A Titanic Recovery
It took twenty-six months to build the Titanic. It took two hours and forty minutes for the ship to sink to the bottom of the Atlantic after it struck an iceberg. It took more than seventy years to find the remains of the ship. And it has now been more than thirty years since its salvage has begun.
The Titanic story has captivated the world and continues to generate interest, controversy, conspiracy theories, piracy, and of course millions in revenue for its stakeholders. Perhaps this universal interest in the ship has something to do with our own history as a race.
The celestial world watched on with keen interest and great delight when God began construction of Adam and Eve. The end product was beautiful. God was satisfied with Adam and the latter was delighted with Eve (Ge.1:31; 2:23). Adam was the glory of God and Eve was the glory of Adam (1Co.11:7). Life was blissful but sadly only for a short time. The human ship ran into a dark iceberg named Satan that tore into its heart and sent it into the blackness of the deep known as sin.
But God loved his creation and would not give up on its recovery and restoration. The Son of God decided to descend to the depths of human sin and depravity and salvage God’s masterpiece. He had come to seek and to save that which was lost (Lk.19:10). And when he was done with his mission he cried, “It is finished” (Jn.19:30). He had located us and begun the process of recovery.
It would take another mission and another agent to bring us up from the bottom and restore us to our formerly pristine state. That agent is the Holy Spirit. After Jesus ascended to heaven and the Father approved his salvage efforts, he sent the Holy Spirit to begin the work of restoration (Jn.14:15-18). When we accept the saving work of Christ he sends his Spirit to work on our behalf and to do so until we are fully restored to the divine image. As we cooperate with the Spirit, we are being transformed into the image of the Lord, from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit (2Co.3:18). This is what God is after, the reimaging of man to the divine likeness (Rom.8:28).