For if, when we were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his Son, how much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life! Rom. 5:10, N.E.B.

Christianity is a religion of redemption, a rescue operation by the Father through His Son, Jesus Christ. This is true because only God can forgive sin. All sin is against God. What makes sin so great is that it is against persons. When we sin, we sin not against rules on a wall, but against a loving heavenly Father. Before Christ we must accept the fact that our sins are very real. They are not merely social errors about which we can say, "It does not matter." The experience of forgiveness is reserved for those who come to understand sin within our relation to a personal God and to our fellow men. Otherwise we will not seek forgiveness with a contrite heart before God.

Redemption also means that only Christ has control over the past. We all have a past. We cannot turn back the pages of time and begin all over again. Sin commands a stiff price. It sinks into our blood stream and into our nervous system. Only God has power to lay remedial hands on the past. We have no power to cleanse our past. Yet the past must be cleared if we are to experience redemption.

Furthermore, only Christ has control over the future. Dreadful as are many of the problems and circumstances of this life, they belong only to this life. Christ offers us life eternal, an entirely new kind of life in the future. In Christ there is a way out of all the agony we see in the world. We are all mortal. We all sin and die. There ought to be a future for all those who die young on the battlefields of the world, and in the deprived areas and dark places of the earth. The Christian looks forward with hope and joy to the future. We know that death comes to us all, but we also know we shall live again. Christ will restore our lives, our loved ones, our lost joys, and the perfection in which He created us. Redemption offers no less than this to us.