About Project Diktuon
Pulling the Fish Together
Brief History of Salvation

- Doctor, Doctor, I think I’m god.
- Would you tell me everything starting from the beginning?
- Well, in the beginning I created the heavens and the earth…

The beginning

To get an idea what Christianity is all about, one has to start from the beginning. Or rather even from before the beginning. What was God thinking when He created the universe?

Children. God wants children. And not only in this time. Even before He established the universe, He had planned to make us holy and pure, but it will take until the heavens and the earth disappear until this plan is completely finished.

Creating the universe was just the first part of the plan. Having created everything, God created man in His image. Among other things to be an image of God means to have a free will. To limit our free will would be to compromise that image. However His plan requires that we are created in His image.

Man fell when he left to walk his own paths. We could say that the core of the fall is that we know by ourselves what is right and what is wrong. In other words, we have a moral of our own, separate from God. When we do naturally what we think is good, it is unnatural for us to leave the decision about what is good to God.

The issues

Having allowed the fall, there were three things God needed to deal with in order to complete His plan. The sins the fallen men do, and the condition of being fallen in itself. The third issue was that we are separate from God in the first place. His plan of salvation addresses all of these.

The first issue is a problem because the deeds themselves are an insult to God. While they may not hurt Him directly, they hurt those He loves, our fellow human beings. On the other hand, He wants to destroy us, who hurt His loved ones, and on the other hand we are the loved ones. He needed to arrange the atonement.

The second issue He needs to deal with is the fact that we sin in the first place. Forgiving our transgressions is quite frustrating if we keep on doing them. In fact, the fallen man is utterly incapable of living according to the will of God. Even when he manages to do deeds that are in line with the will of God, these deeds are based on him judging himself – perhaps using the law given by God – what would be right in the eyes of God. Therefore the deed, which is in line with the word of God, originates from his knowing good and evil, in other words from the fall and sin. So, even when he does deeds that are in line with the will of God, these deeds originate from his fallen nature, and thus have the stain of sin. Spiritually speaking: by our created and fallen nature, we are dead, and everything that grows out of that death stinks.

Third, there is the initial problem of us being separate from Him. Even when He created man, we were not really of the same being. An image is separate from its maker. Unlike its maker, it hasn’t got a life of its own. His plan is not only to restore man to the pure unfallen state of Adam. Had that been enough, He could simply have prevented the fall. But His plan is that humans become something which cannot be created – children of God in His transcendent glory. God’s intended fate for man is therefore greater than the creation.

The Cross

God’s plan of salvation on the cross is three-fold. First, He atones the sinful deeds we have done and will do. Second, He saves us from the state, where we are ultimately incapable of doing anything not growing out of our sinful nature. Third, He unites us with His transcendent being. And all this is focused on the Calvary Cross.

Blood of Christ is the atonement of our sins. The evil deeds of humans have earned the wages of sin, the wrath of God. The Old Testament gives us a picture of how this wrath is turned away from men: by offering Him instead the life of something else, a sacrificial animal. The New Testament reveals what inspired this picture: Jesus Christ crucified. He suffered enough to absorb all the wrath of God, enough for His death to be a just and sufficient penalty for each and every sin, together or apart. It was not the length of His suffering that counts, but its depth – Life himself surrendered to death.

The question is, how does this penalty for the sins of men transfer onto Jesus on the cross? By us becoming one with Him.

The event where God unites us with the death and resurrection of Jesus is called baptism. When we are in Christ, immersed into Him by God, we are on the Cross in Him. And as we are on the cross in Christ, our sins are there as well, and they are punished.

In a way, in Christ we suffer the wages of sin ourselves. This is the first part of salvation, atonement from the sins we commit. The second part is that we are immersed into His resurrection as well as His crucifiction. Therefore, we are dead in Him and His new life is in us. When we act from this new life, our actions no longer arise from our sinful nature, but from His new life. This solves the issue of our actions inevitably arising from our sins.

Looking at it from another perspective, in Christ God unifies man into His very own being, His own Life. Salvation doesn’t take us back into the created unfallen innocence, but into the holy purity of the Son of God, purity that is not lack of deficiencies, but fullness of life and existence. Heavens and the earth and what belongs to them will disappear, but those who are in Christ shall endure forever in transcendence.

Obedience

God is the source of all life. In Christ’s resurrection we share His new life. Living by the Spirit starts by remembering that we are dead in ourselves and free to live according to God’s will. The new life we live is no longer our own, and our actions in the new life no longer originate from ourselves, but from Jesus.

(This does not mean that all our actions would originate from Jesus: we are still capable of sinning, and our sinful actions originate from ourselves. Therefore no-one must think he cannot sin. The difference to the old life is that previously all our actions originated from our sinful nature, as there not yet was any new nature. In fact, abiding in Christ is not mandatory. If we choose to live by our old, fallen nature, we in effect reject Christ and the mercy of God. If we accept to live like the Spirit living in us guides us, we are living in Christ and doing the will of our Heavenly Father.)

Therefore, there’s nothing Christian that does not originate from God – and conversely, if there is something that does not originate from God, it is not Christian. (This is a definition about the state of the matters; in practice it is only possible to discern a Christian from a non-Christian by grace of God.) Therefore God, and His self-revelation in His Son Jesus Christ, revealed to us by the Holy Spirit, must be the starting point and the hard core of everything we do.

As we are in Christ, His new life starts to take form in us. It is like the ”new DNA” would start to express itself, causing us to resemble Jesus more. This means that Christian ethics is not so much normative but descriptive.

Normative ethics tells us: ”Love your neighbour. Always consider what is best for your neighbour and in accordance with the will of God and do so.” However, this assumes that with this advice, man would himself know what is right and could act accordingly. It therefore relies on the sinful nature of man, and any action based on it arises from the sin and the old man.

Christian ethics describe us: ”Whoever lives the new life will be found to love his neighbour.” He does not think what is loving in each situation, but forgoes that decision; it is not important if you love your neighbour or not, important is that you are obedient to God. According to Christian ethics this will cause the neighbour to be loved.

But we cannot be even obedient. If obedience was a requirement, it would go back to normative ethics. All we are able to do is to be disobedient. The only option to disobedience is to surrender all, and only trust to the Word of God, which says that LORD Jesus Christ has entered our hearts in Holy Spirit and act accordingly – as our heart dictates.

Judgement

How about people who have not been baptised? If baptism to Christ is the only way our sins can be atoned, what happens to the unbaptised, e.g. the Old Testament saints?

The difference is that those who God baptises into unity with Christ, are baptised into unity already in this time. This unity will be perfect only in eternity, but we Christians are in it already in this time. The unbaptised who put their trust in God, even when they didn’t know about Jesus and the cross effectively believe. The faith of the OT saints came apparent in the attitude of their hearts and in their walk, which was in accordance with the will of God. (N.B. God produced also this fruit, e.g. Judges 14:4.) Yet, as Christ is the only way to God, they were in fact believing in Him, though not knowing it themselves.

In the last judgement all people, both baptised and unbaptised, are brought together and the same question is posed to everyone: Have you lived faithfully? God has revealed His will to all the world and everyone has had something to be faithful in.

The work of Christ on the cross is the only grounds for redemption, so there is no need for perfection in deeds. Jesus is kind and He knows all our weaknesses and imperfections. He is the Judge and He will judge fairly. But He will look into our lives and ask if we have sought Him, if we have wanted to do His will as we have known it. If so, He will join us to Him, His resurrection, forever.

This accomplishes God’s grand plan to have children in glory.

Gospel Summary

These are to be taught when preaching the Gospel:

  1. Jesus, incarnated Son of God, Anointed, Christ, Messiah, was anointed for His death in Bethany by a woman called Mary.
  2. God has risen Jesus from death to judge all people according to their works.
  3. All people everywhere must repent from their sins: turn to God with all of their hearts and minds, live justly and be kind. Christians are to show their obedience to God by living accordingly.
  4. Anyone who seeks God as a saviour and acts accordingly will be saved, and his sins will be atoned on the cross of Christ.
  5. When God joins anyone in Christ, he starts to live a new life. This means that he will come to know God in his spirit and gets the strength to do deeds not based on his own sinful nature, but arising from the Living God Himself.
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