Starting from the Start - (Closing the Gap)

 Authors Note- This is the first blog post in what I hope to be a fairly long series of posts; most of which will be about Christianity and my thoughts and opinions about it. We can also talk about music and technology (I love me some music and technology). I figured since this is the start we might as well start with the fundamental idea in Christianity, "Jesus Christ saved us from our sins", the following post will be my ideas on the subject. I hope you enjoy the post and the rest that are to follow.


The Salvation story goes like this:

First God and Man were close together. They walked and talked together in the Garden and things were awesome.

GM

Then Man sins and is separated from God. This is known as "The Fall" and is found in Genesis 3. This sin becomes a divider between God and Man.

G-S-M

Now God and Man are separated and cannot have the relationship that God originally wanted them to. This is a big deal to God. It wasn't like "Oh, Mike is leaving, oh okay. Yeah he is alright but we don't really.. oh his name is Jim, my bad." This was God losing people that he loved unconditionally. God wanted more then anything to get Man back, so he gave everything. This is where Jesus comes in. Jesus is God and a human (or "God in flesh"). Jesus (because he was God) was born without sin nature. "Sin nature" is that awayness between Man and God (its the "-" in G-M). Jesus also never sinned. He was with God in the way that Adam was before the fall (GM). When Jesus was crucified he took away the price of sin, that is, "G-S-M" became "G-M", because he was perfect.

G-M

Now we get into forgiveness. You see there are two forms of forgiveness. The first is form of forgiveness is one party eliminating the others debt. It would be like if a friend of mine had stolen my wallet containing $40 dollars and me telling him that he did not own me $40 dollars. I forgave him. This doesn't not mean though that I would then allow my friend near my wallet again. This is the second form of forgiveness. A mutual restoration of the relationship of the two parties. This would be me regaining trust for my friend. When Jesus died sin was forgiven (you don't owe God $40), but that gap still exist where sin once was. This is salvation; Jesus removing the cost of sin and you and God restoring your relationship to what it was meant to be.

GM