Good morning,
Almost all of us know the verse that begins, For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, but we often don’t give much thought to how God was able to carry out his plan in the face of the power of his sworn enemy. Before Jesus ever spoke our world and our heavens into place, God the Father and Jesus the Creator Son and God’s Holy Spirit put together a plan that would make their plan for creation an opportunity to develop a willing eternal love relationship with those they created. Willing love would require a choice and a way of dealing with the rebellion and sin that would soon blossom and grow in their beautifully created world. Satan and the angels who followed him wanted this world for their own and were allowed to challenge Adam and Eve with clever lies to trust the serpent rather than their Creator. When Peter was writing about this issue he wrote about Jesus, God chose him as your ransom long before the world began, but he has now revealed him to you in these last days.(1Peter 1:20) When Jesus confronted Adam and Eve and the Serpent about what they had done he warned them that what had begun in this new world would not always be the way Satan had planned. Jesus said, And I will cause hostility between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel. (Genesis 3:15)
That short statement was the basic guideline for what the Lord revealed to his people over the centuries that followed. In Isaiah 53 the Holy Spirit laid out a detailed account of how God would deal with this issue more than 600 years before the Savior was born. One piece of this plan reads, 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. (Isa. 53:5,6) When Jesus came as a man and then publicly demonstrated he was the Son of God, he was trusted by some, hated by many and finally physically attacked by Satan’s followers. Jesus never came under the control of those who hated him. When he was praying in the garden he told the disciples there, “My soul is crushed with grief to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.”(Matthew 26:38) Luke tells us that, He prayed more fervently, and he was in such agony of spirit that his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.(22:44) That deadly spiritual attack failed and later when Peter tried to fight for Jesus he was rebuked and reminded that if Jesus wanted to stop this event he could call on thousands of angel to come to his rescue. At every other stage of what happened that day, Jesus insisted on following his Father’s plan exactly as promised. Jesus was not a victim at any point. He was the aggressor. No one could stop his loving plan to pay the full price of the sins of all mankind for all of time. Jesus showed us what real love looks like. Peter ended his comments on this topic by saying, You were cleansed from your sins when you obeyed the truth, so now you must show sincere love to each other as brothers and sisters. Love each other deeply with all your heart.(1Peter:1:22) Dear Lord, please help us not to miss the point of what you did there on the cross for us that day.
1 Peter 1:20 God chose him as your ransom long before the world began, but he has now revealed him to you in these last days.
Roy Wisner
