Life

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I shall today start the vein of finding all the things which Jesus is to us, either through statements of the apostles in their epistles, or through statements from Jesus Himself (e. g. “I am the vine”). The first book I read with this perspective was Matthew. Now, this is a book which tries to prove that Jesus really is the Son of God through presenting the prophecies that had been coming since the Garden of Eden. To be honest, there were not a lot of statements made by anyone about who Jesus is for us, who are His church. But one certainly gets the feeling that Jesus really is the Son of God after reading Matthew. (Alright, so Jesus is the Son of God regardless of how we feel about it, but you know what I mean.) Maybe that doesn't seem like much, but being the only begotten Son of God truly is the single most important aspect of Jesus Christ. Why? Because in Him, God climbed down from Heaven to save us earthlings the only way we can be saved. 

God created the human. When the first humans ate of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they incurred a humanly inseparable gulf between God and man. Suddenly, because sin and self-love had entered in, man could no longer commune with God the way Adam and Eve had been used to. So our first instinct is to measure up to God's standard ourselves in order to reclaim that communion enjoyed by the first humans, correct? But we never can, because of the nature of eternal life, and eternal death. 

Eternal death is merely a separation from God. When we are separated from Him, sin is the natural outcome. But sin is not the root of eternal death. Eternal life can come only from God. Anything apart from Him is doomed to failure and death because He is the only Life in the universe. By Him all things were made, and by Him all things consist. How can life be imparted to a person by mere actions of right, when the whole man is wrong by separation from the Life? It is the syndrome of the young rich man, who insisted to our Lord that he had kept all the commandments from his youth. But it was not enough. Nothing short of complete surrender could grant him the life he sought. If we are to believe him that he had indeed kept all the commandments, he was still yet not good, because he had not surrendered and become indwelt by the only Good One of everything. 

This is why the Son of God is the most important of all the things which Jesus is to us. For no one else could impart the Life which we so earnestly desire, and can never attain on our own wrongful foundation.