Matins Devotion: August 27, 2024

2 Corinthians 5

When we think of the concept of reconciliation, we usually think of it as two people who have sinned against each other finding healing, two people pulled apart by the cruelty they heaped on each other mutually desiring to forgive the other. And so the reconciler is the one who gives them the tools to do this. But with God, things are far different and far more merciful.

Your Father in heaven did not sin against you. Rather, He gave you love and honor. He fed you, cherished you, gave the very world to you. And you responded by despising Him, by throwing His gifts back in His face. You responded by running from him, by putting a thousand miles of angry, burning distance between the two of you. You didn’t want peace with him. You wanted to die in the wilderness alone. But because He wanted peace with you, He gave it. And even though the price He had to pay in order to make you His own again was giving up the blood of His only begotten Son, that’s exactly what He gave you. 

Through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, you have now been reconciled to your Father. In your baptism, you received the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And His death, Jesus destroyed your sinful nature, destroyed the nature that despised your Father. In His resurrection, Jesus gave you a new nature that cherishes your Father. With His nail-pierced hands, Jesus struck the sinner you were dead. He raised up to life a new, faithful child of God. With His nail-pierced hands, Jesus carried that child across the table, across the divide and He placed you into the hands of the Father who had been waiting to receive you back. You are no longer separated from your Father. There is no longer anything separating you from His eternal embrace. Jesus Christ destroyed it all when He created your new nature in the waters of Holy Baptism. You have eternal peace with the God whose Son you killed. And if you can have peace with that God, you can have peace with any man on this earth.