Day 4 – Unity

For us to truly understand who we are in Christ, we must have a good idea of why we are in Christ. Why did God save us? Why did He go to the great lengths that He did in order to redeem us back to Himself?

First of all, we know that love was the motivation for our salvation. Eph 2:4-5 makes this clear. But a different question is: what was God’s goal or final purpose for it? What did He plan to achieve? God does nothing without a reason and a plan. So why salvation? The short but perhaps surprising answer is unity.

You see, God created us for relationship. This was His plan from the beginning; a relationship in unity and harmony. Man was to have undivided fellowship with Him. We see this pattern in the Garden of Eden – God evidently had regular communion with Adam and Eve (Gen 3:8). On top of that, mankind was supposed to have undivided fellowship together with one another.

But sin broke that fellowship – both with God and with one another. God drove Adam and Eve out of the garden – the very place He had prepared for them. From that time on, their relationship with God was different. And then in Genesis 4, no sooner did they have 2 sons, that one killed the other (Gen 4:3-8). There was a grand total of 4 people in the world that we know of, and already their relationships were so strained that one murdered another. Human fellowship was most certainly broken!

Throughout the Old Testament, God went to great lengths to make some sort of fellowship possible, despite the fact that sin was not fully dealt with. The Law of Moses was a big part of that, as were the covenants He made with Noah (Gen 8:20-22), Abraham (Gen 15:7-21), and David (1Chron 17:7-14). But even through this, sin was still a problem – man could not simply come before God.

Then in the New Testament, everything changed! He made it possible for our sin to be removed from us (John 1:29), so our relationship can be restored. We have passed from spiritual death to spiritual and eternal life. Now we can enjoy undivided fellowship with Him. And very importantly, we can enjoy a relationship of unity and harmony with one another.

That is what our salvation is all about.

Consider:

Do I regularly consider the privilege it is to have fellowship with God?

Have I valued the ability to have proper fellowship with people as a part of God’s salvation?