The promise…

To us (part 3)

Paul makes it clear in Ephesians 2 that we would never have come to belief in God’s promise of justification on our own. And what a pity if God had allowed that to continue, because we would never have experienced the goal of justification, which is finding ourselves, just as Abram did, revelling in God’s greatness – and not out of obligation either, but because we can’t help it. 

And why can’t we help it? It’s because “God, in his great love for us and in the riches of his mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions,” verses 4-5. We were totally dead, as “dead” as Sarai, Abram’s wife, who’d never been able to have children. But God brought Sarai’s reproductive capacity to life, so the two of them could experience for themselves what happens when God promises the impossible. 

Because that’s how God worked to make his greatness real to Abram. He brought the dead to life. And Abram was the first to experience that, making him “our father in the sight of God” – the father, that is, of all those who also experience “God giving life to the dead and calling things that are not as though they were,” Romans 4:17.  

Because that’s how God works with us to make his greatness real to us too: he produces a new life in us that we could never create ourselves, just like Sarai’s body couldn’t produce new life either. But in God’s mind he was calling her what she wasn’t yet – a mother – as though she was one already, because of his promise to her, in the same way that he calls us “justified” – the very thing we had no right to be called either – as though we are, and all because of what he promised us in his Son. 

And now we get to experience that promise coming alive, just like Abram and Sarai experienced God’s promise of a child coming alive for them. Bringing impossible promises to life is how God works, which in our case is the promise of justification, bringing a life dead to God to being alive with Christ. 

Justification is the birth of a new life in us, just like the birth of new life in Sarai, so that we find our selves revelling in God’s greatness, just like Abram did…(more on this tomorrow)