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Monday, November 26, 2012

God...With Us...Priceless

All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet:  “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel” (which means “God with us”) (Matthew 1:23 NIV)

This was the first miracle of Jesus Christ. He came from heaven and entered the earthly realm as one of us by virgin birth. He began by doing the "impossible" so that we could become like him. 

The human race, sometimes smart, but many times downright evil. Maybe not you but there have been plenty of atrocities committed by mankind that it's no wonder that God himself wanted to wash the earth and start all over again as in the days of Noah.

When the time was right, just as was planned in advance, God, packaged in human flesh came to dwell with us.  Not only did God choose to live with us, he became "The Way", the access to live with Him. 

I don't think we can fully appreciate this unless we attempt to understand the contrast of how evil humanity is and how good God is. 

Any good in man is our attempt to pattern ourselves after God's standards of right. Most people across all cultures have some standard of "good." From birth we know or are taught it's important to honor and obey our parents, tell the truth, not to kill, not to covet or steal...this standard can be found in the Ten Commandments. These standards were not merely written in stone for Moses and the Hebrew people - they are coded into our DNA and can be found in some form in every culture.

God's standard for right which is coded into our DNA should make us "good" right? (Romans 3:10 NIV) Unfortunately there is another nature also coded into our DNA - like a computer virus - For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing (Romans 7:19 NIV)!

Look with me at the evil that humanity has written on the tablets of history. Contemporary names that might be familiar are Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Ayatollah Khomeini, Saddam Hussein...just to name a few. In fact I found a list of the Top 10 Most Evil Men, whose author starts his list by saying, 
"The most unfortunate aspect to researching this list was the realization that that I could do a top 100 most evil men and still have a multitude of people for a second list!"
This evil is not an anomaly. One has only to look inside a prison to find the worst offenders of humanity.

Why in the world would a good God want to have anything to do with humanity?
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. (John 3:16 NIV).
This was the first miracle of Jesus Christ. He came from heaven and entered the earthly realm as one of us by virgin birth. He began by doing the "impossible" so that we could become like him. God so loved us that he dwelt among us.

God...with us...precious.

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