II Corinthians 5 ~ Trying To Become What We Already Are
Just as surely as the disobedience of Adam made us sinners, the obedience of Jesus made us righteous. We need to be as familiar with the scripture in Romans 5:19 as we are with John 3:16.
Many of us don’t fully realize what took place when we were born again. In The Other Half of the Story, I reiterated the desperate situation Adam’s sin had left us in,
Through one (Adam) many were made sinners,
and began to turn the focus on the greater part of the story….
Through One (Jesus) many will be made righteous!
We are familiar with the fact that our sins were forgiven, but our salvation went much deeper than that.
We are not just forgiven for sin’s fruit, we’ve been delivered from sin’s root….our sin nature. No longer ‘born this way’, we are now born again with another kind of nature. Just like Abraham who “believed God and it was reckoned unto him as righteousness”, our believing in God’s Son has resulted in our being counted righteous.
He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. II Corinthians 5:21
I said in The Fruit of Disobedience concerning man’s regret after the fall, “I imagine they wanted things to go back to how they had been originally…back to the time when they were first created, back to a place of no shame, back before the knowledge of good and evil…Yes, I’m sure they wanted to go back to how it had been before the fall.” I was overjoyed to realize that because of what Jesus has done, that is exactly what has happened! Jesus has recovered for us what Adam lost…our original image and likeness. We are again created (re-created) in the image and likeness of God.
….put on the new self, which in the likeness of God has been created in righteousness and holiness of the truth. Ephesians 4:24
We have a new man, a new self…and he is righteous and holy.
I was beginning to realize that I had fallen for yet another of the lies Eve had fallen for. The serpent had tempted Eve with the ultimate deception. Eating of the forbidden tree, he told her, would make her like God. Yet, she had already been created in His very image and likeness. It suddenly dawned on me that, like Eve, I too had been attempting to become something I already was.
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