God cares about us
June 16, 2008 (MONDAY)
I watched a movie recently that was full of suspense. As the plot unfolded, the characters moved from not knowing each other to getting acquainted to entanglement. Ingenious writing presented a plot in which people came to know each other, then slowly became involved with each other as the suspense began to build. Their activities became more and more dangerous, and as I watched, I wanted to call out to them, “Don’t do that! Don’t go there! Don’t say that!” The situation grew intense and I grew nervous, so much so that I wanted to turn off the program. But I kept watching as the story unfolded.
I wonder if God ever wants to say to us, as he watches the story of our lives unfold, “Don’t do that! Don’t go there! Don’t say that!” But He does not interfere. He gave us free will. The decisions are ours. We cannot expect God to intervene every time we mess up.
As God watched human history unfold, He saw us bring sin into the world and get ourselves tangled up, like a spider’s victim in a web, in a faulty value system of our own making. He finally intervened with an act so selfless that it breaks the hearts of sinners when they first hear about it: He gave up His only Son so that we might know that He loves us and wants to help us. Jesus said he came to earth “to seek and to save that which was lost.”
He told us stories about a woman who lost her money and frantically searched until she found it, about a shepherd who searched for one lost sheep risking his own life as he searched and finally rescued it, and about a father who longed for his rebellious son’s return to home and family, and one fine day. when the son returned, had a big celebration because the family was complete again. In each story there was a seeker – of a coin, a sheep, a son. In real life God Himself is the seeker and he is looking for you.
We have missed the point of the Bible if we make it primarily a book of predictions about the future, or a system of laws that emphasize condemnation and punishment. The overriding message of the Bible is that God loves us and has taken extreme measures, the death of His Son on a cruel cross, to save us. It is a message of marvelous, unsurpassed grace, offered to everyone who will accept it.
“Marvelous grace, infinite grace, grace that will pardon and cleanse within,
Marvelous grace, infinite grace, grace that is greater than all our sin.”