Wednesday, April 10, 2019

He Was Crushed...for us

Thursday, April 11, 2019

But it was the Lord’s good plan to crush him and cause him grief.  Yet when his life is made an offering for sin, he will have many descendants.  He will enjoy a long life, and the Lord’s good plan will prosper in his hands.  When he sees all that is accomplished by his anguish, he will be satisfied.  And because of his experience, my righteous servant will make it possible for many to be counted righteous, for he will bear all their sins.  I will give him the honors of a victorious soldier, because he exposed himself to death.  He was counted among the rebels.  He bore the sins of many and interceded for rebels.    Isaiah 53:10-12

The process of doing theology is, simply put, attempting to get your mind wrapped around what God has said and done.  It’s as one of my professors at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, Fischer Humphries said:  Theology is thinking about God.  At the risk of presumption, I also believe it includes trying to make sense of the why of what God does.  And if there’s one concept that makes my head hurt it’s that God had Isaiah write that crushing Jesus was the Lord’s good plan.  What?  In my limited human capacity for understanding, it is hard to wrap my hurting head around how crushing your only much-loved son with a savage beating, mockery, wrongful conviction, and an infamous, brutal death, nailed like a naked buzzard to a cross on the town garbage dump could possibly be a good plan.
Now, I know asking a question of God’s motive almost treads on the holy ground of questioning God’s character.  However, this question is not one of How could, you, God; it is more like, please help me understand, God, so I can better worship and serve you.
And I think in order to understand this concept of a Father crushing his beloved son, we need the Holy Spirit’s help to get higher than our earth-bound understanding.  With that prayer offered from my heart, let me take a stab at it.  I believe there are these few necessary pieces to help understand this complex syllogism:
1.     Faith – you must, in order to believe, believe first! 
2.     Faith – you must trust that God is truly good; since, according to Scripture[iii], God is entirely good by nature, every God-deed is incapable of evil.
3.     Faith – this was God’s plan, and its goodness is odd (considering our use of the word “good” usually means “more” or “easier” or “palatable”).  But in God’s loving actions “good” is more equated with true, benevolent, and righteous.  Some not so easy, plentiful, or palatable course-corrections on behalf of a disobedient human family are what God has taken to Himself.
So it begins with faith, and it’s all about faith.  We can easily see in Scripture the holiness of Jehovah.  Virtually every page of the Bible points in some way to the other-ness of God, His holy nature and righteous ways.  No evil may even exist in His presence.  For us to ever have a hope of meeting God without being turned away because of our unholiness, there had to be a cleansing.  And because of the life issue…blood was the cost.  And because unholy blood wouldn’t suffice, it was the crushing of the holy that became God’s good plan.
In a simple illustration with which I live every day, I offer my bride.  Elizabeth got that cleanliness is next to Godliness thing as a dominant gene!  Russell…not so much!  Sometimes it is difficult to wrap my head around why every stick of furniture must be moved at least 412 times during the year to dust under there, but Elizabeth knows what it takes to have a home that actually IS clean and smells fresh without the use of cover-up sprays. 
In the same way, God won’t compromise on holiness requirements.  If you’re going to be “clean” from the inside out, it will never do to count on anything other than (or less than) the sacrifice that crushed Jesus for our rebellion!
For You Today
He was crushed for our rebellion – believe it or not, the only acceptable approach to the throne of God is to receive that forgiveness…and it is only a humble, heartfelt prayer away.
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[i] Title Image:   Pixabay.com
[ii] Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture quotations are from The New Living Translation©
[iii] Mark 10:18 (and many more)

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