In his book Written In Blood, Robert Coleman tells the story of a little boy whose sister needed a blood transfusion. The doctor explained that she had the same disease the boy had recovered from two years earlier.

Her only chance for recovery was a transfusion from someone who had previously conquered the disease. Since the two children had the same rare blood type, the boy was the ideal donor.

"Would you give your blood to Mary?" the doctor asked.

Johnny hesitated. His lower lip started to tremble. Then he smiled and said, "Sure, for my sister."

Soon the two children were wheeled into the hospital room--Mary, pale and thin; Johnny, robust and healthy. Neither spoke, but when their eyes met, Johnny grinned. As the nurse inserted the needle into his arm, Johnny's smile faded. He watched the blood flow through the tube.

With the ordeal almost over, his voice, slightly shaky, broke the silence. "Doctor, when do I die?'


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When you look around and see evil, pain, and death – do you ever ask “Is this the way things were meant to be?”

Ever consider the concept of paradise? Heaven? Seems like every culture has some legend or theory about paradise – about a better life later on. Doesn’t that suggest that maybe humans are programmed to reject contentment with our defective existence here?

The very existence of good and evil, of right and wrong, point to some outside origin. Where else would we get these ideas? C.S. Lewis once wrote:
“My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust… Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creature with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.”

So we live in a world that’s messed up. You get that. I know it, too. We recognize the wrong in ourselves whether we call it evil, or sin, or dysfunction, or imbalance. If you and I are all alone in this crazy world, then there’s nothing much to do but cry. But what if there truly is a God, then what?

Could it be that the legends around the world – about paradise, about divine supernatural – could they be real? Can we track back to the beginning of what humans once knew about God?

We’re faced with this idea. Getting back to God, getting “at one” with him. The question is how?

But before we can get that, we have to work out what went wrong. If we once knew God intimately, that knowledge could have trickled down through thousands of years of human legend. Sometime, long past, humans knew God. Now we don’t. What happened?

Now some people read about where sin started (see Genesis 3, below) and say that Adam and Eve broke some arbitrary law, and so were punished by God and expelled from his presence. But this very legal perspective makes the solution very legal too—that in order to get back to God we just have to let him repair our legal position so we can get accepted back. So cut and dried.

But look closer. I think the story is talking about much more than just disobeying a law. It’s about a crisis of distrust that involves the shattering of an intimate relationship.

In the story, the snake insinuates that God can’t be trusted. That God is a liar. That God is preventing freedom and self-development and individuality. The issue is over who is to be believed—God or the Serpent.

The damage done to the human—divine relationship is poignantly illustrated when God goes looking for the pair in the garden and they hide from him, admitting they are now afraid. It’s a tragic result of misplaced trust and deliberate rejection of truth.

the sin problem
I remember seeing a movie poster advertising one of Stallone’s films called COBRA. The slogan read: Crime is a disease. Meet the cure. Maybe a version of that slogan would fit well here: Sin is a disease. Meet the cure, Jesus.

So what is sin? One translation of 1 John 3:4 says: Sin is lawlessness. What does that make you think of? Lawless? Outlaws...lawless frontier towns? Bandits? Westerns? The fastest gun in the West?

Why were Adam and Eve lawless? Because they just woke up one day and decided to go out and disobey God? Or because of their inner attitude?

Lawlessness speaks of an inner attitude, a way of thinking and living that is out of harmony with the standard of conduct and behaviour that the law expresses. There’s a definition in the holy bible that can help us here: “Whatever is not of faith is sin.” (Romans 14:13.)

So what’s faith? Faith is trusting God, having confidence in him.

And the opposite of faith? Distrust, not having confidence in God. So this definition comes out something like: sin equals not trusting God.

Sin is that antagonistic attitude, that spirit of rebellion that separates us from what is good. We have gotten away from God, built up a barricade, and like spoilt children we refuse to come back. Even though he’s the only one who can really heal us. So in desperation, God broke through that barricade and came to us, so we’d allow him to take us home again. To get back with us. To get that relationship back again.

God wants to know you, like he used to. He wants to be at one with you. In unity with you. In a relationship with you.

He wants at-one-ment.

At-one-ment
Meaning? Atonement really means at-one-ment. Being at one, in harmony. It’s a “made-up” word, all run together, as the rather free writers of the sixteenth-century who translated the holy bible were fond of doing. It originally meant “to reconcile”. It keeps the old pronunciation of “one”, as we also do in “alone” (all-one) and “only” (one-ly). But is really is the word for “one”.

But instead of just unity, this word has morphed into a description of systems which view salvation as the result of legal adjustment of the sinner’s standing before God, or some transaction between humans and God in which compensation is effected, punishment cancelled, and anger propitiated.

We use atonement most commonly in its new sense—you atone for wrongdoing by trying to provide compensation or payment. But we need to recognize that the word atone did not originally have this meaning.

Unfortunately a lot of believers misunderstood this. Ancient bible history shows us how the Israelites a ceremonial sacrificial system designed to explain the process of restoring harmony—the atonement. But soon God was complaining that they completely misunderstood. Again and again God objected to their “meaningless offerings,” (Isaiah 1:13 NIV) because the worshippers believed that they were set right just by fulfilling specific rituals.

But if you were God, would you want people to just blindly perform rote customs to honor you? Or would you want real friends, who did things because they loved you? Exactly. And God’s the same way. He wants love and company.

So God rejected mechanistic worship, instead pleading for understanding and true relationship. God was different than other pagan gods or idols. He wanted more than just sacrifice—he wanted relationship, understanding, recognition of meaning. He wants true worship – from the heart.

Atonement.

We have got to rescue this beautiful word. It describes what Jesus came to achieve—the one-ness of all Creation, the re-uniting of human beings back to God. This is how we can get back to knowing God.

What do I need most? Forgiveness, yes – but even more? I need to be changed. I need to transform from a rebellious enemy of God into a trustworthy friend. That’s the goal of at-one-ment.

Harmony. Peace. Unity.

It’s something God can’t demand. Love demanded becomes robotic. It’s no longer genuine. True love cannot be required, only pleaded for.

The Cross
Jesus died on the cross. That action denied one of Satan’s persistent charges—that God is an autocratic tyrant who demands sacrifice and self-denial from his created beings, but is not willing to do so himself.

Want to know the way back to God? The way to know the divine again? The way to connect with what our human ancestors used to know so well? That path leads past the cross where Jesus died, to win you back. To help humans love and trust him again.

Crucifixion is gory. In its harsh reality it rightly repels us. We see the consequences to universe-wide rebellion; and the lengths to which God will go, not just for our salvation, but to restore harmony throughout the universe.

Here we see God as he really is.

Somebody willing to die to get your trust. Willing to die to gain reconciliation in his relationship with you.

What is that worth to you? [show less]

What kind of reconciliation do you need in your life? How would it change the way things are for you?

Have you ever made a sacrifice to achieve peace with someone else?

How do you feel about gaining a personal relationship with God? Is it appealing to you?

Can you think of any time that you may have misunderstood God? What happened to set you straight? [show less]

Do you want reconciliation with Jesus? What are tangible evidences of at-one-ment with God in your life?<

Dear God,
Thank you for all that you have done so that I can be reconciled to you. I’m thinking about trusting you more. Enable me to experience all the blessings that come from being fully connected with you. AMEN.

In the words of C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

God says he has no pleasure in the sacrificial blood of bulls and goats (Isaiah 1:11). Similarly in Isaiah 66 he compares sacrifices to murder or presenting dogs or offering pig’s blood! Why? Because “They have chosen their own ways, and their souls delight in their abominations.” (Isaiah 66:3 NIV)

Genesis 3
The Fall of Man
1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?"
2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
11 And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"
12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."
13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?" 
 The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."
14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, 
 "Cursed are you above all the livestock 
 and all the wild animals! 
 You will crawl on your belly 
 and you will eat dust 
 all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity 
 between you and the woman, 
 and between your offspring [a] and hers; 
 he will crush [b] your head, 
 and you will strike his heel."
16 To the woman he said, 
 "I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing; 
 with pain you will give birth to children. 
 Your desire will be for your husband, 
 and he will rule over you."
17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,' 
 "Cursed is the ground because of you; 
 through painful toil you will eat of it 
 all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you, 
 and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow 
 you will eat your food 
 until you return to the ground, 
 since from it you were taken; 
 for dust you are 
 and to dust you will return."
20 Adam [c] named his wife Eve, [d] because she would become the mother of all the living.
21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever."
23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side [e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. [show less]

re:tell - Thomas Lindberg. http://www.sermonillustrations.com/a-z/a/atonement.htm. 11 April 2006.