Grace Before the World Began

The good news of the gospel is that God has saved us and called us to a holy life — not because of anything we have done but because of His own purpose and grace. This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the world began. This is essentially what Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 1:9. He says something similar in Ephesians 1:4: “For God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world that we should be holy and blameless before him in love.”

We are saved by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8). Saved by the grace of God granted us in Christ Jesus before the world began. Saved by the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. For we are God’s workmanship, God’s doing (not our own), created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10).

How were we chosen and created in Christ Jesus? It was not by anything we have done or ever could do. It is purely by the grace of God and the faithfulness of Jesus Christ before the world ever came to be. It is by the Incarnation, by which Christ united divinity with humanity, God with humankind — and eternity with time. It certainly happened in time, but by that union, time itself was transfigured by eternity. And so were we chosen and created in Jesus Christ, “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.” As as I have said elsewhere, Christ Crucified and Risen is the foundation of the world).

In our human frame, we think of past and present and future as three different moments, a linear succession. But there is really only one moment, the Eternal Moment. It is the moment of divine love and grace and faithfulness, the moment of the Incarnation, the moment of the Cross and Resurrection, the moment of Creation — and also the moment of the completeness and fulfillment of all things.

God made known to us the mystery of His will according to His good pleasure, which He purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment — to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ. (Ephesians 1:9-10)

Our Lord Jesus Christ did not merely come in the fullness of time; he himself is the fullness of time. In him, time has come to its completion. What we experience as temporal succession, within our limited perspective, is in reality the fullness of time transformed by Jesus Christ, in whom all of time is revealed. It is one with the Eternal Moment, in which all things in heaven and on earth are brought to unity and summed up in Christ.

Christ Shatters Our Delusions

Here is the primary thing: Jesus Christ is the Logos, the Word of God, who indeed is God. Through Christ, God created humankind in the image of God — to be like God. Our delusion was that we could ever be divine on our own, apart from God, determining for ourselves what is good and what is evil. Apart from God, and the goodness of God, we experienced evil and its relentless pull toward non-being. We became futile in our thinking, and our foolish hearts became dark.

By the Incarnation, our Lord Jesus Christ united himself with all humankind, joining divine being with human being. He became not just one of us; he became one with us. Not merely a human being, he became Human Being itself, defining for us what is means to be human. He is the humanity of which all humankind partakes, the truth of who we really are. Our true identity, our true self, is found in him alone.

And so Christ entered into our darkness and our delusion, for he is the True Light, who gives Light to everyone in the world. Our darkness could not overcome it, our delusion could not comprehend it, but is itself overcome by it. The same John who tells us this, in John 1, also tells us, “the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining” (1 John 2:8).

Christ, the True Light, has come into the world and has never ceased to shine, so the darkness is already passing away and must finally succumb to his Divine Light. In Jesus Christ, then, God has come to shatter our delusions from the inside out.

The Saints Are Alive and Well

The Saints are not dead and gone. They are alive and well in the unhindered presence and glory of our Lord Jesus Christ, where all is unveiled. They are with us and we are with them, because they are with Christ and he is with us, ever and always. This is the Communion of Saints, which the Church has long confessed in the third portion of the Apostles’ Creed:

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Holy Catholic Church,
the Communion of the Saints,
the Forgiveness of Sins,
the Resurrection of the Body,
and the Life Everlasting. Amen.

Lord Jesus said, “I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even if he dies, and the one who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26).

Do you believe this? The early Church certainly did, for it is the gospel. And so they believed in the Communion of Saints.