Theology and the Way to Salvation - Essay Example

?669089 Doctrine The Way to Salvation Lent Genesis 9:8-17 Peter 3:18-22 Mark 9-15 God is loving and forgiving. He is also all-generous. In his generosity and unconditional giving and forgiving, He gives us Paradise to be with Him in perfect harmony. But we are unfaithful to Him despite this overflowing love. We disobey His one and only order of compliance to stay in His favor. We exhibit this unfaithfulness right in the face of His expectations that we will love Him in return and recognize how much He cares for us. We continue to be sinful and disobedient to the point of abandoning Him and paying homage to other gods which earns His displeasure. In his disappointment, He sends the floods to destroy all His creations, save for the family of Noah, His chosen one, who lives up to His model behavior. Such a punishment God deeply regrets doing and thereupon enters into a covenant with Noah and all his descendants that never shall any such holocaust come upon His chosen people. As a reminder of that covenant, God sends forth the symbol of His reconciliation, the rainbow, which appears whenever clouds would form in the horizon. In addition, He gifts man with the power over all living things so that he may be able to live to the fullest according to his creative endowments and thus live in God’s continuing favor. But do we recognize God and the continuing favor He bestows upon us? Or instead of resting upon the credits of our inheritance from His outpouring of love, we choose to exhibit our forefathers’ disobedience and do as we please according to our desires and forget our covenant with Him? The first reading reminds us of this agreement that binds us all descendants of Noah. Let us remember God’s unconditional love and His ever-flowing mercy and forgiveness. At the same time, let us remind ourselves of the sign of God’s promise and the equivalent response befitting a beneficiary of God’s provisions. Do we abide by our end of the covenant or do we continue to lead our lives according to our worldly tendencies ignoring our contract conditions? Lent is the time of our lives to recognize our disobedience and sinfulness. It is also the time to change our ways. Lent is a rainbow that invites us to an introspection. God offers a continuous path of righteousness and uprightness to earn His favor, even as we reject His only Son who He sends to redeem us from our brokenness. Jesus Christ is the fulfillment of god’s promise of salvation. Jesus is the evidence of His undying love for us His children. God loves us so much that instead of punishing us in the way of the Floods, He takes the opposite track of offering His son to die that all of us may live. And God knows how we would respond: we reject Jesus, we spit at him, we kick him, we insult him, we stone him, we do everything and anything but love him. Yet for all of these responses, our God who is in Jesus takes them all in silent submission till His crucifixion and death on the cross. We would crucify our own God and Savior to His death, and just as it was written, Jesus resurrects to tell the world, including his tormentors and crucifiers, that all is forgiven. That’s how much we are loved. How much do we love in return? Lent is a rainbow that calls us to our covenant, and as we enter this season, let us remember what and how we have been to Jesus. It is almost definite that whatever we are or have been, a saving grace is always waiting to welcome us to the loving Father, as Peter in the second reading reminds us. Our life may not be a life in Jesus but if the crucifiers have been embraced by the Father, no other indiscretion or sin could be more serious as not to be forgiven and accorded loving mercy. A recourse is ever available to allow us a renewal of our baptism in the Lord’s favor. Our sinfulness is our own temptation in the desert and even when we have mired ourselves a great distance away from Jesus, the same sinfulness can be our entry passage to a life of repentance and fullness. No longer will we be punished with the rampaging waters of the Flood, for Jesus is alive to remind us of God’s promise that never shall such Floods happen again. Jesus is waiting for us in many different forms: in the Sacraments, in the Scriptures, in the people that we meet, in our families, our friends, our neighbors, our associates, the beggar knocking at your door. Jesus is simply asking us to return and believe in Him for our salvation. Critical Commentary According to Clines (1972 p 131), the Flood narrative as depicted in Genesis is seen as a punishment for human sin and is a narrative of God’s dealings with man, with the “Flood as an expression of His will and activity.” It is Clines’ (1972) opinion that God alone takes responsibility for that catastrophe; God was sorry but not angry. Clines(1972) adds that God’s relationship to man that was depicted then was that of a Judge, and as judge, God was concerned with man’s moral ways. It is said that God sent the Flood because of the great wickedness of man on earth: the corruption, the violence, man’s weakness to flesh, lust for power. The same sins afflict modern society but in more contemporary forms such as high technology, destruction of nature and other elements of the secular world that seek to achieve independence, indicating that the vestiges of the original sin have descended with man’s evolution. The Flood also depicts the plan of God to “uncreate” but the sin of the old has not been erased by the Flood and is seen to have been carried forward (Clines, 1972). Human nature remains the same. But the rainbow serves as an assurance that God’s act of uncreation will not be repeated despite man’s continual disobedience. The temptation of Jesus narrative tells of the return of Jesus to Galilee to begin His ministry but not after His temptation by the devil. The temptation of Jesus shares a similar theme in the temptation of Adam by the snake in the garden of Eden that caused Adam the loss of God’s favor over him. This incident represented man’s original disobedience that seemed to have been inherited down the generations, an inheritance that became the reason for the sending of the Flood to uncreate man. Obviously, the Flood, while succeeding in wiping out all living things save for those favored by Noah, did not necessarily succeed in uncreating man, for man’s nature stayed with him. Thus the temptation goes on until the time of Jesus but not like in the garden of Eden where Adam surrendered to the tempting of the devil. In the case of Jesus, the temptation did not succeed because Jesus did not accommodate the devil’s biddings. The message in Lent is the call to follow Jesus as he propagates his ministry. References: Clines, D. (1972). The Theology of the Flood Narrative, Faith and Thought 100.2 pp128-142, 1972-3 Mathison, K. (2008). The Temptation of Jesus, Table Talk Magazine. February 1, 2008. Ligonier Ministries Read More