“He has caused his wondrous works to be remembered; the LORD is gracious and merciful.” How will you respond?
That is where we ended the last post. How have you responded? Have you read God’s Word this week, looking for the reasons behind why you should do what God asks of you? It is a precious truth that God walks with us as we grow, giving us reasons why we should trust Him, why we should obey Him, why we should walk the path He has for us instead of attempting to forge our own.
We have the inestimable privilege of responding to what He has already done. He does not leave us to build a system of religion. He does not expect us to draw up our own blueprints for life. Too often we look at the horizon of our days with the idea that we must choose either to seek our own delights, defying anyone to tell us we’re not doing it right, or to cower under the weight of expectations, hoping that we get it right and that God will be satisfied.
God calls us to more than this. He offers each of us something better. Instead of our own story, a small drama that unfolds in our limited days, He has given all of us a grand story, an epic that is big enough for each of us to live in together, with purpose and joy more abundant than what we have ever dreamed.
We find that story in the Bible. More than anything else, the Bible is the epic tale of God’s creation and what He has done to redeem it. He fashioned this world perfectly and placed humans in it to govern and grow it according to His purpose, but through their disobedience those same humans brought about its fall. It was soiled with a stain that would spread throughout all of it, making it a worthless tragedy.
Remarkably, God saw past the tragedy and envisioned the opportunity to demonstrate His glory and justice and love for His creation to see. Where the reality was one of destruction and pain, God saw the possibility of restoration and wholeness, and so He set in motion His plan to rid His creation of its self-inflicted misery. God promised an individual and his descendants to use them to bring about His purposes. Regardless of their success or failure, obedience or faithlessness, God continued to work, promising to redeem and renew what He had created. In terms ranging from lovingly soft to shockingly stark, God declared that they could experience the benefits of participating in His plans or the pain of choosing their own way.
Those of us who know the story know what God has done: He Himself became human in the person of Jesus Christ and dwelled among us, experiencing our sorrows without succumbing to the evil that has overtaken us all. He was wrongly sentenced to death, bearing His own judgment for the evil we had perpetrated, and died. However, death had no hold over the perfect One who had created and had not been infected by the evil that led to death. He rose again, defeating sin and death, and now offers that victory to those who would have it.
Just as He offered those before us the chance to participate in His purposes and experience its blessing, He offers us victory over sin. Despite the evil that infects us all, we can have a relationship with the God who made us and who values us enough to bear the consequences of evil on our behalf. He offers us the chance to take part in His story, the real story, instead of looking to make our own.
This offer implies that the story is not finished. Indeed, it is not. The Bible tells us that just as Jesus came to defeat sin and death, He will return to eliminate evil once and for all. It’s hope beyond imagination, and God promises it to us. It’s a story big enough for all of us to live in, if only we will step into it. God has truly caused His wondrous works to be remembered, and they demonstrate Him to be gracious and merciful!
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