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In Christ, Mark
In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.
“I,
even I, am He who blots out your transgressions, for My own sake, and
remembers your sins no more. Review the past for Me, let us argue the
matter together; state the case for your innocence. Your first father sinned;
those I sent to teach you rebelled against Me. So I disgraced the dignitaries
of your temple; I consigned Jacob to destruction
and Israel to scorn.”
Isaiah 43:25-28
This ends this
reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
Take a moment to think about all
the sins you have committed in a lifetime. It’s not something pleasant to
consider is it? I know it isn’t for me.
Now think about all the sins your
immediate family has committed. Maybe those would be the sins of your spouse or
maybe those could include the sins of your father, mother, or siblings. Ditto
for any children you may have (I have two adult daughters).
Next, think about their fathers,
mothers, and children and the generation before them and the generation before
them. Before long, the tally of sinfulness becomes exponential. It’s not a
pretty picture is it.
You see, we tend to minimize the
matter of sin. We like to talk about all the feel-good parts of life and side
step the dirty little secrets that we all have failed and fallen to meet our
Lord’s word, will, and way, ever and over and over again. We never seem to
learn from the mistakes of the past but tend to repeat past errors as if we are
sending the message to God that we don’t deserve His judgment but rather only
His blessing. We want to somehow justify ourselves before God and defend our
actions in some way that might win us acquittal without any other intervention.
In other words, we have a real
tendency to minimize our transgressions in life and we do so in plain sight of
the God who is just and powerful, a God who despises sin.
You see, had it not been for sin
entering the world at the fall of Adam and Eve in Eden’s garden, God would not
have had to make the decision to give up His only Son Jesus as a living
sacrifice to pay the penalty for sin once and for all. Sin is what put His Son
on the cross, dying an excruciating death alongside common criminals when He
Himself was completely innocent. The sin that we want to so often ignore was
not something that God was willing to and thanks be to Him for that. For if He
had, we would live today with no hope of salvation, only the future of eternal
damnation.
I believe our scripture passage
today, the final verses from what has been an amazing journey through Isaiah
43, is meant to remind us that we stand guilty before God as a result of our
wicked sinfulness, without hope and unable to save or defend ourselves. Look at
these words:
“I, even I, am He who blots out your
transgressions, for My own sake, and remembers your sins no more. Review the
past for Me, let us argue the matter together; state the case for your
innocence. Your first father sinned; those I sent to teach you rebelled
against Me. So I disgraced the dignitaries of your temple; I consigned
Jacob to destruction
and Israel to scorn.” Isaiah 43:25-28
Did you hear God speaking to you as
He was His people so many years ago?
“Review the past for Me, let us argue the matter together; state the
case for your innocence.”
How can we possibly respond to
this? What defense can we offer?
The truth is that we have no answer
except that we stand guilty before a just God, a God who knows no inequity in
His verdicts and rendered consequences. We are no more innocent than our
ancestors before us and their ancestors and their ancestors as we trace all the
way back to Adam and Eve where this sin train began.
That’s where we stand before God.
That’s why we need Jesus.
You see, God is a just God and He
is also a forgiving and loving God, a Creator Father of us all who was not
willing to see His precious children perish and so He provided a way to be
saved from all the transgressions we have committed, a way to have our dirty,
filthy sin-stained selves washed white as snow, a way for us to live with Him
forever, even though this worldly life may end.
The way was through the One who
told us He was the way and the truth and the life, the only Way to the Father.
The way was Jesus who allowed Himself to be brutalized in our place and through
His shed blood, cleanse us from our iniquities.
Through Jesus, we are saved and set
free to live forever but it came at a terrible cost. As we continue to march
toward Good Friday and another visit to the cross, let none of us ever forget that
we are only able to stand before that cross justified because of what God, our
just and forgiving and loving Father, did to blot out our transgressions
through the sacrifice of His Son, our Savior, Jesus, who will rise from the
grave in victory on Easter Sunday and remind us that we are victorious as well
when we place our belief and faith and trust in Him. Alleluia!
Amen.
In
Christ,
Mark
PS: Please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it.
Send any prayer requests to OurChristianWalk@aol.com
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