Adam and Eve were given a choice to either eat from the tree of life in the middle of the garden or to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which was also in the middle of the garden. To eat from the tree of life was to choose to live from the life of God, in absolute utter dependence on Him. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil was the choice to try to be like God by depending on your own ability to make it happen. The fact that they were given a choice even to the last moment before they ate the forbidden fruit makes it clear that they had free will; yet, Revelation 13:8 says that Jesus was the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world. God had already provided the solution before there ever was a problem in the garden. We were rescued before we were lost. Does that mean that all along, God had a contingency plan already accomplished just in case things didn’t work out in the garden, or does it mean that God is so sovereign and so brilliant His ways are simply not our ways, and it is okay to not fully understand how free will and sovereignty go together?
Someone said, and I am not sure who it was, “God planned that we would be woven into the fabric of Jesus’s existence.” Being crucified with Christ, and being raised up in union with His life as our life, was always God’s plan. Being “in Christ” was always God’s solution for broken humanity. The crucifixion and resurrection of Christ were played out incarnationally 2000 years ago at a place called Golgotha, but in reality, it was accomplished before the foundation of the world. Listen to these verses from Ephesians 1:3 – 4a, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who HAS blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly’s in Christ, JUST AS HE CHOSE US IN HIM BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF the world.”
Tomorrow is Good Friday, and because God’s plan was that we would be woven into the fabric of Jesus’s existence, Christ’s history is our history. Tomorrow we celebrate and enter into mystically, and sacramentally the day our history and human history began to change forever. The old hymn that asked the question, “Were you there when they crucified,” has a definitive answer, YES, we were there. We worked just there as spectators but as participants in the crucifixion of Christ. His crucifixion was your crucifixion, and His resurrection to newness of life was your resurrection to newness of life. You are woven today into the fabric of Jesus’s existence. Let your imagination run wild with that truth.
This is Maundy Thursday, and tonight we will remember the first Eucharist. Sacramentally, we will actually be there. In every Eucharist, we are there at the foot of the Cross, not as a memorial, but the actual timeless event made present. Christ is truly there in the bread and the wine. It has by the action of the Holy Spirit supernaturally become His true body and His true blood (it is a mystery, and it is hard to understand with the natural mind, just like it is hard to understand how God’s perfect sovereignty and man’s free will can coexist). But there is something else you need to remember every Eucharist; you are also there, not just as a participant in the Eucharistic liturgy, but as one co-crucified, not just 2000 years ago, but you, in the Lamb were slain before the foundation of the world. To the praise of the glory of His grace, the new you was created before the Fall ever happened and was waiting for you to believe so that all that God had already accomplished for you in Christ could be realized in you on earth as God’s masterpiece – THE NEW CREATION.