This 1949 classic by Gulton Oursler recounting the life of Christ was an instant bestseller and has been read by millions.  Salvation history is literally His-story.  I learned about it in the Baltimore Catechism under the tutelage of the Ursuline Sisters during my elementary school years in Cleveland, Ohio.  But knowing about someone is quite different from knowing someone from personal encounters.  From a lifetime of personal encounters, I share my understanding of His-story, i.e., my statement of faith.  It is the greatest story ever told to me.

We were created to be in a relationship with unconditional love.  Jesus came into this world to reveal to us that the unconditional, uninterrupted, unending love for which we were created – is God.  One of his closest disciples passed this revelation on to us in one of his letters, inspired by the Holy Spirit (1 John 4: 16b).  “God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God and God lives in him (JB). “ “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (RSV).”  “God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God, and God in him. (NAB)”   The translations of “live”, “abide”, and “remain” convey the essence of this love: we need it to have life (live), without interruption (abide), and to have it forever (remain).  Just as all creation needs a certain environment in order to grow and be sustained (a combination of air, water, light, and nutrition), human beings need to be in the presence of unconditional love in order to grow, mature, and attain the fullness of the purpose for which we were created – perfect intimacy, unity, and harmony with unconditional, uninterrupted, unending love.

Before the created universe existed, there was only this perfect union of persons – the harmonious, intimate, trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  But Perfect Love chose a moment to share this perfect happiness.  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be.  What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race (John 1: 1-4, NAB).” 

Perfect love chose this moment to share perfect joy, and we call it the creation of the universe.  At the culmination of this process of creation, God began the human race by sharing with us a portion of his very spirit, manifested in our intellect and free will, that is, the capacity to know God and to choose God, for perfect love cannot exist unless it is freely chosen.  We existed in intimate harmonious union for a time, until we chose separation, by preferring to be our own god.  We call this the original sin.  We did so, just as other created beings had done before us.  Pure spirits that we call fallen angels had made the same choice, and had influenced the human race to join them in their rebellion (represented in the Book of Genesis by the temptation to eat fruit from the forbidden tree).

Promise Made

God could have left us with the consequences of our choice – the forfeit of our capacity to live in unconditional, uninterrupted, unending union with Him.  But God does not love according to our actions or how we treat Him.  God loves according to who He is.  And so He made a promise and began a process of reaching out to the human race and giving us the opportunity to return to our intimate union with Him – the purpose for which we were created.  It was a necessary process, because the consequences of our choice to separate ourselves from Him severely affected us.

Our intellect was darkened and we lost our intimate knowledge of who God is.  Our bodies became subject to pain, sickness, and suffering.  Our wills were warped with a permanent tendency towards selfishness and self-love.  But God patiently worked to help us rediscover who He is.  He selected a specific race and nation of people which whom to reveal these truths and develop a relationship: the Jewish people.  Our minds which had been darkened by our original sin began to be enlightened.  “God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all (1 John 1: 5b, NAB).” 

Promise Fulfilled

But someone from the human race needed to repair the relationship that had been broken.  One of us, on behalf of all of us, needed to defeat sin, Satan, and death by living a life of perfect love and obedience, including the willingness to surrender his own life to overcome our disobedience.  Jesus was sent by the Father to accomplish this in the power of the Holy Spirit.  He repaired the broken relationship between God and the human race and restored the promise of unconditional, uninterrupted, unending union with Perfect Love to those who would choose his way, his truth, and his life. (To be continued)