4. Unity: The Plan of Redemption (2)

What is God's Plan for Redemption?

A Progressive Revelation

The Bible is a progressive revelation. If you skip the first half of any good book, you will have a hard time understanding the characters, the plot, and the ending. The New Testament is only completely understood when it is seen as being built upon the foundation of the events, characters, laws, prophecies, covenants, and promises of the Old Testament. It shouldn’t surprise us then that the New Testament gives us pointers that indicate the important role of the Old Testament. Passages such as Galatians 3:24 states, “The old law was given to us as a teacher to bring us to Christ so that we may be justified by faith” (see also Romans 15:4; 1 Corinthians 10:11; 2 Timothy 3:15). The New Testament points us to the Old Testament. In this manner all of Old Testament history was a teaching or training period to prepare mankind for the arrival of Jesus Christ and His role in the plan of redemption. Consequently, a proper grasp of the Old Testament has a very important purpose in understanding the overall theme of the Bible. It was a teaching or learning period for all of mankind.

What are some of the things we need to learn from that Old Testament period that covers the creation of the universe, mankind, and early earth history?

The Eternal Plan

The Bible begins with the God of the Bible, who was pre-existent before the creation of our physical universe.

We are told in the Bible that God had this plan of redemption before He ever created mankind (Ephesians  3:11; 1:4). Why would this be so? It has to do with the concept of “free will.” Free will simply means the ability to choose one’s own moral actions without any interference or compulsion. It makes logical sense that if God was going to create a being with free moral agency, a being that could choose to do right or wrong from its own volition, that God would have a plan in place as to how He would react or handle the result of mankind’s choices. The plan of redemption is God’s plan or reaction to the free moral choice of mankind to sin (break God’s) laws.

So why did God create man to start with, or even bother with the creation of a physical universe? We can not get inside the mind of God, but are restricted to what little He has revealed about Himself to His creation. What God has revealed is that He has purposed to have spirit beings in heaven that choose to love and worship Him out of their own choice. Before God created our physical universe, we see that He had created spirit beings (called angels) in another dimension (called heaven) that had chosen (free moral agents) at some point to sin against God. He subsequently cast them out of heaven (2 Peter 2:4, “…God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to pits of darkness, reserved for judgment”). It was after this, that He created this dimension (a physical universe) and spirit beings (us), and placed us inside physical containers (our bodies). Just as many computers are labeled with the famous “Intel Inside”, all of us should be labeled “Spirit Inside!” It is this spirit, created in the image of God, that separates and distinguishes mankind from the animal world (Genesis 1:27, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”). We are placed in these temporary physical containers in order to train our spiritual bodies to love, serve, and worship Him for His glory.

Our mortal containers restrict or limit our free moral actions completely to this dimension, the physical realm. God desires to see if we will choose to love Him, to worship and serve Him, while we are in our physical containers in our time on earth (Deuteronomy 8:2; 13:3, “…the Lord your God is testing you to find out if you love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.”). When our containers eventually die, the inevitable fate of all humans, our spirit will return to God and await His final judgment (Ecclesiastes 12:7, “then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.”; Revelation 20:13, “…and the dead were judged…according to their deeds.”). This will determine the eternal fate of you and me, whether we join God in His dimension (heaven) or are cast away from His presence (hell). It all depends on whether we live the kind of life here on earth that demonstrates our willingness to recognize Him as our Creator and love and serve Him while here on earth (1 Peter 1:17, “If you address as Father the One who impartially judges according to each one's work, conduct yourselves in reverent fear during the time of your stay on earth”; Acts 17:27, “so that they would search for God and perhaps grope for him and find him–though indeed he is not far from each one of us.”).

We additionally see that God uses the analogy of a parent to describe our relationship with Him, He is our Father, and we are His children (1 John 3:1, “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him.”). What do parents desire? – that their children demonstrate their love to them because they actually want to (out of their own choice) – not out of compulsion (because they are made to). God has made us in His image and this is effectively demonstrated in the love of a parent to a child. It is God’s will and desire to have a loving spirit-ual relationship with every spirit being that He has created (2 Peter 3:9, “…He is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.”), but that relationship must be defined in accordance with His character and nature.

Two Gods?

Some people have drawn the mistaken conclusion that there must be two Gods in the Bible. There is the God of the New Testament that is all love, joy, forgiveness, peace and happiness, while the God of the Old Testament is a harsh God of justice, punishment and wrath. [2]

Clearly, on the surface, we see that God seems to behave differently towards His creation in the Old Testament than He does in the New Testament, but is He really a different God? No. Consider a parent that lovingly disciplines a small child so that it will learn the things needed to be a productive adult. When my children were little, I, as their father, disciplined them as often as I thought they needed it. They rarely enjoyed it, and, on occasion, would remark, “Daddy, you are mean.” At that point in their lives I might have resembled that God of the Old Testament that appeared harsh toward His creation. But now that my children are grown up they have a completely different attitude toward “mean dad”. We have great relationship with our grown-up children on a completely different level than that of the growing up training period. That is what the New Testament is trying to tell us about the Old Testament period. As pointed out earlier, the Old Testament was a teaching and training period to prepare us for Christ. That included many disciplinary actions toward people and nations that often appear unnecessarily strident or harsh by later standards and behavior. God behaves differently in the New Testament, and today, toward His creation on the basis of spiritual maturity learned from the training of the Old Testament period. The God of the Old Testament and New Testament is the same God. “I the Lord do not change.” (Malachi 3:6).

The Nature of God

The character or nature of God is defined by the characteristic of holiness—the pure absence of any evil—“You are not a God who takes pleasure in evil; with you the wicked cannot dwell” (Psalms 5:4). John says, “God is light; in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). John is telling us that God is completely free from any moral evil – He is the essence of moral purity and goodness. The holiness of God is the foundation for His plan of redemption.

It is God’s holiness that perfects His attributes of omnipotence (infinite power), omniscience (perfect knowledge), and omnipresence (present everywhere). Imagine that you or someone you know had the attributes of omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. Would you love them? Or worship them? Not necessarily. What if they were evil, a Hitler or a Darth Vader? It is precisely God’s nature of holiness that makes all of His attributes perfectly good. It is His holiness that makes Him worthy of our praise, love, and devotion. I know this about God by observing His holiness in His interaction with His creation. Consequently, it creates within me a love for God and a desire to serve Him, and to be with Him as my spiritual Father.

“For the word of the Lord is right and true,...He loves righteousness and justice; The earth is full of his unfailing love”(Psalms 33:4-5, emphasis added). We also discover that God’s holiness is demonstrated to us in one of two aspects, His justice and His love. Again, “Righteousness and justice are the foundation of Your throne; Love and faithfulness go before You” (Psalms 89:14, emphasis added). All of our dealings with God are governed by these two aspects of God’s holiness.

God’s justice means that God will never treat mankind unfairly. We can trust His promises and we can trust His judgments and pronunciations (Deuteronomy 32:4; Job 8:3). We can count on the fact that what He says He will do, He will do (Isaiah 46:8-11). Likewise, if God pronounces a penalty or judgment, not only will it be fair and in the best interests of mankind, but we can be sure that He will follow up on His pronouncement. For example, sin is defined as the breaking of God’s laws (1 John 3:4) and God’s justice will not allow sin to just go unpunished.

A complimentary element of God’s holiness is His love for His creation. While His justice is fair and sure, it is administered in the context of His love. His love for His creation seeks to repair what mankind’s carelessness has destroyed by committing sin.

God repeatedly states that we are to be holy because He is holy. “Thus you are to be holy to Me, for I the LORD am holy; and I have set you apart from the peoples to be Mine” (Leviticus 20:25, emphasis added). God created us as spiritual beings (Genesis 1:26, “Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness…”) and wants to have a spiritual relationship with His creation. If we are holy we can then have the spiritual union that a holy God desires.

This forms the basis for the plan of redemption, God’s incredible plan of justice and mercy first demonstrated in the Old Testament. So, why was a plan to redeem mankind needed in the first place?