More on the Reconciliation of Christ's death !
More on the Reconciliation of Christ's death !
More on the Reconciliation that Christ's Death accomplished for all whom He died. First of all, Christ's death did reconcile sinful sinners to Himself, not that He did not Love them and needed to be reconciled in that regard, but in that their sins forbade Him to be in personal fellowship and communion with them. It is an alienation of His Life of Fellowship like the prodigal son experienced with his Father Lk 15:12-13
12 And the younger of them said to his father, Father, give me the portion of goods that falleth to me. And he divided unto them his living.
13 And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living.
What the wayward son lost was fellowship with his Father but not His Father's Heart of Love .
But not only that, its strictly by the reconciliation in Christ's death, that those He died for, that God reconciles them [subjectively] to Himself, in other words it deals with the sinners personal alienation from God in his own mind, the issue being in the sinner and not in God. The enmity is in the sinners mind against God, not in God's Mind towards the sinner, as stated here Col 1:21-22
21 And you, that were sometime alienated and enemies in your mind by wicked works, yet now hath he reconciled
22 In the body of his flesh through death, to present you holy and unblameable and unreproveable in his sight:
That word reconcile in Vs 21 is the word apokatallassō and means:
to reconcile completely
to reconcile back again
bring back a former state of harmony
Notice again who Paul states that was alienated and enemies in their minds in Vs 21, not God, but You writes Paul.
But Christ's Death and it alone effects the change of mind in the sinner, in the sinner Christ died for. Yes, Christ's death is responsible for the reconciling of sinners in their minds back to God. In other words, when the prodigal son experienced a change of mind as here Lk 15:17-20
17 And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!
18 I will arise and go to my father, and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee,
19 And am no more worthy to be called thy son: make me as one of thy hired servants.
20 And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.
What all this pictures is the effects of the Death of Christ bringing back an wayward sinner back to God, for he no longer has any enmity and hostility in his mind towards his Father and returns, and his doing that is to be credited to the praise of the Death of Christ, its effects, and nothing else; for that was one of the Great and Splendid purposes of His Death, as Peter says here 1 Pet 3:18
18 For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that[purpose] he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit:
Which He did succeed in doing. In other words, Christ's death is 100 % responsible for any sinner's true conversion to God in Faith and Repentance, and no man Preaches the Word of reconciliation aright as Per 2 Cor 5:19-20 without understanding that ! For the word of reconciliation is preached to produce, bring to light the blessed effects of the reconciling death of Christ !