Day 8: Living Daily in Reality: Why make us in His Son?
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We’re talking about the one human being in the world who had the power to
die and come back to life for more than a month in the first century of
our present era. He is also the man that has been regarded as the wisest
and most ethical human being by both religious and non-religious
philosophers. He behaved and spoke as one would expect the son of the
creator to behave, and he said that you and I were made inside him before
the world was created.

Why would our maker make us inside his only son? This man’s
resurrection, you remember, is so reliably reported in history and fully
documented in thousands of manuscripts that our very history is divided
into B.C. and A.D.. He explained his final departure from the earth by
saying “I go to prepare a place for you that where I am there you may be
also”. It’s plain from his other statements that the creator is a loving
person who made us because he wanted other children like his only son. He
obviously made us in his son so that we would share his life and nature
and be as dear to him personally. But Jesus made it clear that his father
did not want little toy automatons but free-will people who could
actually be friends that he could love. This meant we could choose
non-existence if we wanted, so he would have to sustain us and bear the
consequences while we chose. He did this by making us inside his own son.
So our present world is the temporary effect of our current decision to
live in independent nothingness!

It also explains why so many of us have within us good and kindly
impulses along with selfish and cruel attitudes. The goodness comes from
this life of Christ within us while the hostile attitudes express our
choice of non-existence. But all of this is sustained by the only human
life that has been called “the first-born of all creation” – Jesus, the
only son of our maker. He carries us within himself along with every
consequence of our sin or independent living. As the most responsible
being in the whole universe he has committed himself to enduring whatever
we do with our free wills.

Although there is no ‘before’ and ‘after’ in eternity, let’s for a moment
talk in simple terms. A millisecond after God had his only Son he made
you and me inside his Son so that he could come to earth in the human
race. This is the meaning of those words we quoted before from the book
called ‘Ephesians’ – “we are God’s workmanship created in Christ Jesus
for good works which he has prepared beforehand that we should walk in
them”. In his son our creator works to complete his universe through us
— and bears all the negative consequences of our rejection of his life
in us. Thus this present world is a temporary picture of what life was
not meant to beLiving Daily in Reality the creator himself bears the fatal consequences of all
our autonomous actions so that we may be kept alive for a further
opportunity to accept his life within us. God is no distant, impassive

scientific experimenter observing us through a microscope — he has put
himself at risk and bears all the strains internally of his will and
nature being assaulted by children whom he loves as his only son. This is
the cost of making free-will beings and giving them every chance to make
the choice between life and nothingness.