Yesterday we talked about man being ‘wonderful’ because he is created in the image of God.  

God, in His communication to ‘us’ through the Bible tells us something else about man – He tells us about the Fall.  This introduces the other element which we need to know in order to understand man.  Why is he so wonderful and yet so flawed?  Who is man?  Who am I?  Why can man do these things that make man so unique, and yet why is man so horrible?  Why is it? 

The Bible says that you are wonderful because you are made in the image of God, but that you are flawed because at a space-time point of history man fell.  The Bible teaches that man was separated from God because of man’s revolt against God.  And ‘all’ of mankind inherited a universal condition of moral guilt and separation before God.  And yet, even though man is morally guilty and separated, man is not nothing.  Modern man tends to think that he is nothing.  Man is the very opposite of nothing, because he is made in the image of God.  Even though he is fallen and, without the non-humanistic solution of Christ and His substitutionary death, and separated from God for eternity, this still does not mean that man is nothing. 

In reality, man is ‘somebody’, even though he is in revolt; he is free to make choices and he is unprogrammed and it is clear that he really revolts and thus has true moral guilt.  And the clearest message of the Bible is that God created a plan to reconcile man back into a relationship with Him through Jesus Christ, by what Jesus did.  Jesus died on the cross in substitution and as a propitiation in order to save men from their true guilt.  A man must come to believe that he personally and truly has true moral guilt before the God who made him.  Christ died for man who has true moral guilt.   

The Apostle Peter, wrote and declared this truth in 1 Peter 3:18…he said ‘Christ died once for our sins. An innocent person died for those who are guilty. Christ did this to bring you to God… 

Thoughts developed and/or taken from the works of Dr. Francis A. Schaeffer, Trilogy – Escape From Reason