"When will Shiloh come? When will God turn his face back to his people? When will He hear us again? When will we be reconciled to our maker?" These were questions that represented the longings of humankind, as we yearned to again see and walk and talk with God, even as we did in the Garden of Eden when we were in Adam. We longed to have the active movement and participation of God in our daily lives again; we longed for our first estate with God.[Gen.2:15;3:8]

Carl Jung once wrote of a type of racial memory, or primordial stuff, that human beings have. It is a sort of innate human memory that allows us to venture back to our origins, even back to Adam. And it was that stuff that propelled man to want to return to God, as we ventured farther and farther away from God through sin. [Isa. 59:2] Sin has its momentary pleasures [Heb. 11:22] but it can never satisfy that absence of God in man's life. The prodigal son is a good analogy of us in our wayward state and our desire. [Lk. 15:13-20]

After human beings had gone so far from God at our lowest ebb, that abstract desire, flamed by the men of God over the centuries, rekindled and our racial memory quickened us, and we cried out to be filled with the absence of something that was crucial to man, even as Adam had a longing for Eve before she was created. We longed for reconciliation; we longed for God again. But in our wayward state, we could not approach God, we could not make God hear us. We were without strength. [Rom. 5:6]

But thank God, about 2004 years ago, after many tears and much pain, when the fullness of God's time had come, [Gal. 4:4] God disrobed Himself of His eternal glory, veiled himself with the likeness of sinful flesh, [Rom. 8:3; Phil.2:7] and came to the earth and His own arm brought salvation, [Isa. 59:16; 63:5] and by himself, he reconciled wayward and untoward man back into a relationship with Him. God, himself, looked on man and brought the reconciliation he had planned as far back as in Eden, when he covered man with coats of skin, [Gen. 3:21] after man's covering was insufficient to cover his sin--after their disobedience, and after God had pronounced sentence upon them.

Reconciliation with God:
Reconciliation was more than a word and a notion. Man had violated the Eternal God's word and command. Man had accepted the word of a liar over the word of God, who cannot lie. And God's word had already been issued and settled in heaven: In the day you violate my word, you will die.

That sentence was upon all mankind; for Adam represented all mankind. And the God that cannot lie had to fulfill his word. Furthermore, to make sure that man did not enter again and eat of that tree of life, God drove man from the Garden, and placed a cherubim (angel) and a flawing sword at the east side of the garden. [Gen. 3:23-24]

To reconcile man back to God required that man's sin debt be paid in full and that man enter back into the Garden to eat of the tree of life. In doing that, man had to brave the powerful cherubim angel with the flaming sword God placed at Eden's entrance to keep the way. Furthermore, man had to be clothed with clothing of righteousness that was acceptable to God. The coats of skin that man had from God were only symbolic of what He would do through Christ, but as man degenerated in sin, even the coats were not enough. The Psalmist wrote that God looked down on man and saw that there was none righteous, no not one! [Psa. 14] In man's state before Christ, and man's state now without Christ, God saw all man's righteousnesses as merely filthy rags. [Isa.64:6]

God had searched to see if there were any that could redeem himself or any who could reconcile man back to God. Because of the judgment God pronounced on man, man had to do the work of returning to God; a holy God could not accept sinful man as a redeemer of himself from sin. No man had the standing with God or the strength necessary to pay man's sin-debt and to brave the cherubim with the flaming sword. So God, by His own power, brought salvation. He had to do it himself. Yet he had to do it within the boundaries he imposed on mankind and on Himself: Man had to die for his sins.

Then Jesus came:

God got tired of vain oblations and sacrifices; it was time for the real atonement for man's sins. In order to have someone acceptance to God who could pay the debt owed for sin, God had to have a man, and that man had to have strength enough to overcome all the challenges that God had determined for redemption. Since there was no man with such abilities, God came himself to do the job.

When God came to earth, He could not come as God; there had to be a man to pay for man's debt. So God in his wisdom and majesty came to earth and His spirit overshadowed a virgin named Mary, who was from the line of David, and begot a body. That body was the Christ in which He dwelled. And we looked upon and beheld God's glory while here on earth to redeem man. The Bible says that the glory of God that we beheld was that of the only begotten son of God.[John 1:14] Adam, the first son of God, was made of the dust of the ground; Jesus Christ was begotten of a woman, and He was the Lord from Glory.

Jesus came into this world with the express purpose of redeeming man. And redeeming man was a task too weighty for man alone. While on his way to Calvary, at every turn Satan attempted to trick Him and tempt Him away from His mission, but Jesus was focused on his mission--to redeem man and bring God's wayward creation back to God. That was a great and mighty battle that was fought in the most unlikely place, and before many eyes who did not understand what was taking place. For had they known, they would not have killed the Lord from glory. [1Cor.2:8]

It was fought at Calvary, on a Roman cross, among criminals on each side. There God was working his work; taking a man whom He was pleased to dwell in; a man whose whole purpose was to die to redeem man.; a man who knew this purpose from his birth; a man whom God dwelled in fully--there was not a time when Jesus did not have God in Him. He was given the spirit of God without measure. Indeed, in Him dwells the fullness of the Godhead bodily. [John 3:34; Col. 2:9]

The Garden of Gethsemane Prayers:
When approaching this consummation of his purpose, Jesus saw what he was to face, and the Christ went into prayer, asking God to do redemption another way. Look at Jesus' agony in Garden of Gethsemane as he prayed three prayers to God, the eternal spirit:

After this prayer, Jesus went back to his closest disciples and found them sleep at his greatest moment of testing. He chided them and went back to prayer a second time:

"...and prayed, saying, O my Father, if this cup may not pass away from me except I drink it, thy will be done."

After the second prayer, he went back for moral support, and Peter, James, and John were sleep again--their eyes were heavy. But without a word, he simply went back the third time and prayed, saying the same words.

Look at the struggle and amazing truths that Jesus was calling on in his prayer. Mark's gospel indicates that Jesus says in his first prayer, "All things are possible with thee." It was possible that God could have done redemption another way, because all things were possible with Him. But He had chosen Calvary and begotten Jesus for the task of Calvary.

Luke's recording of this Gethsemane scene shows us that so agonizing was this moment and this hour for Jesus that an angel came and helped him. Luke says that Jesus prayed so hard that his sweat was, as it were, great drops of blood falling down to the ground. [Mat.26:36-46; Mk. 14: 32-42; Lk.22:39-46; Heb.5:7-8]

Jesus understood fully what he had to do and its difficulty and pain. And he did it. This Gethsemane event was a point of getting the flesh totally under subjection to the Spirit and will of God. His flesh wanted to reject it, but he overrode the flesh and was guided only by the spirit. [Heb.5:7-8] After mastering the flesh, even unto death, Jesus returned to his disciples and told them the hour was at hand. It was time to brave the flaming sword; it was time to become sin for man that we might become the righteousness of God; it was time for him who had never known sin to know it for every man who trusts in him; it was time to get God's creation out of sin and back in relationship to God; it was time for him to experience the absence of God from his body for the first time; it was time for him to plunder the depths of hell and take the keys of hell and death out of Satan's hand. He knew the enormity of this time and of this moment that was upon him. It was this very moment for which he was born!

A look at Calvary:
Jesus had said that no man could take his life; he had power to lay it down and power to pick it up again. [John 10:18-19] On Calvary he demonstrated that truth. The Roman soldiers did not kill him. By the time they got around to spearing him, to hasten his death, he was already dead; he had given up the ghost.

When Jesus had been rejected by the Jews, bruised and beaten by the Roman soldiers, it was time to pay the price God had said man would have to pay for his sins--death. [Rom. 6:23] But the rejection and scourging of Jesus by the soldiers were physical actions and events that represent a greater spiritual reality that was taking place. Remember the cherubim and the flaming sword that kept the way of the tree of life? That sword was to cut down any who approached the entrance to the Garden; Jesus' physical abuse by the soldiers could be the outer manifestations of a spiritual battle that was taking place between that cherubim and Jesus, as he sought to brave that sword and eat of the tree of life for us all.[Gen. 3:24]

But paying the sin-debt was another thing entirely. Paying that debt required that all of mankind's sins, from Adam unto Christ returns to get his church, be satisfied, placed upon, by Jesus. Upon him, God placed all of mankind's debt of sin. Oh, the burden of sin placed upon Christ at Calvary. It was at Calvary God suspended time and operated in His own time lines.[See Time no More]

At the moment of Jesus becoming the sin bearer, all our sins were placed on him, and Jesus cried out, Eli, Eli, la ma sabach thani, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? When he cried out, all can now realize that at that moment we were freed of sin.

Jesus had never known what it felt like to not have God inside of him, and we had not known in our sinful state what it felt like to have God inside of us always, but when our sins were placed on him, he realized the stark absence of God from his person and his communion. This absence of communion and fellowship with God was an experience that man had known for years, as we plunged deeper and deeper in sin.

The Transposition of Sin for Righteousness:
On Calvary, when our sins were placed on Jesus, who was the righteousness of God, God then turned His back on Jesus' sinful nature and turned toward us, who, instead of being sinners, we had taken upon ourselves the transposed nature of Christ. We became the righteousness of God, instead of Christ being that righteousness. Instead, Jesus became the sin that God hates and we became the righteousness that God loves.[Rom. 5:14-19]

This was the purpose for Jesus' coming into the world. And that is why God forsook a sinful Christ for us. So the question Jesus asked of God is to be answered by all who have accepted the work of Christ in paying our sin debt.

What Jesus did on Calvary was a transposition of love by God. For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. [John 3:16]

Have you accepted what Jesus has done for you on Calvary? He did it for all, but you must receive it individually. And that is done by repenting of all your sins, get baptized in Jesus name for the remission of those sins, and receive the promised Holy Spirit of God. [Acts 2:38-39] If you have not received what Christ did on Calvary that way, you have not received it in God's prescribed way.

I urge you to accept the redemption of Christ today! []

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