The Divine Overachiever: What Happens When God Mans Up
Here is the truth: we have gained more in Jesus than we lost in Adam. We lost human perfection in the first man's fall. We gained perfect flesh-and-blood unity with God in his Son's incarnation.
I suppose, had he wanted to, God could have done enough to pass muster. To straighten up his messed up world, he might have worked hard at some deep cleaning, trashed most of the evil, and given humanity a tough scrub in the tub. Come to think of it, he did that once, in the Flood, and it wasn't long afterward when the righteous star of that show was lying bare ass naked in a drunken stupor inside his tent. That cosmic bath didn't cut it.
I suppose, also, that God could have done a smash up job of taking care of the bad stuff we call sins. He might have heaped up a whole mountain of misdeeds, beginning with Adam's and peaking it with the transgressions of the last folks who'll inhabit this dying world of ours, then transferred all that nastiness onto a sacrificial victim, opened his veins, and declared that blood the ''not guilty'' verdict upon all mankind. And, in fact, he did that when Jesus was crucified. But that's not all.
God is the ultimate overachiever. Not content with a mere global clean-up effort; not even stopping at providing a full and complete sacrifice for our wrongdoing; he went the extra mile, and then some. Here is the truth: we have gained more in Jesus than we lost in Adam. We lost human perfection in the first man's fall. We gained perfect flesh-and-blood unity with God in his Son's incarnation. We lost the fruit of the tree of life, but we gained a meal wherein we eat and drink of God and with God in the body and blood of our Savior. We were banished from Eden as Adam's offspring but embraced by heaven as adopted offspring of the Father himself.
God has achieved your forgiveness, to be sure. But over and above that, he has
Exalted you above the angels
Crowned you as kings and queens
Robed you as holy priests
Bestowed on you his name
Suffused his divine body into yours
Grafted your human body into his.
In short, he has shattered the glass ceiling above humanity, lifting us to heights undreamed of. The dirge of Genesis 3 was transformed into a Hallelujah chorus about a God who, driven by love, mans up for us, that as he is, we may be.
