- Overcomer Literature Trust
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
THE CHASM BRIDGED
By Ruth Paxton
God and God’s first man enjoyed sweet and intimate communion until they were separated by sin. How could this great, impassable chasm which sin had made between God and us be bridged? From the very nature of the case we could do nothing, even had we wanted to, for sin had closed all possible access to God. Clearly, if anything was to be done, God would have to do it.
But what would God do? Adam’s sin presented a terrific problem, one which not only affected God’s personal relationship to us but His relationship to the whole universe, it even affected His own personal character.
Adam’s sin was spiritual anarchy; it was resistance to God’s authority; disobedience to God’s command; rebellion against God’s law. How would God treat sin? Would He punish it? Or would He pass over it? If God failed to deal righteously with such a flagrant case of disobedience and disloyalty how could He maintain order through obedience to law in any other part of His universe?
But Adam’s rebellion created an even greater problem. By it God’s holiness had been outraged; His righteousness denied; His goodness doubted; His word disbelieved; His command disobeyed; His love spurned. Surely such treatment deserved drastic action. Why did He not then and there abandon Adam and Eve utterly and leave them and their posterity to the consequences of their sin?
He did not because He could not. “God is love”, and “love never fails”. God’s love is an everlasting love which nothing can quench, not even sin. Terrible as sin is, it is not powerful enough to defeat God’s purpose in our creation. We were created not only by God but for God. We were made for fellowship with God and for ultimate sonship. Apart from a living, loving relationship with us God could never be satisfied. God, who is love, could not cast away the sinner in his sin and still be love. The claims of God’s love must be met.
But “God is light” and “in him is no darkness at all”. As light cannot fellowship with darkness, so holiness cannot commune with sin. An holy God cannot have intimate relationship with a sinner. God and sin cannot dwell together. The claims of God’s holiness must be satisfied as truly as the claims of His love.
How would He satisfy the claims of both His love and His holiness? His holiness must condemn sin and command the sinner to depart. His love must open its arms to the sinner and bid him come. An holy God could not tolerate sin, a loving God could not turn away from the sinner. God could not desert the sinner but what should He do with the sin? God’s attitude toward sin would reveal His true character quite as much as His attitude toward the sinner. What would God do that would be consistent with His holiness and conciliatory to His love, which would mercifully and yet righteously bridge that awful chasm between Himself and us?
A perfect reconciliation was brought about within God’s being by a bringing together of His holiness and His love by which the claims of each were satisfied. God’s holiness and righteousness compelled Him to pronounce the curse upon the serpent, the man, the woman and even upon the earth. God had said, “ For when you eat of it you will surely die”. God’s word is true and is from everlasting to everlasting. God’s righteousness compelled Him to carry out His judgment upon sin.
But God’s love put an exquisite rose in the midst of the thorns. Right in the very heart of the pronouncement of that awful curse recorded in Genesis 3 v14-19 is that gracious, wondrous promise of salvation through a Saviour. Genesis 3 v15 reads, “And I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers: he will crush you head, and you will strike his heel”. God’s holiness and love are melted together in this precious promise and out of this golden crucible emerges the Cross of the Lord Jesus Christ, and stretches itself across the impassable chasm sin has made between God and us. The reconciliation was affected through the self-provided, suffering reconciliation of God in Christ. “Mercy and truth are met together, righteousness and peace have kissed each other.” Thus the conflict in the divine Being itself was dissolved.
Before Adam and Eve left the garden of Eden the promise was made of a way of salvation for the whole human race which had been plunged into moral and spiritual ruin through sin. It was not our way but God’s, salvation through a Saviour.
Did Adam’s and Eve’s sin take God by surprise, and did He have to think out a way of escape for us after the fall? Here we come to the very perfection of the infinite grace of God. May the Holy Spirit grant each of us spiritual understanding to “grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge”. No, Adam’s sin did not take God by surprise, nor was God’s way of redemption an after-thought. God knew even before the foundation of the world and the creation of man the sad and tragic devastation sin would work in the human race. God had anticipated the fall and was ready for it.
The Cross which was to bridge the chasm made by sin was set up in love in the dateless eternity of the past before it was set up in promise in Eden or in history on Calvary. The atonement for our sin made visible, effectual and historical on Calvary, was wrought out in purpose and in principle in the heart of God in the dateless past.
In Revelation 13 v8 we read, “All the inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast - all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world”. In Ephesians 1 v 4, “For He chose us in Him before the creation of the world, to be holy and blameless in His sight”. In Acts 2 v23, “He was handed over to you by God’s set purpose and foreknowledge”, and in 2 Timothy 1 v9, “Who has saved us and called us to a holy life - not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time”. What can these words mean but that in the counsels of God, in the eternity of the past, the awful tragedy in Eden was foreknown and that, then and there, the wondrous plan of salvation through the Son’s redemptive work was formed by which God-in-Christ should reconcile a lost, sinning race to Himself?
The Bible is the Book of Redemption, its one theme from the beginning to the end is salvation through a Saviour. In Luke 24 v27 we read, “And beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself” and in Luke 24 v44, “He said to them, ‘This is what I told you while I was still with you, everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and in the Psalms”.
All through the Law, the Psalms and the Prophets, God is unfolding to us His plan of salvation through a Saviour. By the sacrifices of the Old Testament He foreshadows the one supreme Sacrifice. By pen pictures and prophetic promises He foretells Him who is “The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”.
The story of His life with the record of its words and works, His death, resurrection and ascension as recorded in the gospels, His doings as continued in the history of the Acts, the deeper revelation of Himself as the living, victorious, glorified Lord in the epistles and the promise and prophecy of a coming King in the Revelation, all have but one underlying purpose, to reveal Him, not as the founder of a new religious order, nor as the teacher of moral principles, but to reveal Him as the Saviour of all. The Father announced the coming of His Son as the coming of a Saviour. In Matthew 1 v21 we read, “She will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name JESUS, because he will save his people from their sins”. In Luke 2 v 11, “today in the town of David a Saviour has been born to you, he is Christ the Lord”.
Jesus Christ did not come only to teach or to preach or to heal, He came to SAVE. Jesus Christ came for but one purpose which He Himself states in these words in Luke 19 v10, “For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost”.
He came to bridge the chasm which sin had made between God and us. No one else and nothing else could do this.
From ‘Life on the Highest Plane’.