Dear Christians, one and all, your God and Father loves you. He is not mad at you; He is at peace with you in Christ Jesus, His beloved Son. And He is not mean. You have known meanness, and you have been mean yourself, but your God and Father is not mean. He is not cruel, as the devil would have you believe, but gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, and abounding in Love.
Everything He does proceeds in Love. And in His great Love for you, He desires to give you only good things — because He desires that you should live with Him forever in faith and love.
So does your Father give you good gifts. And not only that, but He also gives you the freedom to receive them and to enjoy them. Indeed, He gives you the freedom to love Him, or to leave Him. He takes that risk, because He desires to have a real relationship with you. He would have you be His dear child, His friend, a member of His Bride, and not His slave. So He gives you freedom.
But His earnest desire is that you would love Him — that you would love and trust in Him above all others and all other things — not because He is insecure, prideful, or selfish, but that you should have true and lasting Life in Him who is your greatest good. It is true that He is jealous, as the Scriptures testify. He is a jealous God. But understand that He is jealous for you — not as though He were petty, the way that you are sometimes petty — but He is jealous for you because He loves you, the way a husband is jealous for his wife and a mother for her child. He will not permit any other gods to take you from Him, nor to rob you of His Life and Light and Love.
In much the same way, and for the very same reason, He is angry with your sin, and He punishes your sin, because your sin cuts you off from Him; your sin causes you harm and is killing you.
Therefore, your God and Father in heaven disciplines you in His great love for you, as any loving father must disciplines his sons and daughters. He thereby calls you to repentance and to faith.
You parents, if your child were running out into the road, into the path of a car, you would holler at him or her, you would reach out to stop him or her, and you would be angry — not because you desire your child’s hurt, but precisely because you desire that your child not be hurt. And when your Father disciplines you, that is likewise what He is about. But His Love is more pure and more perfect than that of any father or mother here on earth. His desire is always that you would live.
It is by repentance and faith that you live in and with Him, and that is a high and holy calling. And it is for such Life that He has created you in love. To live in that way, by faith in God, is to live as true Man in the Image of God. To live by such faith is to be truly human, to be a man or a woman as the Lord your God intends. And to live by such faith is to trust and rely upon the Word of your God and Father in all circumstances, even if everything else is screaming contradiction.
To live by faith in God is to wait on Him in steady hope and quiet confidence. It is to give thanks in both prosperity and poverty. It is to be patient in affliction. It is to be patient with your family, as your God and Father in heaven is patient and long-suffering with you. It is to be patient with your neighbor, gladly forgiving and continuing to do good to those who trespass against you. It is to suffer all manner of wrongs and hurts and sorrows in the certain promise of the Resurrection, not striking back or seeking revenge, but calling on the Lord to vindicate and save you in love. To live by faith in God is to have your heart so fixed on Him that even in death you fear no evil.
It is for such life that you have been created in the Image of God, and to such a life you are called. What is more, the One who calls you is faithful and true. He’s not playing games with you. He’s not teasing you or tricking you. The Life to which He calls you is a blessed and beautiful Life, notwithstanding the fact that it is obtained for you and given to you by the way of the Cross.
The One who calls you is faithful and true — not only because He is God, and so of course He keeps His Word and promises — but because He truly loves you from His great heart of Love. With the very depths of His Being He loves you; and everything He does proceeds in that Love.
His Love for you is unmatched and unsurpassed. But it is not uncontested. Indeed, the Love of God is resisted and rejected on all sides, within and without. Your own sinful heart is covetous; you desire what God has not given you, and you desire what is not God. The whole world, too, is idolatrous. It worships things. It loves the creature while hating the Creator. It is not content with what God has given, but strives to get for itself. Meanwhile, the devil is furious and rages against you; he is hateful and murderous, and he does whatever it takes to deceive you, mislead you, and destroy you. Thus do the devil, the world, and your own fallen flesh conspire against you — and against the Life and Love of God, which He desires to give you freely in Christ Jesus.
“Skin for skin,” the devil says, as he did when he went after righteous Job. “Skin for skin.” And all too easily, all too often, you fall into that trap. When God commands you to love Him, you regard that as too burdensome. And when He commands you to love your neighbor, you regard that as unfair and unrealistic. When God punishes your sin, you do not perceive His love for you, but only wrath and anger, as though He were out to get you and destroy you. So, too, when He disciplines you in love and calls you to repentance and faith, you run away from Him and flee to the false “freedom” of idolatry. You make a god of yourself and try to make a life for yourself.
Although the Lord your God is so desirous to give you real Life with Himself, you prefer to go your own way, futilely supposing that you’ll do better on your own. The fact is that, while your sinful heart is dreadfully afraid of death, it actually knows nothing other than the pursuit of death. You don’t fear God as you should, and yet you are afraid of Him. You worry that He’s out to get you, and so you run away and try to hide — running yourself headlong into death and destruction.
Do fear the Lord your God — not in the terror of death, but in faith and love — because there is forgiveness, salvation, and Life with Him in the Flesh and Blood of the incarnate Son, Christ Jesus.
It is your sin that brings you to sorrow, grief, and death. But in His Love for you, in order to save you, the Son of God has taken all of that upon Himself, all your sin, your sorrow, grief, and death.
Behold the Lamb of God, the one true Man of God, who takes away your sins and the sins of the whole world. In Him, in His Body on the Cross, you behold the Lord your God as He is, perfect in Love. And in Him you also behold true Man, as Man was meant to be, perfect in faith and love.
In this Man, all that has been broken, including your relationship with God, is repaired and healed and made new. In His Body of Flesh and Blood, God completes and fulfills His good Creation.
It is in Christ Jesus that Man lives with God by faith and lives in love for God and man. It is in Him that Man is rescued from sin and death, vindicated in righteousness, and prevails in peace. For He trusted in His God and Father, He humbled Himself and became obedient, even unto death upon the Cross; and His God and Father saved Him from out of death and the grave, and granted Him the Victory of Life in His bodily Resurrection from the dead and His Ascension into heaven. That Victory is not yet seen, except by the eyes of faith in His Word, but it is already true in Him.
In His Passion and on the Cross, Christ Jesus has nothing but His God and Father. And when even His God and Father turns away from Him in righteous judgment against the sins of the world that He bears vicariously in His Body, the Lord Jesus still calls upon God as His God and His Father. He does not curse, but He believes. He perseveres in faith. And He is heard because of His piety.
So it is that sin and death and all that separate you from God is undone. The brokenness is broken, and death is put to death, because this one true Man, Christ Jesus, remains faithful even unto death. He lives and dies in perfect faith and holy love. And all of this He does for you, in your skin, in your own flesh, so that sin and the curse of death and all their hold on Man are utterly defeated.
Everything is achieved and accomplished in Christ Jesus, and established for you in Christ Jesus, in His Body of Flesh and Blood, crucified and risen from the dead. He is your merciful and great High Priest in all things pertaining to God, so your relationship with God is safe and sound in Him.
God and Man, faith and love, righteousness and peace, all are in perfect harmony in Christ Jesus. And all His faithfulness, His Faith and Love, His Cross and Resurrection, and His Life with God, all of these are yours by the grace of His Gospel. That is what He gives to you, into your body, from His Cross and from His Altar in His Church, that you should live with Him in body and soul.
Here is not only God’s pledge and promise to you, but the one true God and Man given to you. And in the Body and Blood of God the Son, God the Father’s heart is fully open to you in Love, for He thus delights to give you every good and perfect gift in Christ Jesus. Whatever else may happen to you in this poor life of labor, the Life and Love of God are yours in Him forevermore.
In the Name + of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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