Day 3390 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

Romans 6:10 NIV

And thus we've now both the direction as well as a destination, leaving us then all but a decision as to the demise of all old devotion as is the demand for any and all to be dead to death and alive to life.

For God is life.

Author of, Creator of, Savior of life. He is the singular source of existence as all that exists is alive because He said so, spoke all of everything and everyone into being. We are breathing the air He gives, seeing the scenes He paints, enjoying the goodness He grants, yet often denying the devotion He deserves. For indeed He does do all we need Him to, far more in fact than any could ever design or demand or dream of in fact. Yes, all of life as lived in this land in which all of life is or will be soon lost is a gift better than we deserve.

For as sinners we’ve chosen to remain apart from life as we act out, speak out, think out against the very Giver of life and the lone Maker of the only Way back to it from this brink upon which we blew it.

Yes, that is the gravity of our present predicament as predicated most perfectly by our ongoing love affair with all that’s not at all fair. That is what sin is, it’s a rampant injustice most jovially jabbing the King of joy and hope and healing, the sort of healing we need from this reeling we’ve won within this rebellion we’ve become. Indeed, rebellion is to us more than a verb, an action undertaken which merely hints to the moral or, in this case rather immoral fiber of a person, an effort given in evidence of what must thus reside inside of us.

No, our actions do speak louder than words as it simply must be anymore. For to us to just blatantly say, “Hey God, we hate you”, well such seems sort of extreme even as seen from eyes and heard with ears both blind and deaf to both reason and reverence. And so we’ve settled for sending instead such a message in a means we deem a bit more measured, a little quieter, a way in which we feel less ashamed of ourselves for the shame we’ve chosen for ourselves.

Indeed, rather than just confessing with our mouths that we care not that God’s there, that He sees, that He cares and thus is heartbroken over our incessant breaking away from Him for every reason we can imagine, no, we’ve settled instead for simply showing our disregard in the form of the sins we’ve found of more worth than even our souls.

For that is indeed the gravity and reality of sin, is it not? That we’d rather do as we please than to appease the only One with an opinion that can do what He’s already done? Overcome death. Indeed, do we not live as if our living our lives our way is of greater importance than adhering to His design, even though it’s His design which ordained such a victory over even the grave of His enemies?

See, that’s something we discussed a few posts back, the fact that we were, are His enemies as proven in our living in such a way in which enmity is evident. We do things we shouldn’t, say things we shouldn’t, dream dreams we shouldn’t, sell ourselves to secure those dreams we come to idolize even more than life itself. Yes, we allow our minds to run wild chasing hearts still utmost deceptive and utterly depraved as if such a direction can bring anything other than a continuation of the disaster we’ve already found.

And yet in His otherwise endless goodness He sees fit still to offer still a share unto all, not some, not only the best or most bereaved or those with the heaviest of humilities harming hearts into hearing just how hopeless and hapless we’ve all become, but no, He offers this share of His Son unto everyone. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and in Christ all are offered welcome into a faith that’s equated as the righteousness we’ve never found reasonable enough to want before.

We want sin instead. And for many reasons if we’re to be honest. It’s easier. It’s more fun. It’s less restrictive as the reality of responsibility is proven within reason, and we’ve found only reason to reject that part of life. Yes, we’ve settled in sin as within it we’re allowed to pick and choose all matter and manner of life as if this time is just our bellying up to a buffet and ordering off of some menu the aspects of an existence we like, while obviously never eating the healthier side of life.

After all, nobody gets all jacked up about an all-you-can-eat for the endless broccoli.

Such is precisely why we don’t find all that much excitement in God’s design. It’s demanding. It’s heavy, rather harsh in fact. It’s a path paved asking we wave goodbye to the way of life in which we’ve found, or at least think we have, all that there is to love of a life lived in a land so filled with everything a person could want, just pretty barren when it comes to needs. But needs? Who cares about our needs as those necessities seem to always have a way of working themselves out?

So blinded we can’t see the irony in such provision.

No, we live as if everything a life needs to be lived is found on this planet that we just happen to have shown up upon some time ago. Yeah, just sort of popped onto this scene in which we assume we’re here to steal the show and sell the soul so we don’t have to suffer toward its security. No, life’s a party man! Live it up, let it loose, run wild and assume that such limitlessness is somehow never the antithesis to life itself.

For honestly, how can life have limits as the only ones we’ve ever felt were those few found those four days we accidentally ventured a bit too close to reality?

That’s why I talk so much about death, it’s because we don’t want to think about it. We hate the very idea of it, avoid every suggestion of it, deny every time we hear a reminder of it. We hate it because to us it’s nothing but the end of all this fun we’re having. Having so much fun that we can’t see the promise that this life ends and thus the fun will too. What then? That’s why I talk about it, for fun may be fun for a moment, but what will all that revelry and rebellion have left us when we leave here?

See, Scripture tells us plainly that the wages of sin are death. The Bible is packed to the spine with stories telling of God not playing around with the depravity of humanity. You’ve got famines, plagues, pestilence, the literal splitting open of the very ground upon which we stand so as to swallow those who defy the divine. Death is a part of life as lived in this world as we’re just not meant to be here forever. But the problem is, and the one which defines the death we deserve is that we’ve come to live otherwise.

We live life like we won’t die and thus have either plenty of time to enjoy everything we might want to try, or at least plenty of time to make up for it should we end up being wrong.

But friends, living like we have all the time in the world is exactly the problem because we’ve only all the time in this world to determine where we stand in regard to the line He’s drawn, a line called truth. And the horror is that we’ve already lived a portion of our limited time on this earth on the wrong side of what He said is right. And thus we are in the wrong and worthy of His wrath. And we cannot walk through that wrath nor walk away from the aftermath.

That is why I talk so much, so often about the darkness of our sins and the death they deserve. It’s because we need first a firm understanding of the terror trapped inside the tragedy of this promised eternal turmoil before we can ever truly grasp the beauty of His benevolence as proven in what we see His Son having accomplished here. We need to realize the death we deserve before we can appreciate the life we've been offered. Indeed, we need to be pushed toward witnessing His torture upon the cross before we can comprehend the triumph over it He won.

Because simply put, if we don't understand the debt, we can't understand the cost He offers to cover on that cross.

Again, that’s the gift we see defined right here in Paul’s letter to the church in Rome. It’s a reminder of the gift we’ve been given and the gravity of our sharing in such a confession that says that He is Lord, that He did die, but that then He did rise and leave that tomb as empty as our pasts have been. That’s the reality of sin, it’s empty. It’s a hollowed hope, a fallowed happiness, a failed faithfulness to all that’s wrong within us. It’s our decision to deny God in exchange for the way of life we’ve come to live.

Just so happens that this way of life we’ve come to love is one that knows only to go against God, meaning then we’re His enemies, and thus staring down the barrel of a judgement we cannot survive.

Without Christ.

That is the hinge upon which all of our hope rests. Christ. He is our only chance at anything better than everything we’ve been and become. Why? He died. He paid our debt. He absolved our guilt. He resolved our rebellion and sits enthroned in Heaven interceding for our continued insanity. He is forgiveness personified. And as such, thus is He too life magnified for in Him is the salvation we need from the sinners we’ve become who deserve the death we deny.

Because He didn’t deny it. He didn’t avoid it. He chose it. See, He had no reason to lay down His life and suffer as He did other than He merely wanted us to have the chance to come to our senses and make some changes so that we too can share in the life He achieved when He shoved that stone out of His way. Because God created us to live for Him, in Him. And even though we gave up on that idea long ago, He never did. He still wants us to experience a life lived with Him in all the goodness that He is.

And Christ came to die so that we might have that chance again.

So He died to sin, as we see here, once for all. For all have sinned and thus we all need saved. For as we see a bit earlier in Romans, 5:12 to be exact, “therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned”, we are all sinners who’ve well-earned the death we fight to deny. But therein lies the gravity of His gift of His grace! It’s something seen a bit later in Romans 5, verse 15.

“But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God’s grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many!”

We are the many! Because as this verse says, He died to sin, once for all. All of us, all of our death, the very atonement of our every single mistake. He finished it, told us so as He hung in our place. “It is finished.” All then that’s left is for us to finish with it ourselves, to continue to work out our salvation with fear, with trembling, with a ferocity that refuses to fall as short of His glory as we have all this time.

Because in that fight against ourselves, in that struggle we find our share in Him and the selflessness as seen and shown in His sacrifice. And in that we find our welcome into the second half of this verse: The chance to now live for God, the chance to live to God. For He is our direction. He is our destination. He is our salvation, our hope, our healing. He is our life because He gave His that we might do something better, something more with ours than just live in the emptiness of sinfulness.

Friends, I know His way is hard, narrow and narrowing in fact for this world is making sure of that. Let it. Let it go. Let it happen. Let it hurt. Let this life be as hard and miserable as it’s supposed to be. Because it ends, and thus whatever we find or prefer within it, well that ends too. Let us live so that what ends of life is the misery of it, the suffering in it, the difficulty of walking it in a place we don’t belong. Let that be what we die to in this life. Because if we die to this world, then we die to sin. And if we die to sin, then just like Jesus, we too shall live to God.

And if we live out our few remaining days down here living to God, living for God, God is what we’ll find. Because He won’t let us miss as it was never on us to find Him anyway. No, He found us, and in that we’ve found our hope. Don’t let it go again. Embrace the challenge of holding tight to that hope that died to hold on to you. Don’t let Him go.

No, let us do now what is hard so that when we leave, then we can enter our rest. We shall not then rest in sin but rather war against it so that we, like He, are done with it. Because only then can our hope in Him truly mean anything close to what He was willing to die for us to understand.

#LeaveNoSoulUntold