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The object of Jesus’ coming was reconciliation. The initiative in this reconciliation was with God. The New Testament never talks of God being reconciled to the world but always of the world being reconciled to Him. God’s attitude to people was love and it was because He so loved the world that He sent His Son, Jesus. His one object in sending Jesus into this world was to bring people back to Himself, and as Apostle Paul puts it in Colossians, to reconcile all things to Himself.

The medium of resolution was Jesus’ “blood shed on the cross”. The driving force behind reconciliation was the death of Jesus. What does Paul mean? He means exactly what he said in Romans 8:32. In the death of Jesus on the cross, God is saying to us, “I love you like that; I love you enough to give Jesus to suffer and die for you.” The cross is the proof that there are no extremes to which the love of God will refuse to go in order to win human hearts. A love like this certainly demands an answering love. If the cross of Calvary will not waken love in our hearts, nothing will.

We must also note that Paul says in Jesus – God was reconciling “all things” to Himself. The point is that the reconciliation of God extends not only to all persons who believe, but to all creation, animate and inanimate, in earth as well as in heaven. Here, Paul was no doubt addressing the false teachings then that all creation was incurably evil. In Paul’s view, the created world was not evil. It is God’s world and it shares in this cosmic reconciliation.

Finally, the aim of reconciliation is “holiness”. Jesus carried out His sacrificial work of reconciliation in order to present us to God consecrated and blameless. The fact that God loves us this much both liberates us and obliges us more than we know. In one sense, such love makes it easy because it takes away any fear of judgment or condemnation. But in another sense, it makes things almost agonizingly difficult, for it lays upon us that ultimate obligation of seeking to be worthy of that love. This obligation also requires us to stand firm in the faith and never abandon the hope of the Gospel. Out of the wonder of reconciliation is born the strength of unshakeable loyalty which demands that, through sunshine and shadow, we should never lose hope or confidence in the love of God.