An Eternal Anticipation

We are participating in what was an eternity in the making. Our worship today is rooted in what happened in prospect before the foundation of the world (Ephesians 1:4). Prior to creating us, God chose to initiate a plan to retrieve us, knowing that we would wander off from being his friends and serving him. He chose to create us in his image despite knowing that by endowing us with a will and freedom to use it, he would be enabling us to misuse it.

God could have decided not to make us at all or to make us without the ability to rebel. Instead, he went ahead and made us in his likeness, at the same time planning a costly measure to make it possible to restore us from alienation. That plan involved the Son’s entering our realm and carrying his righteousness here to the point of violent flesh-and-blood death.

With these representations of his flesh and blood, we indicate our place in the reconciled state God envisioned long before we were even here to need it.