What is reconciliation?

Question 07028.

Reconciliation with God presupposes something most people would rather not admit, which is that a real estrangement exists in the first place. You cannot reconcile parties who were never at odds. So before we can say anything useful about how peace is made, we have to be honest about how the quarrel started and who was responsible for it, and Scripture is not remotely coy on either point.

The New Testament does not describe the unbeliever as simply distant from God, or as somebody who has lost touch and needs reminding. Paul uses the language of enmity and hostility. There is a breach, it is moral rather than accidental, and reconciliation with God is the word for what the cross does about it.

The breach and who caused it

Paul writes that while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of His Son (Romans 5:10). Enemies is a strong word and he chose it deliberately. Elsewhere he describes people as alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, which is not a picture of neutral indifference but of active opposition. That is the human side of the estrangement.

There is a divine side too, and modern readers find it harder. God is not neutral about sin. His settled opposition to evil, which Scripture calls wrath, is not a bad temper but the necessary reaction of holiness to what destroys His creation and defies His character. A God who could look at cruelty and shrug would not be worth worshipping.

So the breach runs in both directions, and any account of reconciliation with God that only deals with our attitude has not touched the real problem. Something had to happen about guilt, not simply about feelings.

The word Paul uses

The noun is katallage, and its verb form means to change thoroughly, to exchange, and so to change a relationship from hostility to peace. In everyday Greek it could describe the settling of a quarrel or the exchanging of money for its equivalent value. Paul takes the ordinary word and puts it to extraordinary use.

What is striking is the direction of the action in his sentences. All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to Himself (2 Corinthians 5:18). God is the subject of the verb. We are the object. Nowhere does the New Testament describe God being reconciled to us by our efforts, our apologies or our improvement.

That single grammatical observation cuts the ground from under every religion of appeasement. In every other system the offended deity must be talked round. Here the offended party takes the initiative, absorbs the cost, and makes the approach. This is the great scandal and the great glory of reconciliation with God.

How the cross accomplishes it

Reconciliation is not achieved by ignoring the offence. Paul explains the mechanism in the same passage: God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and then, for our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin. The trespasses are not overlooked; they are transferred and dealt with.

This is why I keep coming back to penal substitution as the framework rather than one option among several. If the guilt was not actually borne, then the peace is a diplomatic fiction and the hostility is unresolved underneath. The cross does not paper over the breach; it removes the cause of it. For more on that, see what the atonement is.

Colossians adds that God was pleased through Him to reconcile to Himself all things, making peace by the blood of His cross. Peace by blood is a jarring phrase and it is meant to be. Peace of that quality is never cheap.

Reconciliation with God and the other salvation words

It helps to see how the great terms of salvation each answer a different question. Justification answers the legal question of guilt. Redemption answers the question of bondage and price. Regeneration answers the question of a dead nature. Reconciliation with God answers the relational question: the two parties who were at war are now at peace.

That relational emphasis is why this word warms people in a way that the more forensic terms sometimes do not. A person may grasp that they are legally acquitted and still feel that God is cool towards them. Reconciliation says the coolness is over, the hostility is finished, and the relationship is genuinely restored.

None of these terms competes with the others. They are different windows into one house, and you need all of them to see the whole of it. On the legal window, see justification; on the price paid, see redemption.

Objective and subjective sides

There is a completed transaction and there is a personal entry into it. Objectively, the work is finished. Christ has died, the offence has been dealt with, and God has acted. Subjectively, a person must receive it, which is why Paul, having announced what God has done, then pleads with people to be reconciled to God.

That plea would make no sense if reconciliation were automatic for everybody. The provision is made and the door is open, but a door has to be walked through. The message is not you are already at peace whether you like it or not; it is peace has been made, come and take it.

I find this shapes how I preach. I am not offering people a possibility that God might accept them if they perform well enough. I am announcing that the barrier has been removed at His expense, and urging them not to stay outside a house whose door has been unlocked from the inside.

The ministry handed to us

Paul does something remarkable in 2 Corinthians 5. Having described what God has done, he says that God gave us the ministry of reconciliation and entrusted to us the message of reconciliation, and that we are therefore ambassadors for Christ, God making His appeal through us.

An ambassador does not invent policy. He represents a government that has already decided its position and carries a message that is not his own. That is a wonderfully freeing job description for the nervous evangelist. I do not have to persuade God to be gracious or invent terms; I carry news that has already been settled at the highest level.

It also raises the stakes of ordinary conversation. If God makes His appeal through people, then the awkward chat over a garden fence may be the means He uses. I have seen that happen often enough to take it seriously.

Reconciliation among people

Because God has reconciled us to Himself, He expects the same currency to circulate among us. Ephesians 2 moves straight from peace with God to peace between Jew and Gentile, with the dividing wall of hostility broken down in one body through the cross. The vertical and the horizontal are joined at the same nail.

That is why a Christian who is content to hold a grudge is living inconsistently with the gospel he claims. I do not say that lightly, and I know that some breaches are complicated and some are unsafe to repair. Scripture is realistic about this, saying if possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all.

But the direction of travel is unmistakable. Reconciled people reconcile. If the doctrine has landed, it will show in your relationships before it shows in your notebook.

Who has to change for reconciliation with God?

This is the question that separates the gospel from every religious alternative. In most systems the offended party must be appeased by the offender, who brings gifts, performs rituals or improves his behaviour until the relationship thaws.

Scripture reverses it completely. God does not wait to be talked round; He acts first, at his own expense, while we are still hostile. God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). That timing is the whole point of the sentence.

So reconciliation with God begins on God’s side and ends on ours. What has to change in us is not our record, which has been dealt with, but our willingness to stop fighting and come home.

What reconciliation with God feels like

Doctrine has a texture, and this one feels like the end of a long argument. Many people carry a low background sense that God is displeased with them, which they manage by staying busy, staying religious or staying away.

The message of reconciliation with God is that the displeasure has been dealt with at the cross and the relationship is genuinely restored. Not tolerated. Restored. A person who grasps that stops performing and starts enjoying.

That is why Paul so often moves from this doctrine straight into joy. We rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. The rejoicing is not an optional extra; it is the natural sound of a quarrel that has ended.

So, now what?

If you have never come in, come. The barrier is not on God’s side any longer, and there is nothing left for you to pay. Tell Him plainly that you have been at odds with Him, that you believe His Son bore what you owed, and that you want the peace He is offering.

If you are already His, then live like someone who is at peace with God rather than someone still negotiating. And ask yourself whether there is a person you have written off. Since the whole of your standing rests on reconciliation with God that you did nothing to earn, what would it cost you to make the first move this week?

Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:1 (ESV)