Built on the Bible

“All flesh is like grass and all its glory like the flower of grass. The grass withers, the flower falls.”

1 Peter 1:24

Often, when looking at the Bible and the gospel, we have a tendency to skip to the “good part,” where we see Jesus save us and we spend eternity in heaven. Obviously, that is in fact a very good thing. I know I enjoy being saved by Jesus and being assured of heaven with Him forever! However, when salvation is where we start, we have a limited gospel, and we fail to show others exactly why they need to be saved in the first place.

Depravity from the Start

To see why we need a Savior, we don’t have to look for long in the Bible. Frankly, all we have to do is open Genesis and read the first three chapters. In Genesis 1-2, we see God create a “very good” (Gen. 1:31) world. The world that God created had no sin at all. There was no pain, no death, no sickness, and no COVID-19! There was simple very good creation. God put man on this earth, but unlike the rest of creation, He created man “in his own image.” (Gen. 1:27)

Salvation is only necessary and valuable if there is something that we are saved from.

God commanded man to take care of His world. He told man to reproduce. There was also one additional command: “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die.” (Gen. 2:17) Here we are introduced to God’s moral law. We see God’s system of justice: sin against God demands death.

Obviously, people die today. Adam and Eve ate the fruit from the tree, and incurred on themselves and their children the wrath of God. Because of their sin, God requires a sacrifice to pay for their sins. Someone must die.

Countercultural Today

In today’s post-modern society, this truth his hard to swallow. Frankly, objective truth in general is hard to swallow. So often we see people believe that they can make their own rules, their own morality. What they think is right for them is right, and what they think is wrong for themselves is wrong. This post-modern ideology is deeply entrenched against the gospel however.

As we have seen, God makes the rules. God told Adam and Eve what was right and what was wrong. In the Bible, we see God show us even more of His moral law, how we are to live in ways that please Him and help us enjoy a relationship with Him. God expects us to align our ways with His, not the other way around. So often though our society wants to reverse those.

Salvation Rightly Viewed

So going back to our passage today, why do we need to start with death? Because we won’t appreciate God rightly if we don’t understand our limitations. We simply can’t live forever. Not only are we mortal, but we are accountable to a just God too for a lifetime of sins. No matter how much good we do, we still face an eternal sentence to hell on our own.

Now that we understand our depravity, our condition of being dead in sin and accountable to God for all our it, we can rightly understand salvation. Salvation is only necessary and valuable if there is something that we are saved from. When we understand what Jesus saved us from, we can worship Him more fully.

For believers, I implore you today to mediate and reflect on what God has done for you in Jesus. Jesus doesn’t just tell you what to do and get all the credit for it. He took away your infinite sins! Because of his sacrifice, you can have eternal life! Instead of being like the grass and fading away forever, you are promised a resurrected body and glorification with Jesus! If you don’t know Jesus, I beg of you, don’t reject Christ’s offer of salvation. He wants to have a relationship with you, but He can only do so as your Savior. Confess that you are a sinner, and believe in this glorious gospel that Jesus is the Son of God who died for you!

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. May not copy or download more than 500 consecutive verses of the ESV Bible or more than one half of any book of the ESV Bible.