LS-34-The Need Of Reconciliation

The Need Of Reconciliation God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.--2 Corinthians 5:19.

What was the need of it? Why should the world be reconciled to God? Why not allow the world to follow its natural instincts? Because God is the one source of goodness, and through sin men had cut themselves off from the supply. "There is none good, but One, that it God," Jesus said, and we cannot be good except as we are in harmony with Him. Sin breaks the harmony; it disturbs the relationship between God and the soul. "How can any one be good who distrusts God, the one spring of goodness, who is afraid of God, who is hiding from God, who hates God?" asks James Denney. "To do wrong gives us a bad conscience, and a bad conscience paralyses the moral nature. We know this even in our relations one to another. The child who has violated his father’s will does not wish to meet his father, or to look him in the face. There is something in his heart he wishes to hide. But his whole moral health, strength and happiness depend upon his having no secrets from his father; they depend, in fact, on his sharing with the father the common life of the family, without impediment or restraint. By this wrong act he has cut himself off from this, and till he overcomes it he is morally crippled. He fears his father, for he knows he must disapprove of what he has done; he distrusts him, for he very possibly does not know that though his father’s love has been wounded by the wrong he has done, it is great enough to bear his offence and to love him through it; and if he fears and distrusts and hides long enough, he is likely, at last to hate. All this admits of easy and exact application to the sinner’s relation to God. The bad conscience means definitely the sense of being wrong with God-of being estranged from Him by what we have done, yet unable to escape from Him, at once alienated and answerable. It is the fundamental truth with which we have to deal, that a bad conscience, or the sense of sin, induces moral paralysis. It disables the moral nature on every side. It dulls moral intelligence. ... It impairs even the power to repent, so that the more we need to sorrow for our sin with a sorrow which reaches the depths of our nature with healing pain, the less such sorrow is in our power. But, above all, it relaxes and ultimately destroys the nerve of moral effort."

Here, then, is the need of reconciliation. To remove the sense of guilt, to renew the sense of loving relationship with the Father, to dispel fear, and to restore the capacity for moral effort-this is the work of the Mediator between God and man-the man Christ Jesus.