He's It

"He's it."

SOMETIMES you're not supposed to react. We're to grieve at sin, to feel regret at the weight of it around us, but not to take upon ourselves to rid the world of it, absent of the work of the cross. And we cannot proclaim it's for Jesus when our behavior looks nothing like His. I've said this before but, yes, He called out the hypocritical behavior around Him boldly. However, He also died for those men. In Acts, we read that many of them were saved. They saw Him as Christ. We cannot criticize those we are not willing to die for, and there's no need to die for sin. Jesus took care of that.

He's become our excuse for unrighteous behavior. Meaning acting outside of the goodness and gentleness of a loving, holy God.

God who spoke the heavens and earth into being became a fallible creature and has no regrets for that. He is pleased. He delights in being human. He did it for a purpose, to be the reason anyone is rescued. There isn't any other way to be strong and healthy inside and out, to live free of sin, and even if men can't see and don't desire that because of their fallen thinking, to be what a human man or woman was created to be than through Him. He's it. There’s one manual for human reconstruction, for how to repair the engine, and Jesus is the only one. God created all things. He knows how they should operate.

There aren’t many roads to heaven but just one. Until we see it and accept it, we won't have the fullness of it and so not the life of the Creator to function perfectly.

God became man to become King. He created Israel to show He was intricately involved in our existence. Think of all the people who had to be where they lived, when they lived, and with whom they lived in order for Jesus to be born to Mary. In order for her to marry Joseph whose lineage in Matthew 1 places Jesus on the throne. God is that intent on being with us. He's genetically the King of the Jews, and through His victorious Resurrection, the King of all humanity. We owed a debt we couldn't pay. I've wondered about this, how we could owe God anything, until I realized what we'd stolen from Him was our ability to choose.

The church has preached God gave humans the right to choose. We can choose life, to be like Him, or we can choose rebellion, to act up, as we'd say in the South. He did allow us to choose, and does allow it. But when Adam knew Eve, his wife, had made the choice to do what was forbidden, he then made a choice God had forbidden. He knowingly took on himself the mastery of his existence, saying he could choose his own way and held all the authority and power to live successfully absent of the power of God who had formed him.

All life is God's. Nothing lives and breathes outside of Him. There is no other God, no other source of life. Though men have tried to create one. What Jesus did was become one of us, He became a man, to willingly choose to give back to God Adam's choice. It could only be done by a man following God without sinning. He had to live God's will and not His own. Jesus did nothing He wanted to do, to the point of His will becoming God's will. This is where we stumble. We say we like what we like so that's what we will have, but Jesus said, "Not my will, but thine, be done (Luke 22:42)," even choosing to obey when it wasn't His choice. The one thing He didn't want to do was condemn Judas, so He begged the Father for another way then committed Himself to obey. His love was so great for the man who betrayed Him that He didn't want to cause Judas' spiritual destruction.

He died for Judas, knowing Judas would never make heaven.

Here was the cost we couldn't pay, often sung about in the church. No man or woman could have done what Jesus did. In living sinless. In living in total obedience even unto death. And in being God when His body was in the grave. Because here is the debate in the church that isn't a debate at all. Jesus was God at creation. He was God as a man. He was God when absent of His body, filled completely with the Holy Spirit. He did not die to suffer in hell. That was not the cost we owed. That was the punishment promised for our complete rebellion. The cost we owed was obedience, and Jesus fulfilled that on the earth, even not dying, NOT ABLE TO DIE, for Satan had nothing in Him, until He dismissed His breath.

“If—by the choice of one man’s distrust—selfishness and death permeated all humanity, how much more will those who accept the Remedy that Christ has achieved experience restored trust and complete healing to live forever with God! Therefore, just as Adam’s distrust infected humanity with the fatal condition of fear and selfishness, so too Christ’s choice to sacrifice self achieved the life-giving Remedy for all humanity.” (Romans 5:17-18 Remedy)

The weight of our sin did not condemn Him. He lifted it up and carried it off (Isaiah 53:4), through the power of the Holy Spirit such as only He knew. He is the first among many brothers, it says in Romans 8:29. We are now like Him, but He is the first of us, and perfect in every way. We have no sin because He washed it from us. In God's eyes, all the sinful choices men have made are gone forever. We must now choose to walk in the knowledge of it. Because the lie is out there, that we can do whatever we want, worship what we want, and die under our own terms. But see in Jesus the truth.

• I am the truth. John 14:6
• Thy word is truth. John 17:17
• Spirit of truth. John 15:26
• The Spirit is truth. 1 John 5:17
• The Father is truth. John 15:26
• God of truth. Psalm 31:5, Luke 23:46

Image by Chil Vera from Pixabay


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