The New City Catechism is divided into three parts. The first part focuses upon God the Father, creation, the Fall, and God’s law. The second part concerns Christ, redemption, and grace. The third part instructs us on the Holy Spirit, our restoration to God, and our growing in His grace. Although this is the second to last question in part one, there is a sense in which all of part two is simply an extended explanation of this question, for in this answer we are told of the redemption and grace that is given to us by our Redeemer.

Indeed, this answer ought to strike our souls like finding cold water in a desert after the having meditated upon the previous question and the sobering reality of God’s righteous and unavoidable punishment for our sins that it taught. Is there any way to escape? Is there even one pathway for returning back to God? Is there any possibility of fleeing from God’s righteous wrath and be saved?

Yes! There is a way to escape God’s righteous judgment! Yes! There is a way to be brought back into God’s favor! The central portion of the answer reflects those two parts to our salvation. God reconciles us to Himself, and He delivers us from sin and from the punishment for sin. Both are gloriously and eternally good news, and both are necessary for a proper understanding of the gospel.

The salvation that God has worked for us through Christ is a deliverance from sin’s consequences and from sin itself. We are delivered from the eternal, unending punishment that our cosmic rebellion against the Almighty Creator rightly earned for us. Amen!

Yet the good news does not stop there. He also reconciles us to Himself. The great sorrow of our sin is not primarily the punishment that it earned but the communion with God that it severed. Although God mercifully did not strike Adam and Eve dead the moment that they sinned, they were exiled from God’s presence which is spiritual death. Their unhindered fellowship with God was what made Eden a paradise.

Moses displayed this understanding whenever he was interceding for Israel after the incident with the golden calf. God commanded Moses to take the people into the land of Canaan and that He would send an angel before them to drive out the Canaanites. However, God Himself would not go with them. Yet upon hearing this, Moses prayed: “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth” (Exodus 33:15-16)? Moses understood that God’s presence is the supreme blessing of being God’s people.

Or as David prayed: “You make known to me the path of life; in your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” (Psalm 16:11). Indeed, we read in Revelation 21:3-4 that the great joy of our life everlasting will be that we will dwell with God and He with us.

We must also note that our salvation from the punishment of our sins and back into fellowship with God comes out of mere mercy. Ephesians 2:4-9 expresses this reality unequivocally:

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ–by grace you have been saved–and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast.

Only by God’s great love, rich mercies, and immeasurable grace are we saved. We do not contribute even a drop towards our salvation. If He did not freely choose to work our redemption, we would all be eternally damned. But thanks be to God that He is rich in mercy toward us! He Himself has worked our salvation, and He has done so through our Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who has satisfied God’s justice on our behalf, which will be explored more fully in Question 20.