It occurs to me that our only real reason for despair is that we have God as our enemy.
Circumstances can be warred with and ameliorated, or even overcome. Habits can be battled. But if God is your enemy, all is lost. No plan can succeed, no strategy prevail, no aspiration can soar to glorious heights. All is doomed. We are doomed. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool, anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.
And God had good reason to be our enemy.
Yet God showed His great love for us in that while we were still weak, still sinners, still enemies, Christ died for us.
So for those of us who are in Christ, God is no longer our enemy, nor can He ever be.
That is reason for hope in all circumstances.
Want to know more?
The Bible is a whole book about that good news; here's a book about the good news in that whole Bible.
Tuesday, October 02, 2012
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2 comments:
Ha! So I email you, and then I see this post.
Anyway, for the benefit of your readers: does this cartoon remind you of anything?
Funny you should bring this up today, as Chris Rosebrough just highlighted its antithesis yesterday. Starting at around 36:00, he quotes Doug Paggitt calling for Christians to altogether drop the atonement as the right way to "tell the story of Jesus" (surprise, surprise). He basically said the notion of a God separated from his creation in some kind of raging battle, needing a one-time bloody sacrifice to be able to fix that battle and befriend mankind is poppycock. It would be much better to focus on the "interpersonal dynamic" instead of the imagined cosmic chasm (???).
No matter that "we all... were by nature children of wrath" (Eph 2:3), and that "Christ God was reconciling the world to himself" (2 Cor 5:19). These imply the great barrier of emnity that Jesus broke down for his own sheep, and as you say That is reason for hope in all circumstances. All the clear teaching of Scripture, and some would rather trade it in for ideas from within their own minds. Chris dubbed them Paggittians.
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