OUR JAWS SHOULD DROP

OUR JAWS SHOULD DROP

                Humans have this capacity for adjusting to things. People who start down the road of drugs do so for the euphoric high or the transcendent experience the drug produces. But after a while they find that they have to increase the amount they take in order to get that initial feeling. They may move to stronger and stronger drugs and ever increasing doses until in time they need the drug desperately just to feel normal. To go without the drug now makes them violently ill and the withdrawal symptoms are more than they can bear. They may have to be forced into an institution where they must go through literal torture and violent hallucinations and sweats and shaking and so on until they are dried out.

                But this capacity to “Adjust” to things applies in nearly every area of life. We are surrounded by a world in deep trouble. There are cities around the globe with millions of people in them that are running out of water in a catastrophic way. There are others cities and country sides where people are waste deep in water and yet it is so polluted with sewage and so on, that they can’t drink it. There are millions of acres of farm land that are under water in our own Midwest so that we stand in danger of major food shortages and radically increased prices in the months to come.

                The people of California are a bit nervous right now because a new series of quakes have threatened to bring on the “Big One.” It has been 20 years or so since the last significant shakers brought damage and death to California and so there is a young generation living in California who had never experienced the feel of an earthquake until a few days ago. Suddenly they understand that they are living on borrowed time and the big killer earthquakes which occur generally every 200 years, are now a hundred plus years overdue. The pressure is building up for an explosive event.

                Still we grow accustomed to all of this global violence in spite of the fact that insane weather and perturbations of every kind from our sun and our solar system to the ground we walk on is storming towards some kind of cataclysmic event or other. “We are just in one of those cycles” they say and it will pass by… and yet the words on the Georgia Guide Stones call for a reduction of earth’s population from 7.6 billion people to 500 million and we find ourselves wondering who is pulling the strings.

                But the Jaw dropping that I mentioned in our title is not about all that is going on around us in the world. We Christians have gotten used to declarations in our own Bibles that should make our jaws drop… and yet, for the most part, we either discount the miraculous claims of the Bible or we get used to them until we are able to fit all of our beliefs into watered down philosophical platitudes of human decency and respectability.

                Both the book of Hebrews and the book of John are full of jaw dropping information that should hit us like a euphoric drug, but we have “adjusted” to it to the extent that we can treat this information without our hearts pounding. But think about this for a minute:

                “But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man. For it became Him for whom are all things and by whom are all things in bringing many sons unto glory to make the Captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings. For both He that sanctifies and they who are sanctified are all of one: for which cause he is not ashamed to call them brethren.” Heb. 2:9-11.

                Whaaaaaat? There are so many jaw dropping facts given here:

1.       The One through whom God created everything that exists both in the spiritual realm and in the physical realm is made to become lower than His own creation so that it will become possible for Him to suffer and to die.

2.       He is going to be made perfect through suffering, for even though He is perfect and sinless, He enters our human race, not as Adam before the fall, but as us after the fall. Jesus did not take on sinless flesh but sinful flesh… fallen flesh with all of its propensities towards evil and then He conquered all of those things on our behalf.

                Do we believe this? After all, some teach the Immaculate Conception in which Jesus’ Father (God) was not only divine, but that His mother Mary was also divine. But that is not what the Bible teaches. Heb. 2:14 makes that clear saying: “Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death that is the devil.”

                Paul confirms this as well in Romans 8: 3 saying: ”For what the Law could not do, weak as it was through the flesh, God did: sending His own Son IN THE LIKENESS OF SINFUL FLESH and as an offering for sin, He condemned sin in the flesh.”

                In other words, Jesus came into fallen humanity and forged a way back to God by overcoming sin in the flesh. Now, to be sure, Jesus never participated in sin. His character was flawless and sinless and He was God in human flesh, and yet He took on a body like our fallen bodies so that He could blaze a trail of victory over sin and death on our behalf.

                We can never look to the Law for any help. It only defines sin and then condemns us as sinners. In other words, Satan is our prosecuting attorney and He uses the Law to condemn us and since we have indeed broken the Law, we stand condemned and worthy of death. So God, our Judge does not sidestep our guilt or our worthiness of death. We have been sentenced to death and rightly so for indeed we are guilty.

                Here is where many Christians these days take sin much too lightly. The truth is, the whole human race is guilty and should simply be wiped out. But our Creator stepped in and said “No.” I love them. I created them for a purpose. I knew they were going to fall before I even created them and so I had this plan from the very beginning. I Myself would step into fallen humanity and take the death penalty upon myself… why? Because I know some things about mankind’s eternal destiny that they don’t know.

                Sin and rebellion will forever remain on My people’s doorstep unless it can be dealt with once and for all. We can’t get rid of the sin problem by ignoring it. We must get to the core of it once and for all by getting into the middle of it and exposing it for what it is and defeating it. At the same time we must make a demonstration of the superiority of self- sacrificing love over that which Satan offers in terms of self-pleasing rebellion, hatred, lust and greed and all the rest. Sin must be played out to the very end until it proves itself to be unsustainable and tragic.

                Love and truth will win in the end because love sustains life, while sin and hatred produces death. So mankind is given a choice which principle they will live by and which God they will serve and then at the proper time this whole thing will come to a final showdown as the principles of Satan’s kingdom literally self-destruct. Satan will make one last effort at his global kingdom and worship, but it will collapse upon itself. Sin is self-destructive and unsustainable over the long run.

                People so often picture God as the stern judge just waiting to destroy sinners. But God is not the destroyer… Satan is… and the nature of God’s judgment is that whatever a man sows; that will he also reap. We reap the crop we sow and that is exactly why God has supplied us with the good seed of the Word and it is why Jesus as the first Seed, went into the ground to come forth and produce a great harvest of souls.

                But this salvation is much greater than we can imagine for it says another jaw dropping thing. It says that the One who sanctifies and those who are sanctified are all of one.” How can this be?

                The truth is absolutely astounding. The Holy Spirit came upon Mary and she produced the Son of God. Likewise the Holy Spirit comes upon us when we are born again and we too become sons and daughters of God… part of the family… born of the Spirit… with God as our Father just as much as God was Jesus’ Father. Jesus is not ashamed to call us brethren because in truth He came into our family and figured out a way to make us part of His family. We have become relatives of Jesus both by the Spirit in which new life is created in us, and by the blood which now flows through us bringing constant nourishment and carrying away of sin. We are blood relatives… joint heirs of the kingdom… destined to reign with Christ forever. And it is we who will make sure that sin never rises again… we know what sin is… we have experienced its suffering even as Jesus did. We became the victims of it, but Jesus has made us into victors as we partake of Him.

                Do we understand what communion is as we partake of His flesh and blood? (See John 6:5358) Do we know what it means to live by His Spirit? Do we understand the infinite power involved in overcoming by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of our testimony?

                This salvation that we live in today is loaded with jaw dropping information and power. Rightly understood we should not be able to preach respectable sermons with three points and a poem. Today people no longer want the preacher to raise his voice. It riles their sense of respectability and proper societal pride. We like to think of Jesus as being ever soft spoken and yet we are left to wonder how He preached to 5000 men plus women and children.

                How did Jesus calm the storm? Did He raise up an effeminate hand and say,” Oh peace be still?” or did He shout into the wind with an authoritative command that left the storm with no choice but to quiet down?

                Often with our own sermons and our own examples we render the Gospel inane and lifeless… we make it “respectable” to soothe our own sense of propriety…virtually lacking in Jaw dropping amazement.

                I like the way our preacher preaches. He doesn’t rant and rave and run around on stage like some TV preachers do, but he does preach with authority and power and he brings the Word to life as the Holy Spirit gives Him utterance. In truth we should read our Bibles in wide eyed amazement. There is nothing sedentary about the truths offered therein… and we are either becoming living oracles of the life presented and offered there, or we are simply becoming bystanders… looking in from the outside… yawning in complacency because we are no longer a part of the living flow… no longer finding living water flowing from our innermost being.

                We as the Body of Christ desperately need to pray for the Holy Spirit to revive in us that sense of jaw-dropping excitement and vitality… that first love that once captured our hearts.

                Just like a marriage, we can either keep that first love alive so that our hearts skip a beat when we see each other and we feel a tingle of excitement at the mere touch of the other… or we can allow it to become mundane and empty and lonely.

                Let us then return to the joy of our salvation so that the Word of God will make our jaws drop once again as we wonder at the greatness of our salvation!