Tag Archive - unconditional love

God's Wrath

March 11, 2010 in Faith, Featured with 0 Comments

I spent the weekend at a winter retreat with a group of our high school students from our church. It was more of a serious retreat, with the main focus of the retreat being Worship. We were taught what worship was, the many different ways to worship, and then put many of those ways into practice through bible reading, prayer, silence and solitude, and even a concert of prayer. It was all really awesome.

One of the things that stuck out to me the most was a story our youth pastor, Greg, explained, which is right out of the book of Numbers. Numbers 25:5-13 to be exact.

5 So Moses ordered Israel’s judges, “Each of you must put to death the men under your authority who have joined in worshiping Baal of Peor.”
6 Just then one of the Israelite men brought a Midianite woman into his tent, right before the eyes of Moses and all the people, as everyone was weeping at the entrance of the Tabernacle. 7 When Phinehas son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron the priest saw this, he jumped up and left the assembly. He took a spear8 and rushed after the man into his tent. Phinehas thrust the spear all the way through the man’s body and into the woman’s stomach. So the plague against the Israelites was stopped,9 but not before 24,000 people had died.
10 Then the Lord said to Moses,11 “Phinehas son of Eleazar and grandson of Aaron the priest has turned my anger away from the Israelites by being as zealous among them as I was. So I stopped destroying all Israel as I had intended to do in my zealous anger.12 Now tell him that I am making my special covenant of peace with him.13 In this covenant, I give him and his descendants a permanent right to the priesthood, for in his zeal for me, his God, he purified the people of Israel, making them right with me.” -New Living Translation

I didn’t even know this story was in the bible. Basically, God is pleased with the fact that Phinehas killed two people with a spear by impaling them to the ground for disobeying God. Well last night, we had a small group get together than we have with out students every Wednesday, and Greg again brought up the story of Phinehas and asked the following question:

How do you explain a God that seemingly does/allows ungodly things?

Our students gave a lot of great answers, since it really was a very tough question. You see it all the time when someone is killed in a car accident, gets cancer, or something similar. The question usually is, “Why did God allow this to happen to a really nice person?”

There are clearly some differences between old testament times and today, so I am going to base my answer on this specific story in the old testament. In old testament times, in order to atone for sins they had committed, God allowed the Israelites to offer sacrifices for their sins. During the period that this spear incident takes place, God had allowed a plague to descend on the Israelites because of their defiance of God’s commandment to not intermarry with the people of the land. After the spear incident, it says in Numbers 25:8, that the plague immediately stopped. In my humble opinion, God considered this murder the equivalent of a sacrifice to atone for the sins the Israelites had been committing. In addition, God even blesses Phinehas’ family for generations to come because of the young man’s actions.

Aren’t we glad that because of Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross, we don’t have to atone for our sins in the same ways today?

Yeah, it stopped me in my tracks too. Greg made a great point when he said that when Jesus was on that cross, he took the full wrath of God upon his shoulders. Take a look back through the old testament and see what that really means. Wow…

This can be an amazing reminder when we’re contemplating some juicy gossip to pass along, or visiting that website, or stealing that shirt, etc; This sin that I’m about to commit, I caused Jesus to endure the punishment for my sin when He was on the cross. Old testament type punishment and wrath.

I wonder less why Jesus sweat blood in the garden that night, and I’m infinitely more grateful for God’s grace and love by sending Jesus, and by Jesus’ sacrifice to be nailed to that cross for something I did.

Thanks Greg

So what do you think about God’s wrath?

Best Friends

February 23, 2010 in Faith, Featured with 2 Comments

Have you ever wondered if Jesus had best friends?

I’ve never really thought of Jesus having friends. You just always think of him with the twelve disciples. But multiple times in scripture, Jesus spends quality time alone with Peter, James, and John. The most important is when he goes to the garden of Gethsemane and prays before he’s arrested:

32 They went to the olive grove called Gethsemane, and Jesus said, “Sit here while I go and pray.”33 He took Peter, James, and John with him, and he became deeply troubled and distressed.

Mark 14:32-33

You just think of Jesus getting all his strength inwardly from the Father, and while that clearly is a majority of it, Jesus is still somewhat human. So when things get really bad, when it says Jesus’ soul is “crushed with grief,” he brings his three best friends along with him for some of the toughest moments of his life here on earth. And just like a friend, even great friends, they still make mistakes and let Jesus down by falling asleep.

But Jesus also brings his best friends along for some of his best moments here on earth. At the transfiguration, which I truly haven’t spent any time studying before other than what I’ve read right out of the bible, there are Peter, James, and John to see all these amazing miracles, Elijah and Moses, and they get to hear the voice of God.

2 Six days later Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and led them up a high mountain to be alone. As the men watched, Jesus’ appearance was transformed,

Mark 9:2

Yeah, that’s pretty cool. Jesus even tells them to keep this event to themselves, even keep it from the other disciples, until after his death.

How cool would it have been to be Jesus’ best friend? To be there in those moments, both good and bad, to see things that not even the rest of the disciples got to see. They let him down and he doesn’t hold a grudge, he doesn’t get on the cross and say “I’m dying for everybody but Peter, James, and John; they let me down a few days ago, and I’m just not over that yet.” He forgives and continues on.

What’s even more amazing is that he does the same thing with us every time we sin and hurt him. He continues to forgive is and keeps loving us the same as before. He died on the cross for us knowing full well that we would continue to sin day after day, and he didn’t even blink about doing it.

And we’re not even his “best friends”.

Got any grudges you know you should be forgetting about and forgiving? I know I do.

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