Theological Journal - April 14: Torrance Tuesday: Easter

“The resurrection . . . means that God has established a real bond between his reality and ours in this world. In Jesus Christ he has made his divine reality to intersect and overlap with ours, so that we in Jesus Christ may actually and truly know God and have communion with him without having to take leave of the realm of our own this-worldly existence” (Atonement: The Person and Work of Christ, 233).


Human sin, our heinous refusal to live in relationship to God but rather to live by ourselves, for ourselves, and by our own power, sundered the reality of God from the existence we tried to carve out for ourselves to live and rule in. Heaven and earth, the realm of God and the realm of humanity were meant to overlap and interlock with each other in an organic unity, open to and receptive of each other with free and open concourse between the two. Sin separated these realms and hardened by difference between them into impermeable boundaries. Or so we thought . . . hoped.

God never accepted our redefinition and hardening of the boundaries between his realm and ours though. He kept finding ways to surreptitiously and in disguise cross that boundary to establish his presence in a small family he called out of Babylon. God made this family a nation and through them himself found entry into our world as one of them to reclaim and restore his world to himself and his purposes. We resisted this unwanted divine incursion into or self-made world and rejected him finally and for good nailing him to a cross, dead and gone . . . Or so we thought.

The Sunday after we killed him and sealed him in his tomb, though, he was alive again! Better even than before we dispatched him. He regathered his followers, gave them his Spirit, sent them out to announce his resurrected presence and lay claim to the world he created that we hijacked from him, and we have not been able to get rid of him since. And never will.     

When God raised this Jesus from the dead and he appeared alive among us that served as a sign that this world and the flesh he created us as belong to him and are for him, are treasured and will be preserved by him through all eternity. He will live forever as one of us on this marvelous planet he created as habitation to call “home.” Thus, as Torrance writes, we “may actually and truly know God and have communion with him (in the resurrected Jesus) without having to take leave of the realm of our own this-worldly existence”!

 

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