Thursday, May 12, 2016

Championship Pedigree

Have we caught a glimpse yet of just how monstrous our sins are and how monumental God's forgiveness is?  Perhaps a small bit of perspective is needed.  For one hundred years, Noah and his family worked on the ark that would protect them from the coming flood.  Apparently, no one thought much about the impending rain storm.  They were busy with cooking and hunting and farming and making a life for themselves.  But the most important thing, the approaching deluge was never pondered seriously by anyone except maybe Noah's family.  It was preposterous perhaps; insignificant certainly.  When the forty-two boys ridiculed Elisha and called him an "old baldhead", they were completely unprepared for what followed.  The two female bears that mauled them were the furthest things from their minds.  That is because they had no respect for the prophet of God and were oblivious to the power he possessed.  We can be thoroughly unaware of the immense iceberg before us because we are not scanning the horizon for danger.  The danger we face currently is the gross neglect of contemplation of Sin and its relationship to us.  We pass it off as a mistake or two, as an error in judgment and God declares it much worse than that.  Sin is the complete corruption and ruin of humanity and it is due to a mind saturated in rebellion against God.  When once we grab hold of the realization that Sin is far more horrific than we can conceive and that for God to overlook it is as idiotic as putting a loaded gun in the hands of a toddler, we will begin to hold to a rational view of life as it is.  Our Lord , by dying upon the Cross, evaluated the condition of humanity and determined that if He loved us, He must save us from our sins.  Save, we must use in the sense of pulling a drowning child out of the water or giving mouth to mouth resuscitation to a heart attack victim.  God has saved you out of mercy, not pity, not necessity, not obligation but out of real kindness and love for you.  You are not a victim, God was the victim.  So now you are the victor and He the champion of the world.  Consider what was accomplished when our Savior poured out His blood upon the Cross.

Carrying his own cross, he went out to the place of the Skull (which in Aramaic is called Golgotha).         John 19:17 NIV


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