Jesus Took Our Place
#16 IN MY CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER JOURNEY THROUGH ROBERT MCGEE’S BEST-SELLING BOOK, THE SEARCH FOR SIGNIFICANCE..
Does God determine opinion polls to determine truth?
Does your and my opinion affect what truth is?
If something is true about spiritual things, does that affect the nature of that truth?
Does truth matter anyway?
Does God ever change truth?
Does God accommodate man or is man meant to accommodate God?
Absolute Versus Relative Truth
we should think carefully about the above questions. There are some who would argue that information about God and what He has said, while true, is only relatively so. This is man attempting to make God subservient to themselves because they cont want to be subservient to God.
This posting will begin to discuss the “hard side” of God. It is also the reason we can depend on God and His word. God is holy. To be true to His holiness, God punishes those whose righteousness is not that same as His.
Seems Unfair To Some
To some this might not seem fair. Many things God says about sin may seem unfair to you. We may think, “God, You are so big, why can’t you overlook some things?” But God and what He does are not up for vote. He believes that He has a right to determine all the rules, and He does. He won’t change to be more popular.
Only if we understand the horror of coming under the wrath of a holy God for our sins will we appreciate what Christ did on the cross. Every day our minds should be overwhelmed by thankfulness for what He did on our behalf.
Jesus’ Ultimate Sacrifice For Us
When Chris dies on the cross, He was our substitute. He took upon Himself the righteous wrath of God that we deserved. The depth of God’s love for us is revealed by the extremity of His actions for us. The holy son of God became a man and died a horrible death in our place. Two passages state this very clearly.
“Yet it was our weaknesses he carried;
Isaiah 53:4-6
it was our sorrows that weighed him down.
And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God,
a punishment for his own sins!
But he was pierced for our rebellion,
crushed for our sins.
He was beaten so we could be whole.
He was whipped so we could be healed.
All of us, like sheep, have strayed away.
We have left God’s paths to follow our own.
Yet the Lord laid on him
the sins of us all.”
And from the New Tessament:
“God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him. This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins. Dear friends, since God loved us that much, we surely ought to love each other.”
1 John 4:9-11
In my next posting I will introduce the term “propitiation,” and discuss why this is so meaningful to all who have placed their faith in Jesus as their Savior and Lord.
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