To be Christ to the WHOSOEVER

Two things...

1) Regretful joy in heaven. I have just began reading Life as a Vapor by John Piper, and in there he writes about regretful joy in heaven. This concept made me think a good bit, and it seems logical, and wonderful.

Piper says that there will be regret in heaven, so that Christ will be most glorified. The regret that will be felt, or rather at least known of will be one for the sin that was committed and sentenced the necessity of Christ to the cross. The "joy" part of that, is how glorious the saving power of Christ on the cross is, and will ever be.

To know fully who Christ is, is to see Him as everything that He is. Therefore, we must know Him as Savior as well. To know Him as Savior, we must assume that He had to save us from something; that "something" is sin...ours. Since we will see our sin in heaven, and know that we were meant for damnation and accursed through our own choices, Christ is most glorious to us through the saving grace that He offers and we receive. So while we (who are believers) will be in heaven and with God, we will know for eternity what Christ has done: great things.

2) The idea of grafting appears many times throughout the Bible. I've always heard about how the Gentiles are grafted into the tree of life through Christ into the family of Abraham/Israel, so that they might inherit the kingdom of God.

The one thing I haven't thought about (till last night), was that all people had to be grafted into this kingdom of God: Israel, this family of Abraham's offspring (even Abraham). The grafting is a result of faith. Through faith Abraham was credited as righteous (grafted into community with God).

In the beginning, God created us for worship and community with Himself. We destroyed that through sin, however, God reconciled us to Himself through Christ and our faithfulness given to us by Him.

Abraham and everyone else in the world that is accursed (Rom 3:23), must be grafted in through faith in Christ. So while Gentiles were grafted into the Israel/Abraham family of faith, in actuality the whole world (including them) had to be grafted into restored, redeemed, regenerated community with God through faith in Christ.

Nicholas