Reconciliation only means something if there was a war. Scripture says there was.
The way most of us learned to tell it, you were lost. You were broken. You were a sheep that wandered off the trail and God came looking for you. Every one of those is true, and every one of them is in the Bible, and none of them is the word Paul reaches for when he wants to say what you actually were.
He uses a harder word. He uses it more than once, in more than one letter, and he never softens it.
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.
Romans 5:10, NASB1995
Enemies. Not patients. Not strays. Enemies. If that word lands wrong, it is worth sitting with, because the entire shape of the gospel depends on whether you believe it.
The Hostility Was Not a Mood
It would be easier if enemy meant that we felt some vague resentment toward God on bad days. It does not. Paul spells out what he means, and he means something structural.
And although you were formerly alienated and hostile in mind, engaged in evil deeds, yet He has now reconciled you in His fleshly body through death, in order to present you before Him holy and blameless and beyond reproach.
Colossians 1:21-22, NASB1995
Alienated and hostile in mind. The hostility was not in the emotions, where it comes and goes. It was in the mind, in the place where a man decides what is true and who is in charge. And it produced something: engaged in evil deeds. The disposition had a direction, and the direction had output.
Then Paul goes further than most of us are comfortable going:
because the mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God; for it does not subject itself to the law of God, for it is not even able to do so.
Romans 8:7, NASB1995
Not even able. That is not a description of a man who is trying his best and falling short. That is a description of a man whose factory settings run in the opposite direction from God, who could not reverse them by trying harder, and who mostly does not want to.
You Do Not Repair a Traitor
Here is why the word matters so much. What you think the problem was determines what you think the cross was.
If the problem was that you were broken, then Jesus is essentially a mechanic, and Calvary is a strange and violent way to fix a machine. You do not execute someone to repair a transmission. If the problem was that you were lost, then Jesus is a search party, and the cross is a bewildering detour on the way to finding you. Search parties do not die.
But if the problem was that you were an enemy of the throne, then everything fits. A traitor is not repaired. A traitor is either pardoned or dealt with, and pardon has a cost that someone has to absorb. The cross stops being an overreaction the moment you admit what you actually were.
Who Moved First
There is one more thing in the word enemies that we tend to miss, and it is the best part.
When two enemies reconcile in ordinary life, someone makes an overture. Someone risks it, sends the message, extends the hand. And in almost every human version of it, the offended party waits to see whether the offender is sorry enough first.
God did not wait.
Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.
2 Corinthians 5:18-19, NASB1995
All these things are from God. He is the offended party and He is the one who moved. He did not meet you halfway and He did not wait at the border for a sign of good faith. Read Romans 5:10 again and notice exactly when it happened: while we were enemies. Not after we came around. Not once the hostility had cooled into something more manageable. While.
And notice how the peace was made. Not by negotiation. Not by a treaty in which both sides give something up.
For He Himself is our peace, who made both groups into one and broke down the barrier of the dividing wall, by abolishing in His flesh the enmity… and might reconcile them both in one body to God through the cross, by it having put to death the enmity.
Ephesians 2:14-16, NASB1995
Having put to death the enmity. The war did not end because someone surrendered. It ended because the hostility itself was executed, in His flesh, at the cross. Christ did not just carry your sins. He killed the war.
What That Settles
If you believe you were merely broken, you will spend your Christian life bringing God repairs. You will keep showing up with evidence, hoping the improvement holds and the relationship stays warm. And every failure will feel like it reopens the question of whether you are all right with Him.
If you believe you were an enemy who has been reconciled, three things are settled and they stay settled:
- The peace is not yours to maintain. You did not broker it and you cannot break it. It was made in His flesh, at the cross, before you had an opinion about it.
- Your worst day does not reopen hostilities. He knew what you were when He reconciled you. He was not working from an incomplete file.
- The relationship is not probation. Colossians says the goal was to present you holy and blameless and beyond reproach. That is not a man on parole. That is a man brought all the way in.
And Paul adds a promise on top of the pardon, in that same verse in Romans 5. If God reconciled you while you were His enemy, by the death of His Son, then how much more will He carry you the rest of the way now that you are His son, by the life of that same Son. The hard part is behind Him. The hard part was the war.
The Only Thing Left to Do
There is a reason Paul does not end this section with a doctrine. He ends it with a plea, and it is one of the strangest sentences in the New Testament, because the offended King is the one begging:
Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were making an appeal through us; we beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
2 Corinthians 5:20-21, NASB1995
Be reconciled. Not repair yourself. Not improve until you qualify for a hearing. The terms have already been set, the price has already been paid, and the offer is not a truce. It is adoption on the other side of a war you lost.
You were not just lost. You were an enemy. And He came for you anyway, while you still were one.
Teaching the Word. Watching the Times.
— SmithForChrist