Eve knew the difference between good and evil and the agony of having to choose between them.
Emotionally, they faced fear, anxiety, and shame when they realized the magnitude of what they had done.
Physically, they encountered the terror of potential pain, illness, and death.
Spiritually, they experienced the anguish of being separated from God.
Yet, amazingly, despite the broken state of Adam and Eve God still loved them and desired the best for them.
Brokenness is something that we all understand. There is not a single one of us who walks this planet that does not exist in a state of brokenness. Some of us hurt on the inside, some on the outside. We see sadness, hurt, shame, oppression, poverty, abuse, anger, illness...we all know brokenness. No matter how “good” or how “bad” we are in our hearts or behaviors, we all will die. To quote Robert Bolt, “Death comes for us all; even at our birth—death does but stand aside a little.”
We know this state of brokenness is not God’s Perfect Design.
He designed us to walk in intimate relationship with Him in perfect wholeness. Man chose to desire other things more than God. And that is our sin, our shame, our downfall, and our commonality. We all choose to love other things more than Him. And so we choose brokenness.
But God, in His mercy, sent Jesus back into our brokenness to offer us a way out...a way back to the life of wholeness that all of us know we are missing and none of us knows how to attain.
And so Jesus came, wholly God and wholly man, to walk with us and live as we do, but without sin, so He could lay Himself down as a sacrifice, to pay the price for our decision to choose other things over God. As we see Jesus for the truth of who He is, we turn and trust in Him. When we do that, we make the decision that He will be the Lord and Savior of our lives, and we will actively choose to live as such (though we will continue to make mistakes and live in brokenness because we are still humans).
We then choose to pursue God’s Perfect Design and a deep relationship with Him by seeking to bring healing, hope, forgiveness, grace, and mercy to the world's brokenness by testifying to the truth of Jesus Christ. Not because we can ever earn our salvation, but because we know that no one could ever offend us, reject us, or hurt us more than we do when we choose anything other than Jesus, and so we are grateful.
This pursuit of God’s Perfect Design reminds us of our need for Christ every day because we realize it is something that we can’t earn with just behavior or obtain through hard work. Those things are good and right, but they can only get us so far. Only Jesus can take us all the way.