Jesus, Our Only Hope
It’s Thursday of the passion week, and things have taken a turn for Jesus. The religious leaders have been plotting for over a year now to get rid of Jesus, and their plans are about to be realized. Judas will betray Jesus, then he will be arrested, put on trial, and on Friday, crucified. That Friday, the religious leaders thought that they had achieved their goal, but they were wrong. Sunday would arrive, and with it, the resurrection. It is in the dramatic and sorrowful events of the passion week and the glory of the resurrection that we come to see that Jesus is our only hope.
For the Christian, the human condition cannot be considered apart from Jesus Christ. Though we will look more extensively at his Person and work in the next two chapters, we must focus our attention here on Jesus as the perfect embodiment of the image of God in humanity.
“He is the image of the invisible God,” Paul boldly declares of Jesus (Col. 1:15; cf. also 2 Cor. 4:4). Jesus fulfills what Adam and Eve were created to be. He revealed God in his incarnation; he lived in relationships of love with his heavenly Father and with his earthly neighbor; and he exercised his rule over the natural world so that even the wind and the seas obeyed him. John tells us, “ No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18). In Hebrews we read, “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:3). “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father,” Jesus said (John 14:9).
As the image of God, Jesus reveals God to us; and as the image of God, he shows us what all human beings were meant to be. Jesus is the full expression of the perfection God intended when he created man in his image. In answer to the question, “What is man?,” the Bible directs us to Jesus. Further, as the image of God, Jesus came to undo the sin of Adam. Paul points us to this glorious truth: “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous” (Rom. 5:19).
Adam, being made in God’s image, longed for equality with God and saw it as something to be snatched. Jesus Christ was equal with God, but he did not see it as something to use for his own advantage (see Phil. 2:5-11). While Adam desired to be great and refused to be God’s servant, grasping instead for the likeness of God, Jesus Christ made himself nothing and took on the form of a servant and was made in the likeness of men. Whereas Adam exalted himself and became disobedient unto death, Jesus Christ humbled himself and became obedient unto death. And whereas Adam was condemned and disgraced to the dishonor of God the Father, Jesus Christ was highly exalted and was given the name of Lord, to the glory of God the Father. “Consequently, just as one trespass resulted in condemnation for all people, so also one righteous act resulted in justification and life for all people” (Rom. 5:18).
Jesus Christ, “the last Adam” (1 Cor. 15:45), came as God to be what man was meant to be. He came to undo the sin of Adam by his own obedience and to create a new humanity, a people redeemed by his death, who would follow him in their lives. “And just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man” (1 Cor. 15:49). This is our hope!
And this is our only hope. We are either enslaved in the sinfulness of Adam by our natural birth, or we are liberated in the righteousness of Christ by our new birth. Jesus Christ alone can rescue us from the wrath of God that rightly stands over all who are in union with Adam. Jesus Christ alone can reconcile us from the alienation which came when God justly cast Adam from the garden. And Jesus Christ alone can renew that divine image which has been corrupted by Adam’s sin.
The good news of the gospel is that this is precisely what he has done! Jesus “rescues us from the coming wrath” (1 Thess. 1:10; 5:9). “There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Rom. 8:1). We have been delivered from the condemnation our sins deserve and the moral captivity our sin creates (cf. e.g., Rom. 6:18). Through our Lord Jesus Christ, “we have now received reconciliation” (Rom. 5:11), for “God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men’s sins against them” (2 Cor. 5:19). We now enjoy peace with God as our Father (Rom. 5:1; 8:16). And in Christ that corrupted image is being renewed into a new humanity, “created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness” (Eph. 4:24; Col. 3:10; 2 Cor. 4:16; cf. Rom. 8:29). Our great hope is that when he appears we shall be like him (1 John 3:2).
The seriousness of our sinful condition demanded nothing less than God’s saving work in Jesus Christ. “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people” (1 Tim. 2:5-6). He and his saving work will be the subject of our next two chapters.
Carl Sagan, the Cornell astronomer, once captured the modern problem of understanding what it means to be human: “We humans are like a newborn baby left on a doorstep,” he said, “with no note explaining who it is, ….”171 Thankfully, the Bible gives us that note.
More than that, in Jesus Christ, our God has come personally into this world to adopt us as his own. Our creation in the image of God and then our fall into sin together provide the key to the riddle of the human condition. They explain our origin, illuminate our present tragedy, and point us to our glorious destiny when we as Christians, rescued from God’s wrath and reconciled from our alienation with him, shall be fully renewed in the image of Jesus Christ.[1]
Thankfully, what Christ has done for us, he has done permanently. That means no one and nothing can undo it. By grace, we are saved, and Christ Jesus holds our salvation secure no matter the waves or winds or storms of this life.
[1] EFCA. Evangelical Convictions, 2nd Edition (pp. 105-108). Free Church Publications. Kindle Edition.