Page 45 - what a christianbelieveslastfinaltest3a_Neat
P. 45
Repentance from sin
Reconciliation with god
When reconciliation takes place between people, it is usually
because they have 'fallen out' with one another. The
friendship has ceased and one or other has to take an
initiative to apologise and begin to put things right.
It is not so with God because He never departed from man
and did not stop loving him.
However, just as when people drift apart, they become like
strangers, so as man drifted from God, mankind became
strangers to Him. But He never has been a stranger to us.
So all the doctrines that have been looked at, were designed
by God to enable us to be reconciled to Him.
Colossians 1 v19,20 'For God was pleased to have all
His fulness dwell in him (Jesus), and through him to
reconcile to Himself all things whether things on earth or
in heaven, by making peace through His blood, shed on
the cross'.
There is a word used in the Bible - PROPITIATION, which
means to appease.
In most religions; and in Bible times the Greeks had their own
religion; there is the idea that the 'gods' do not naturally have
good will toward their people. So people have in some way
to appease them.
In the Bible the word Propitiate is never used in the
sense of appeasing a disagreeable God.
Instead the sense of meaning is - to remove all the effects of
SIN and turn us from enemies to friends of God.
45