The other day I was writing about God’s grace, and I found myself getting stuck as I contemplated Jesus’s resurrection. After all, if God created me perfectly and loves me perfectly, then why would He need to save me? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that there’s something very special about humans that is different from animals, plants, or even angels. God loved us enough to give us the ability to know right from wrong. Not in a moral or ethical sense, but to know in our heart of hearts what truly is God’s will and what goes against God and is evil. We not only have that knowledge from eating of the tree of knowledge as depicted in the story of Adam and Eve, but we have the ability to act upon that knowledge. When the lion eats the antelope, he doesn’t do it with malice in his heart, he does it because it is his instinct to kill other animals and get food because he is hungry. Yet, when humans kill other humans, we do it knowing that it goes against God’s will because life is such a precious experience. We don’t kill out of instinct; we kill out of reason, which is often faulty and ill advised.
Just knowing the difference between right and wrong and having that choice to act upon it makes us vulnerable and yet God loves us enough to give us freewill and allows us to live in a world where we are exposed to danger because all our brothers and sisters also have freewill. As a loving Father, He wouldn’t send down all the armies of angels to force us to knee before Him and force us to do His will, but what else could He do? He sent His only Son to make an ultimate sacrifice of love. Jesus took on the sin of the world for us. He took on all the pain and suffering that there ever was and there ever would be. He faced all the evil that we could imagine and more. He suffered it all. There’s no way any of us could ever understand it. It is just too much. He did it so that we could know that there’s never any evil, any pain, or any sorrow that would ever keep us from God and everlasting life. Nothing can keep us from God is we just accept Jesus’ sacrifice.
Today is Easter. It is a day to rejoice in Jesus’ resurrection. Yet, I believe that for me, it means that as a sinner, someone who is doomed to continue to fail over and over again, Jesus’ resurrection points to my hope and my salvation. The resurrection tells me that although I am flawed, God will never abandon me. He gave His alone son for me.
My faith saved me. May God’s peace reside in all of our hearts.
