Where the word ‘reconciliation’ or ‘reconciled’ is, you usually find the word ‘enemy’ or ‘enemies’ too. What is in view is the reconciliation of enmity. But by Christ’s cross he has not only reconciled men but also ‘things’. What does that mean? Are things, natural things, worlds, reconciled with God through the death of Christ?

We have been considering the Death and Resurrection of Christ in relation to God’s pronouncement in heaven that the repentant sinner who trusts wholly in Jesus Christ is righteous in God’s sight. The word ‘right’ is a legal and an exact word. You cannot have a comparative of right, nor a superlative of it. It does not make sense to speak of anything being ‘righter’, because nothing can be ‘righter’ or ‘rightest’. There is no comparison. If a sum is right it is right, and even the teacher cannot improve on that! Those that are declared righteous in God’s sight are accepted by him in Jesus Christ, not only through Jesus Christ. They are righteous with the very righteousness of Christ himself, because they are ‘in’ him.

That does not mean to say that guilty sinners, as soon as they have trusted in Jesus Christ, already live perfect lives, and are perfect in the moral, ethical, even spiritual sense. But, you see, God sees everything telescoped from eternity to eternity. All that he sees, all that he foresees that he will do, all that he purposes to do, he regards in eternity. For eternity is not elongated time, it is a different sphere – there is no past, present and future in eternity. All that God purposes to do is, as far as he is concerned, done. And what he says in heaven about a guilty, repentant and believing sinner, he purposes to do. But he declares it first. The boldness of it! Some of us would not dare to say what we were going to do until we had first tried to, and made sure that we could. But none of that with God! He declares, first of all, that this one he now pronounces, through Christ and in Christ, to be right – let me put it boldly, shockingly – in his sight is as right as Christ.

We have seen the ground of this declaration that God makes in heaven is not our faith; the ground of it is the death of Christ. It is not primarily because we believe that we are justified, but because Christ died. It is through the death of Christ that God comes to us and gives us the gift of faith, and says, ‘Here you are, use that, and believe.’

In chapter five, when we spoke of the forgiveness of sins, I quoted some words of Vincent Taylor, the New Testament scholar. Here is more of what he says: ‘The question, What is forgiveness? is less easy to answer than one might suppose, especially if one wants to relate the answer to the teaching of the New Testament. In modern theology the distinction between forgiveness and reconciliation is far from clear, and many would affirm that there is not any difference at all between them. Evidence for this statement can easily be found in current definitions of “forgiveness”.’ And he quotes the five scholars we have quoted already, each with a sentence. For example: ‘The full restoration of delicate personal relationships between friends or between parent and child is what is meant by “forgiveness”.’

Now, in the chapter on the forgiveness of sins I said that forgiveness is the removal of sins. They are removed by the death of Christ. Bearing the full penalty for men’s sins he takes them away from the sight of God. But there is another word in the Greek language which suggests a fuller meaning; not only the removing of the obstacle to friendship with God but the actual act of taking us back into his arms. It is the word katallagē, reconciliation.

Strictly speaking – if we want to be strict – when these men say that forgiveness is restoring and taking back, nothing less than reconciling, they are mixing up two words. The word they want is the word which is our subject here. It is reconciliation – restoration, if you like, but reconciliation is the Bible’s word; bringing someone back into friendship and fellowship, who has been out of it because of what they have done, because of their sins.

Reconciliation is mentioned in several passages of Scripture. In Romans 5:6-10 Paul says: ‘For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.’ Here is expressed both our ungodliness and our inability to help ourselves. ‘For scarcely for a righteous man will one die, yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die. But God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were (neither right nor good, but wicked) sinners (‘enemies’ of God, he says in a moment) Christ died for us. Much more then, being now justified by his blood (that is by his death), we shall be saved from wrath through him. For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled we shall be saved by his life.’

Enemies! This is all I want from this passage at the moment. We were not merely weak, not merely sinners, but enemies of God. That is why we needed to be reconciled to God, taken back through forgiveness into friendship and fellowship with God, by the blood of his Son. This is what the hymn says:

Jesus sought me when a stranger 

Wandering from the fold of God. 

He, to rescue me from danger, 

Interposed his precious blood.

Why are we enemies by nature? Because we have been infected by the enemy. God has an implacable enemy. Apparently when an angel sins – I suppose especially a great one, or a high one, a resplendent one in great authority, like Lucifer (so the Old Testament suggests, Is. 14, Ezek. 28) – he is unsaveable. There are many fallen angels, waiting in judgment (2 Pet. 2:4). Their leader, the Devil, is implacable and unsaveable. He is destined to burn and suffer torments in hell for ever and ever – the creation of God, a glorious creation of God gone wrong. And it was he who infected man with sin and made Adam a rebel like himself. Now we are all infected; and we are all by nature enemies of God. This is in our blood, our moral and spiritual blood. But we are not unsaveable!

God is able to save his chosen ones, the elect of men who have fallen into Satan’s clutches. It is not because they are not responsible, for Adam and Eve fell with their eyes wide open. They deliberately disobeyed God when he had given them everything good. It was a barefaced sin, the first sin, there is no doubt about that. We must not minimise its heinousness. Its heinousness rises to high heaven. But it was masterminded by Satan, the unsaveable enemy. Yet God has mercy on us and says, ‘I can save them from his clutches.’

But how can this be when they are tainted with his sin; when because of the sin of Adam, that open, barefaced sin, they partake of his nature and are in a sense, as wicked and sinful, as rebellious and bad as the Devil himself? How can God save men and women who have become like Satan himself, and are his children?

How could God do it? Only by thrashing the enmity out of them. Now, there is much more to it than this, but you cannot say everything every time. Let us stick to one point. He thrashes it out of them in the body of his dearly beloved Son, who never sinned and was never even faintly disobedient to his Father, let alone his enemy. He interposed his precious blood between an angry God and hell-deserving sinners.

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