It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that something is wrong with the world. Evil is all around us. People do terrible things. Nature is both a benevolent and a destructive force. As we get older and begin examining our world, we notice that life just doesn’t add up. It’s not fair.
Why do we spend so much of our life trying to make things right? We try to make things right with our parents. We have to make things right with our friends. We need to make things right at work. Why is it that so much of life is not right? The Bible tells us the answer. Our world is not working the way God designed it to work. People don’t live the way God designed them to live. The Bible tells us that God created a happy and holy world, where all creatures lived together in peace and harmony. But everything changed when Adam and Eve rebelled against God by eating the forbidden fruit.
Ever since that time, mankind has been estranged from God. We have been running away from God. As Romans 3:23 says, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” This means that you aren’t right with God. You never have been. All the problems in the world around us? They stem from the fact that mankind is not right with God. This mess we see around us is our mess, and there is no way we can fix it. This is the bad news.
But if I’m not right with God, how can I get right with God? What is the solution? Is there something I can do? The purpose of this study is help you answer these questions and more. We have to start with the bad news, because Adam and Eve’s first sin is what brought this mess upon us. Because of their rebellion, we stand under the wrath of God. We inherit their brokenness. From there we will take a long look at Christ’s work on the cross. We will discover together how Jesus deals with God’s wrath and secures for us eternal life, how he reverses the badness brought into the world by Adam and Eve.
This is ultimately a study about your hope. As the New City Catechism asks "What is our only hope in life and in death?" It answers, "That we are not our own but belong, body and soul, both in life and death, to God and to our Savior Jesus Christ."
In Christ, God justifies you and makes you His own. In Christ, you belong to Him. Enjoy!
