Salvation Comes From God
Life or Death is in the power of the choice!
There are two eternal destinies to which the eternal souls of mankind choose to spend their eternity by either choosing life or death. We are able to live physically without choosing God, but we will be making choices to destroy ourselves physically. The reality is if we are choosing not to choose God we are choosing Satan and his wages...his payment for being his minion is death. Though you may be alive presently, you can not live on his wages and you will begin to die physically and of course you are already dead spiritually.
We all start out in this life as babies who carry the bent toward sin and death. We will all carry this to our grave unless … unless there is a Savior, a Redeemer who is willing to take our punishment for the sins we have committed. We do, and his name is Jesus, He is our Savior. He is God, come in the flesh to take our punishment of death and save us from our sins and from the penalty of our sins.
As a means to clarify my previous statement, we are not punished for having the bent toward evil, but because of that bent we should choose evil. That is what we will be punished for.
Salvation begins, only after you have reached an understanding that you are doomed, and that there is a Savior waiting on your acceptance of Him. Though the purchase price has been paid; it is an advance payment waiting on you to claim it. As it begins to dawn on you that there is hope, that life doesn’t have to be meaningless; and you make your choice to accept the sacrifice Jesus made in your behalf, you begin to live!
Life will take on new meaning, life will be something to look forward to, and life will now be eternal instead of being over at the grave.
Genesis chapter 15 lays out the covenant God made with Abraham for atonement for sin. God appears to Abraham in a vision and gives him a message.
God said, “I am your shield” and “I am your great reward”. If we were to break this done a bit, it would look like this … I am your protection and your treasure. What difference did this make to Abraham to have this declaration of God? First of all, when the Word of the Lord comes to someone; it is to be shared. Abraham, as the messenger of God, was a prophet of God. Secondly, Abraham was a part of mankind; and this entire chapter deals with the sin nature of mankind and the redemption process that God had planned.
Abraham showed his humanity by thinking of passing the blessings on to his household, but God had a much bigger plan in store for him. God plainly showed Abraham, who was to benefit from this declaration that was given to him. It was to be his children. God began to tell Abraham all that He had done for him. God said, “I have separated you from your land and your people, and brought you to a new place and given to you as an inheritance”. This land was to be a place where Abraham’s children could serve the Lord without the influences of the wicked neighbors. (Some of the details needed worked out and would be in God’s own good time!)
The meat of this passage now follows as Abraham, following God’s instructions, takes different kinds of animals and divides them laying them in an organized fashion. This most certainly would have created a trail of blood as the life-blood flowed from the animals and mingled in a pool.
This was a sight that Abraham was never going to forget because of its significance, and while he waited on God to make the next step; Abraham maintained the purity of the sacrifice by not allowing any external contaminations to take away from the pure sacrifice. Abraham had birds swooping to get their own piece of that tasty meat which he chased away while he waited. These birds could be compared to the devil as he tried in vain to get between the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the Father making it impure and thus ineffective.
The sun began to go down, and Abraham in his humanity began to become sleepy as God began to reveal Himself in this new and remarkable way. It was as if the wickedness of the world had overtaken the light and extinguished it altogether as an unnatural darkness swept across him.
As God began His discourse with Abraham, He prophetically spoke of Abraham’s children being servants in a strange land and being set free when the time was right. He spoke of the people of that land being judged for their sins, and Abraham’s children inheriting that land from the hand of God.
The smoking furnace that Abraham saw was representative of the suffering Abraham’s descendants would face, while the burning lamp would portray the great deliverance by which they would be delivered. This has a two-fold meaning, one as in the children of Israel being delivered from Egypt, and two as in we who have been grafted into Abraham’s lineage have lived for many years in bondage to the prince of this world and have received our freedom through Jesus Christ. This type of covenant could only be broken through one party not going through with his or her end of the covenant, which would require his/her death as the perpetrator of this broken promise.
Abraham is considered the prophet of the Lord and the father of all who have faith. Through this kind of representation we see from him we can understand that he is representing both God and mankind. In a nutshell, this covenant states that if God doesn’t keep up His end of this covenant, He will die as part of that agreement; on the other hand, God is saying, that because no amount of mankind will ever be “good enough” as a sacrifice of death for failing in this agreement, He (God) would die for that scenario as well.
This covenant was fulfilled in Jesus Christ who is God and man both, and because man failed in his part of the agreement, offered up Himself as God on behalf of mankind. It is critical that we recognize both the humanity and the divinity of Jesus and understand just what He came to do, for how can we appreciate His sacrifice on our behalf unless we understand the workings of this covenant and what was required for sin.
The only way to atone for the sin of humanity was for a holy God to offer Himself as a holy sacrifice for an unholy people. It is clear, mankind had nothing to offer for its own redemption. As this plays out in our lives, we have salvation by our faith in the grace of God which is available through Jesus Christ because of His offering.
Genesis 15:1-21
Romans 4:16
Romans 5:1,2
Romans 6:23
