on our right to eternity

I’d been having trouble figuring out why exactly Christ’s sacrifice entitled us to oneness with God and eternal life.

I understood the concept and system and logic behind penal substitutionary atonement, double imputational justification, sacrifice, temple/tabernacle mechanics, etc., but it still escaped me why we should be allowed to come to God once sin was dealt with. Why does the removal of sin automatically place us with God? Why do we deserve to rise from the grave just because God raised Christ from the grave?

I’d always looked at it as the whole whore-wife analogy, us being the whore-turned-wife of Christ. So was it simply down to Christ’s unfathomable love for us, illogical though it seems, that grants us undeserved eternity?

Yes and no.

My mother put it as us being heirs with Christ. God had always planned for creation to be eventually subject to one man, that man being Christ. We are co-heirs.

But that didn’t click with me. She saw us and Christ being from birth one, while I saw us as two-become-one.

Then she explained it as a homecoming – we were born into glory, but we’d strayed from it somewhere down the line. Christ’s atoning death allowed us to go home, where we belong.

She chuckled that I’d been away from home for too long. I saw it more worryingly as me growing complacent – I forgot that I don’t belong in the world, never have and never will. I forgot I am a sojourner, forgot who I am, forgot who my Father is – he’s where I belong.

But now I have no right anymore to go to hell.