Tuesday, February 15, 2011
2 Corinthians 5:19 that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation.
WHAT GOD PLEASES IN YOU! -- HIS MESSAGE (Part One)
As a foreign missionary I obviously often spend long periods of time in foreign countries and there I often talk to people whose fundamental beliefs and view of the world, and even of America, are very different from those that I grew up with. And the first reaction to such views is: "How could you possibly think that way, you are so wrong." But if you talk to them long enough and you live with them, you may just begin to view things the way they see it, and you begin to understand what they are talking about.
This is our problem. God sees the world from a perspective of truth that we can never begin to understand. God tells us things that seem utter foolishness to us -- like the fact that we are nothing but dust and even our greatest accomplishments are piles of rotting stinking dung. And so the Lord has to patiently teach us little by little to see the world through His eyes. And He does that, as Paul so clearly points out here, through the ministry of reconciliation, through what we call the Means of Grace.
In our text Paul reminds us that God saw our problem, and he sent a solution, His own Son to die for us. But that wasn't enough; it wasn't enough to fix the problem, because no one on earth could see the problem. Sure there were and are some who know there is a problem, but no one could or can really understand the true nature of the problem -- that man himself was the problem, full of sin as He is. So God sent not only his Son, but the Word about His Son -- The message, His message which constantly and consistently forces us to see the world through the eyes of the eternal God.
