The God of Restoration

Pastor Don Porter

As the Easter season approaches I think it is a good time to explore one of the major characteristics of God and that is the role of restorer.

I recently read a book called The Shack. The book is about a man who believes in God but whose daughter was abducted and violently killed. This man blamed God for her death and as a result his relationship with God is destroyed.

The book goes on to describe how God sets out to restore this man to himself.

In the book, God explains how, that when He Created the world, He loved us so much that He created man and woman to have the ability to choose our actions. But God’s desire was for us to choose to have a total and complete relationship with Him and to be dependent on Him because we had no knowledge of good and evil. When Adam and Eve sinned, that relationship was destroyed, as they gained the ability to determine good and evil based upon their own standards.

Their action caused sin (which is independent action by man based on our perception of what is good or bad for us) to enter into the world. This also resulted in destroying man’s relationship with God. To prevent this God could have created us without the ability to choose but then we wouldn’t have been able to choose to love Him. So God instead created the Master Restoration Plan to remedy this.

Under God’s plan He sent His Son Jesus Christ, in human form, to earth to live the life man was originally intended to have with God. Jesus led a life completely dependent on God and in a continuous relationship with His Father and acted in accordance with His Father’s wishes and therefore Jesus was without sin. God’s restoration plan went even further. God designed it so that Jesus who was without sin would die as a sacrifice for all the sins of mankind.

But because we have the ability to choose we must choose to accept and believe that Jesus was the Son of God and accept His sacrifice for our sins in order for our relationship with God to be restored. The key here is that it is our choice. God knew that not everyone would choose His Redemption Plan even though God wanted it so badly that He condemned His only Son to die in our place.

The book impressed upon me a number of things.

First, it reminded me that when things go well in our life we take all the credit. It’s because of how hard we work, how well educated we are, how religious we are, how we take care of our health, how we plan for our financial future, etc.

But when things go wrong, God is the first one we tend to blame. How could a loving God allow such things to happen?

To blame God for bad things that happen is unfair. God gave each of us the ability to choose. Because mankind has chosen to determine good and evil based on our own perceptions rather than God’s, our actions have consequences. The world we live in today, which most would agree is a mess, is the result of man making his own determination of good and evil and choosing his own actions with the resulting consequences over many centuries. The bad things that happen are the result of our choices and the choices of others who live in this world around us.

But couldn’t God intervene and stop bad things from happening? No, not without taking away the ability for mankind to make choices. We don’t want God to take away our ability to make choices and God doesn’t want to either.

And because God loves every person on the earth equally He can not take away one person’s ability to make choices without taking it away from everyone even though the consequences hurt God as much as it hurts us.

So what is the answer to the problems in this world?

First, it is to accept God’s restoration plan and restore our relationship with Him through His Son.

The second is to read God’s instruction manual for life on this earth contained in the Bible.

In it God offers instruction, but then it’s our move. We must accept His instruction and apply it to our lives. Then, and only then, can we expect to cash in on the benefits of His instruction. So you see, application is the essential link between instruction and change.

God caused men to write His instructions rather than give them verbally because we all know what happens when things are passed on verbally. Many of us have participated in a test where we tell someone a story and then have them pass it on to someone else and this is repeated until the story is finally told to us. The story we get back is far different from the one we originally told.

So, God had His instructions written. He has preserved every word of it in a Book, the Bible. It’s all there, just as He communicated it to us.

When Jesus returns for His own, He is not going to ask us how much we memorized or how often we met for study.

No!

He will want to know, “What did you do about my instructions?”