God’s Work of Salvation is the Providence of Restoration

The sinful world brings humankind sorrow and causes God to grieve (Gen. 6:6). Would God abandon this world in its present misery? God intended to create a world of goodness and experience from it the utmost joy; yet due to the human Fall, the world came to be filled with sin and sorrow.

If this sinful world were to continue forever in its present state, then God would be an impotent and ineffectual God who failed in His creation. Therefore, God will save this sinful world, by all means.

To what extent should God save this world?

He should save it completely. First, God must expel the evil power of Satan from this sinful world (Acts 26:18), thereby bringing it back to its original state prior to the Fall of the human ancestors. Salvation must then continue until the good purpose of creation is fulfilled and God’s direct dominion is established (Acts 3:21).

To save a sick person is to restore him to the condition of health he had before the illness. To save a drowning person is to restore him to the state he was in before he fell in the water.

Likewise, to save a person suffering under the yoke of sin means to restore him to his original, sinless state. In other words, God’s work of salvation is the providence of restoration (Acts 1:6); (Matt. 17:11).

The human Fall was undoubtedly the result of human mistakes. Nevertheless, God also assumes some responsibility for the outcome because it was He who created human beings. Therefore, God has felt compelled to conduct the providence to correct this tragic outcome and to restore human beings to their true, original state.

Furthermore, God created us to live eternally. This is because God, the eternal subject partner, wanted to share eternal joy with human beings as His object partners. Having endowed human beings with an eternal nature, God could not, by the laws of the Principle, simply annihilate them just because they fell. If He were to do that, He would be violating His own Principle of Creation. The only choice left to God is to save fallen people and restore them to the original, pure state in which He initially created them.

When God created human beings, He promised to help us accomplish the three great blessings (Gen. 1:28). He declared through Isaiah, “I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it” (Isa. 46:11), meaning that despite the Fall, God has been working to fulfill His promise to us through the providence to restore these blessings. He sent Jesus to restore us to our original, ideal state, as we can discern from Jesus’ words to his disciples, “You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matt. 5:48).

An original, ideal person is one with God and has realized a divine nature; thus, with reference to the purpose of creation, he is perfect as God is perfect.