Did God step out of eternity into time to save us from something or to save us for something? Jesus didn’t come to earth to salvage what he could in light of the Fall; he came to gather all brokenness and fallenness into himself so that he could make all things new. Jesus did not come just to save us from sin’s penalty; he came to bring us into union with himself so that we could participate in the life he lives.
For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved in His life. (Romans 5:10)
Irenaeus was one of the most important persons in church history. He was born in 130 A.D., not too many years after the death of the apostle John, and is considered one of the greatest among all Christian teachers and theologians. He wrote this; “Our Lord Jesus Christ who did through his transcendent love become what we are, that he might bring us to be, even what he is in himself.” I read recently someone put it this way; “God has not simply effected a cosmic salvage exercise but effected a marvelous exchange in which God has become what we are so that we, in turn, might share in God’s own life through Christ.”
We were reconciled to God through the death of his Son so that we might experience the MUCH MORE of God’s redemptive plan. That MUCH MORE, as explained in the last part of Romans 5:10, is that we would know the daily and eternal wonders of being saved in the very life of Jesus. We were saved for and by the joy of being carried along in the life of Jesus, resulting in our being saved from what we were as a result of the Fall. The word “reconciliation” literally means “a great exchange.” The Christian life at its core is an “exchanged life.” My fallen existence exchanged for a union with Jesus’s existence. How great a salvation!