God's plan

Sorry this is so long... I have the day off and woke up really early... so here are my meditations on childbearing and Easter..

I am being reminded lately that God's plan is usually different than what I would have planned, had I been given the authority to plan anything. This is not a bad thing. Usually it points to my own ignorance, sinfulness, or just plain lack of creativity :) Praise God for his plan(s)!

For example - if you had to design a method of procreation, would you have come up with conception/gestation/labor/delivery/recovery? Would you have made a newborn baby so fragile and in complete dependence of his parents while at the same time hearty enough to make it through the birthing process and sturdy enough to survive new parents trying to figure out how to physically care for him? How about a woman's body during this whole process - my Mom keeps reminding me how amazing God's creation of our bodies is in all of the different functions that it does and all of the changes it goes through during pregnancy and birth. Praise God for his creative and amazing creation! I feel like we stand in awe looking at beautiful landscapes, seascapes, and starry skies but I forget to really consider how awe-inspiring the human body is - we worship and serve an awesome God!

But what is even more amazing and what should fill us with more awe and wonder is God's plan of redemption for us. Do any of us fully understand the Trinity? Is that even possible? I can't understand why God would choose to create us in the first place - He, one being in three persons, eternally perfect and lacking nothing/no-one, chose to create. It was good - for a while. And when that creation sinned, He didn't destroy it and start over or just go back to being perfect without creation. Instead he chose to be glorified through creation.

So here we are several thousand years later - still steeped in sin, living in a fallen creation, surrounded by natural disasters, death, sickness (frequently tragic), lawlessness, greed/corruption, etc... the list goes on. Even when the disasters, sickness, and death aren't direct results of someone's individual sin they are symptoms of the fallen creation - without sin none of these would exist! And yet God, who is perfectly holy and just and perfect (and requires perfection) doesn't destroy us. Even the earth we work is fallen. Everything around us cries out for redemption - for something or someone to come and fix it or to at least alleviate the suffering. I can barely watch the news for fear of hearing of the disgusting, abominable things people do to each other.

"BUT GOD... "

I, like our pastor Brad, love that phrase. It's heavenly! It's like dripping soap into a greasy pan - all the grease disperses and after a little scrubbing everything is clean and shiny again. Praise God for his "grease-fighting action" against our sin! But is it the plan I would have come up with? No. Is it better than anything I could possibly have invented? Absolutely. And certainly more effective! But contrary to what I hear on the radio and see on "evangelical TV," God's redemptive plan wasn't easy. It, like my dirty pan, required work - and dirty work - to accomplish. And just like I don't know what exactly is in the soap that cleans my pan or why it works the way it does, I don't know what Christ went through to secure my redemption.

I may not be a murderer or child molester but I absolutely fall short of God's requirement of perfection. He's not like me - I let my students' bad behavior slide, I'm inconsistent, and I don't give appropriate consequences - even on my best days! No, God is consistent. And he is just. The wages of sin - ANY sin - are death. Period. End of story. It's perfection or sin: those are our two choices. And anyone who's spent 5 minutes with anybody else (or just themselves, for that matter), can testify that we all sin. Even just a little bit... but the size doesn't matter because sin is sin and no matter what the sin is, it's defiance of God's standard (putting aside the physical consequences of our sin have a wide range depending on the sin itself - I'm speaking spiritual here). So we're all in the same, sinking, boat. No, scratch that - the boat is sunk and we're dead. Dead in our transgressions. All of us. From Mother Theresa to the Pope to the Uni-bomber, to my friends' sweet children, to me. And you, whoever you are reading this. We're corpses. If we don't acknowledge our sinfulness and the spiritual consequences of that sin then we're no better off than the corpse in the morgue.

"But GOD..."

... spent hundreds of years giving us hints of how he would redeem us, finally culminating in the cross of Christ. Praise the Lord he chose to send the Holy Spirit to inspire men to write these down as scripture. And praise God the Holy Spirit opens our eyes and hearts today to respond! My plan certainly wouldn't have required a blood sacrifice. But then my plan would have compromised God's justice. Since sin requires death, somebody has to die for my sin. So Jesus was born, and lived, fulfilling EVERY prophesy given about him in the Law and the Prophets (Old Testament). And then he was betrayed, beaten, was the "suffering servant" that Isaiah spoke about, and ultimately murdered, hanging cursed on a tree, then buried. The only perfect person who ever lived, never sinning, completely fulfilling God's requirement of perfection, is our spotless lamb - sacrificed to fulfill the lawful and perfect requirement of death for sin. And amazingly enough, Jesus went willingly, completely obedient to the Father's will (with which he was perfectly aligned), fully knowing what would happen to him.

"But GOD..."

... didn't stay dead. No, after Jesus died for my (and your) sins, he conquered and overcame death by rising - alive again! And alive still! Further fulfilling scriptural promises of his bodily resurrection (and ensuring ours), and ascension into Heaven. Which we know is a real place because he, in his physically resurrected body, sits there NOW. The dirty work is finished. He is triumphant, glorified, and exalted. PRAISE GOD!

Praise God for HIS plan. For ALL of his plans. Praise God that in the last days he will redeem all of creation and everything will be made new. Praise God that there will be no more suffering, pain, or death. Sin will be NO MORE and all of the earthly consequences of sin will be wiped away and creation will again be GOOD.

Praise GOD for his mercy and loving-kindness and for his timing. His mercies are new every morning. Great is YOUR faithfulness, oh God our father!

Praise God from whom ALL blessings flow! Praise him, all creatures here below, praise him above, ye heavenly host. Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. AMEN!