Accord Resolution Services

Some time ago Canadian Edition of Reader’s Digest included a short story submitted by Merrilea Young of Chase, British Columbia. She tells of her eight-year-old son who, as he was brushing his teeth one night, mused, “Do you know what I like about God?” “No,” she replied. To which her son answered, “When He made us, He didn’t use nails.”

How true that statement is! When God originally created us, He created us without nails. In our original models, Adam and Eve, we were created perfect, without blemish, without malfunction. We were created in His image. But that included the right to choose between right and wrong. It included the freedom to apply our own will. And that’s where the trouble began.

When we started doing that, we started moving further and further away from the image of God. Further away from His perfect creation and more and more towards individuals who wanted to rule ourselves and be submitted to no one’s authority. In short, the perfect creation became broken. It had to be fixed.

But rather than throw us away because we were broken, His incredible love for each of us, would only allow Him to fix us, to repair us. Any master builder would tell you it would have been so much easier to have started from scratch rather than to remodel and repair. However this time, unlike God’s work when He made us originally, this time He needed something that the eight-year-old in our story above realized God didn’t use the first time around — He needed to use nails.

But wait, He used those nails alright, but not on us. He allowed them to be used in nailing Jesus Christ, His only begotten and beloved Son, to a cross on which he bore all the imperfections of each and everyone of God’s human creations. As those nails were pounded into Christ’s flesh, we were being repaired. The work was complete when He finally died in our place. There was now the means by which we could be saved from a life of sin and death. We could be united again with God, His Holy Father, and accepted into his family as His sons and daughters.

Christ’s resurrection from the dead, after being inflicted with the nails meant for us, now secures for those that accept that act of salvation on Christ’s part, a place in His Father’s Kingdom. All we have to do is to accept the gift.

I guess the young man was right — even the second time God made us whole, He didn’t use nails on us!

Ken B. Godevenos, MBA, CCP, CHRP
Accord Resolution Services Inc.