We come today to the end of a series of podcasts in which we've been thinking actually for a couple of weeks about the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ.

This week we've been thinking about his work, how it is that Jesus provides for

us a propitiation that saves us from God's wrath, a justification that saves us from our guilt,

and a redemption that sets us free from our bondage in sin. So in a sense we've been visiting the temple, the law

court and the slave market. But now there's a fourth word to think about. It's the word

reconciliation. And it has to do with personal relationships. Of all these four words, it's maybe reconciliation

that has the most contemporary ring about it. It implies there's been alienation. An alienation

was, as you know, a big word in the Marxist philosophy.

It was claimed that in an industrial society workers were alienated from the fruit of their

labour.

The worker did he's working.

Somebody else took the real profits.

But we've also become increasingly familiar with the idea of alienation in personal relationships.

Husbands alienated from their wives, children alienated from their parents.

And in the world of the individual, there's a new psychological vocabulary that's developed,

an individual being alienated from himself or from herself.

And there are all kinds of ways that this idea has taken root today. We've got whole organizations

and specialists in all kinds of fields of life whose goal or expertise is to bring about reconciliation

or a new integration because alienation involves disintegration.

What the message of the Bible teaches us is that all of these alienations, these disintegrations,

have a single root.

Every human alienation is rooted in our alienation from God.

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