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Chapter 4—Relation of Education to Redemption
By sin the members of the human family were shut out from
God. Without the plan of redemption, eternal separation from God,
the darkness of unending night, would have been theirs. But through
the Savior’s sacrifice, communion with God is again possible. We
may not in person approach into His presence and look on His face,
but we can see Him and commune with Him in Jesus, the Savior.
“The light of the knowledge of the glory of God” is revealed “in
the face of Jesus Christ.” God is “in Christ, reconciling the world to
Himself.”
2 Corinthians 4:6
;
5:19
.
“The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us ... full of grace
and truth.” “In Him was life, and the life was the light of all people.”
John 1:14
;
1:4
, NRSV. The life and death of Christ, the price of our
redemption, are not only to us the promise and pledge of life, not
only the means of opening again to us the treasures of wisdom, they
are a broader, higher revelation of His character than even the holy
ones of Eden knew.
And while Christ opens heaven to us, the life that He imparts
opens our hearts to heaven. Sin not only shuts us away from God,
it destroys in the human soul both the desire and the capacity for
knowing Him. Christ’s mission is to undo all this work of evil. He
has power to invigorate and restore the darkened mind, the perverted
will, the faculties of the soul paralyzed by sin. He opens to us
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the riches of the universe and imparts the power to discern and
appropriate these treasures.
Christ is the “Light, which enlightens everyone.”
John 1:9
,
NRSV. As through Christ every human being has life, so also
through Him every soul receives some ray of divine light. Not only
intellectual but spiritual power, a perception of right, a desire for
goodness, exists in every heart. But an antagonistic power is strug-
gling against these principles. The result of eating of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil is manifest in every person’s experience.
There is in our nature a bent to evil, a force which, unaided, we
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