At this time of year, we are commemorating Passover, the time when God set the Jewish people free from cruel enslavement by the oppressive Egyptian Pharaohs of the time. In addition, we are celebrating the act of Jesus Christ taking our place in the needed spiritual destruction of sin and its effects within all of us. The only way to do this was by the wise judgment of a Holy righteous God. This judgment could obliterate the power the substance of sin had to control us, basically rendering it impotent. So, Christ took each of our personal sins to himself. Then, after capturing this entity, he pursued his own death on the cross, allowing God to judge that sin within him instead of us, and to free us all from the cause of self-betrayal, which is what holds us captive, and drives us to the compromise of dignity and even betrayal of others. This inner struggle, against the effects of this pollution of our souls, can, at best, be delayed in our own strength, but it is a continual battle that wears us down. However, what God has done is set up an opportunity for anyone who would choose to respond to His provision, and offer a new essence of life. If we will admit our need, and simply ask Christ to enter our hearts, each person can experience Him living there by His Spirit. Through this, His nature will overcome our own inherent, self-willed, self-sabotaging nature. This Friday is Good Friday, the day acknowledging Christ’s dying on the Cross to take away our sins. Then comes Holy Saturday, normally Jewish Sabbath, which is particularly solemn, as it acknowledges the attempt of sin to persuade the hearts of mankind that death had the final word. But praise GOD, however, “Sundays a comin’!” Resurrection Sunday is when, Christ’s triumph over death, shown by His rising again, offers each of us an invitation of Eternal Life, life after judgment, made of cleaner stuff. If we will invite Jesus into our hearts, to change and then rule our nature as the Gentlemen He is, He will lovingly come to live inside us. No more inner hostilities, no more compulsion toward self-betrayal, or desire to use or devalue others will then be able to dominate us. Instead, His nature to share its capacity to forgive the betrayal of others will inhabit your soul. So you can see God set up and put everything in place. He knows our true need for freedom from inner struggle and our need for eternal life, but he will not force his nature on us. Many people complain about that aspect of God, They ask, “If He’s so all-powerful, why doesn’t He just fix everything automatically?” Well, the quandary here is ‘living with dignity.’ He died to redeem that dignity, and He will do nothing that will subvert it. So what remains is the use of our will. The real purpose of our will is to agree freely with the divine purposes of God, and central to this is our liberation from the oppression of sin. Yet we get it all muddled up, we try to ask for hybrid solutions all the time. Including our ideas based on our limited perspective, even from the collective misdirected knowledge of the best of mankind, is desiring a distortion of God’s perfect answers for our individual lives. God knows best and is a higher Love than we even comprehend. But make no mistake, He is always informed and is always Love, even when we don’t perceive the reasons for His ways. Oh yes, we still have to put something into this. On an ongoing basis, it is the practice of co-working with that nature, so it can demonstrate to you the wonders of forgiveness and truth. Much to peoples’ surprise, God is the one who has given us free will, the capacity to choose. But the sin nature invasion, by manipulating of Adam and Eve, left us with this inherited internal struggle. But God knows, even after this exchange of our sin for His nature of grace, we still stumble. We are still human after all, limited in our perception of the way sin works as a separate entity within the human condition, but having God in the human heart gives us a greater capacity to understand the failings of others, and the ability to get back up without being overcome by what could have overcome us before. I recommend you don’t miss this opportunity to visit a local church online this Good Friday and Easter Sunday. We don’t have to feel disconnected during this season. Our community is filled with people whose hearts are motivated by God to care. It often doesn’t matter if they know why, but you can recognize God’s victory expressed through every smile. Let’s all go online with God’s love through Christ’s intervention for your life.
Happy Resurrection Seasoning