God Did That

"We don't have to die like He did because He died like He did, fulfilling a plan He'd made before time began."

HE CREATED MAN in His image after His likeness in order to take on His own likeness and die for our rescue. He designed the heart to pump blood, He designed the blood that flows through our veins in order to shed His own blood that He designed in the body that was made after His likeness. The entire purpose of the blood was for it to cleanse us of our sins and to heal our bodies. Once His blood was shed, there was no more need for the heart or the blood supply in mankind. His Resurrected body is flesh and bones (Luke 24:39). His blood sits, living, on the altar of heaven (Hebrews 9:24).

He created the mind in His image and His likeness in order to be born as an infant and remember nothing He’d done, in order to grow and mature and learn who He was as human, as the Son of God (Luke 2:52). The purpose of “thinking” was so that He could choose to die and choose to be Resurrected. The mind was made in His image after His likeness so that He could walk in the Spirit, be led of the Spirit, and live in the Spirit on a scale we have not realized. He was human but, age thirty, was all the Father and all the Spirit of the Father, the Spirit of Christ. Nothing He ever said or did was outside of them, without hearing them, without knowing it came from them.

“…not only are we doing the same thing, we are the same—Father and Son. He is in me; I am in him.” (John 10:38, MSG)

He lived a life of worship. He left the multitude, He gave up sleeping and earthly comforts, He took Himself away from His disciples, to spend His time in prayer to the Father (Mark 6:46; Luke 6:12). He followed the promptings of the Spirit, who led Him into the wilderness, then into the synagogue to proclaim Himself Christ in the words of the prophet Isaiah (Luke 4:1, 18). There is a song by Bethel Music that speaks of worship as action as well as lyrics, Let my life be worship, in the ordinary. When I’m doing the dishes, when I’m doing the little things, even then, He has all of my attention. There is a place we must come to where worship stretches beyond the church building, beyond our home devotions, into a connection with heaven that spans our sleeping and our eating, when we run errands, when we drive our kids to school. To live and be inside the realm of the Spirit is to never be solely human. It’s to never think outside of what He’s thinking. It’s for our gut reactions to be God’s, our choices to be His.

“If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.” (Galatians 5:25)

It's to be fervent for Him all the time because we are full of Him all the time. He never leaves us or forsakes us, the Bible says. But to live this way, we must choose to make ourselves aware of Him, and that means laying aside what we want to do and allowing Him to change our behavior. The kingdom of darkness is a selfish one, it’s dog-eat-dog, survival-of-the fittest. The kingdom of light, God’s kingdom is humble, it’s laying our life down for the betterment of other people, it’s knowing we cannot function well alone. It’s knowing God is in us and has given all for us to live healthy and successful lives even if what the world around us says otherwise.

He is asking us to live higher, to rise up onto a new level, a new plain. To not settle for the will of the body and the human mind, but to be as bold in the Spirit, with the Spirit, as Jesus was. Who didn’t hesitate to become human, to be born as a baby, even when that would require not knowing what He’d created for a time. We see His suffering, and rightly so. But in our focus, we need His humanness as our ideal, that He would walk on water without questioning it, that He would raise the dead in front of witnesses, that He would declare Almighty God was His Father who’d sent Him here, not only to die, but to die in order to rise again.

What has God asked you to do? Philip ministered to a man then was transported from that location into another in seconds of time. Paul had dinner with a crew of sailors during the height of a storm which he had prophesied would destroy their ship. And it did. Peter was released from jail by an angel who walked him clear out of town, and not until he reached the house where the church was settled, praying for him, did he realize it wasn’t a dream. The beloved apostle John saw Jesus as Alpha and the Omega in a fantastic visit to heaven that foretells God’s plan for the future still to come. He was “in the Spirit on the Lord’s day.”

Where are we “on the Lord’s day?” On the day-to-day? These stories are not just for our reading but are so that we know our God did that, and we are inspired to greater belief in His faithfulness to do incredible things for us, with us, and through us. Not for the acts themselves but because Jesus sets our example. We don’t have to die like He did because He died like He did, fulfilling a plan He’d made before time began. Facing the cross, He said, “I have glorified thee on the earth: I have finished the work which thou gavest me to do. And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was (John 17:3-4).” In that moment, He knew far more about humankind than we can fathom. In that moment, He became the Word which was with God in the beginning, which was God who created all things. And was on the earth to wipe the plate with the devil who thought himself immune to what he didn’t know had been cooking for thousands of years.

For eons. From before the foundation of the world, when the God of heaven committed Himself to become nothing in order to give us everything.

“Therefore, when Christ himself came into the world, he said: ‘You never desired sacrifices and offerings, but you prepared a body for me; burnt offerings and sin offerings are not what your heart longed for. Then I said, ‘Here I am—I am the one written about in the Scriptures—I have come to fulfill your will of love, to reveal your true character, and to expose the lies of Satan, O God.’” (Hebrews 10:5-7, Remedy)

“But your minds were won back to love and trust in God when you understood and internalized the truth about God, revealed by Jesus—the perfect, sinless One. He chose to reveal the truth about God—to be the Remedy—before the world was even created, but it was in these last days, for your sake, that he accomplished what he had previously chosen to do. It is because of Jesus’ life and death that the lies of Satan are exposed, fear is removed, trust in God is restored, and the human species is restored back to perfection; and it is God who called Jesus to arise from the dead, and who glorified him—as he was fulfilling God’s purposes—therefore your trust and hope are in God.” (1 Peter 1:19-21, Remedy)

Image by tomkingsr at Pixabay


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Suzanne D. Williams, Author
www.suzannedwilliams.com
www.feelgoodromance.com