God's Dilemma

For us justification and reconciliation to God is the really big deal about the incarnation of Jesus Christ.  There isn’t anything more important for us than assuring our final destiny will be with God in the New Heaven and Earth.  But for God there was a much bigger objective driving the advent of Jesus Christ.  To understand what that is we need to go back to Genesis, the book of Beginnings. 

Genesis opens at the same point of history at which that John began his Gospel. 
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.

Why?  The Bible gives us part of the answer in Genesis 1:26-28.
Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. 28 Then God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”

God created the human race in His image and likeness.  Not multi-personed individual life forms, but intelligent persons with some of His characteristics.  We’re not divine nor do we have super powers, but we do have creative imaginations and a will to exercise that creativity.  God then commissioned mankind to rule over this planet.  I also suspect His intention was that we would expand into the rest of the universe.  Why else would He have made it so big? 

Genesis 1”26-28 is actually the first mention of the Kingdom Jesus Christ spoke of in the Gospels.  All of that was put on hold when Adam sinned.  Adam and Eve had brought sin into the creation and with it, death. 

Romans 5:12 “Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned.”

The human race would now have to be redeemed, bought back from the curse of death.  However, for God there is also an internal conflict that must be resolved.  He is perfectly righteous and just as well as compassionate, loving and merciful.  These moral attributes are all equally active within His person so any solution to the problem of sin must be consistent with and satisfy the requirement of each attribute.  That is why Jesus Christ offer Himself to die in our place. 

Romans 3:21-26 But now the righteousness of God apart from the law is revealed, being witnessed by the Law and the Prophets, 22 even the righteousness of God, through faith in Jesus Christ, to all and on all who believe. For there is no difference; 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, 25 whom God set forth as a propitiation by His blood, through faith, to demonstrate His righteousness, because in His forbearance God had passed over the sins that were previously committed, 26 to demonstrate at the present time His righteousness, that He might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
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I’ll break that down in my next post.