Today’s devotional is taken from God Came Near by Max Lucado
What God did makes sense. It makes sense that Jesus would be our sacrifice because a sacrifice was needed to justify man’s presence before God. It makes sense that God would use the Old Law to tutor Israel on their need for grace. It makes sense that Jesus would be our High Priest. What God did makes sense. It can be taught, charted, and put in books on systematic theology.
However, why God did it is absolutely absurd. When one leaves the method and examines the motive, the carefully stacked blocks of logic begin to tumble. That type of love isn’t logical; it can’t be neatly outlined in a sermon or explained in a term paper.
Think about it. For thousands of years, using his wit and charm, man had tried to be friends with God. And for thousands of years he had let God down more than he had lifted him up. He’d done the very thing he promised he’d never do. It was a fiasco. Event the holiest of the heroes sometimes forgot whose side they were on.
Even after generations of people had spit in his face, he still loved them. After a nation of chosen ones had stripped him naked and ripped his incarnated flesh, he still died for them. And even today, after billions have chosen to prostitute themselves before the pimps of power, fame, and wealth, he sill waits for them.
It is inexplicable. It doesn’t have a drop of logic nor a thread of rationality.
And yet, it is the very irrationality that gives the gospel its greatest defense. For only God could love like that.
At first I didn’t recognize him. I guess I was expecting someone in a flowing frock with silky-white hands. But it was he. The lion. The Judean Lion. He walked out from among the dense trees of theology and ritual and lay down in a brief clearing. In his paw was a wound and in his mane were stains of blood. But there was a royalty about him that silenced even the breeze in the trees.
Bloodstained royalty. A God with tears. A creator with a heart. God became earth’s mockery to save his children.
How absurd to think that such nobility would go to such poverty to share such a treasure with such thankless souls.
But he did.
In fact, the only thing more absurd than the gift is our stubborn unwillingness to receive it.
Max Lucado God Came Near
Christmas Advent Podcast
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