Day 3947 of the 7 day Bible verse challenge.

1 Peter 2:24 NIV

The undeserved

This is the very backdrop of the entirety of the Gospel purpose for it’s proven in what remains even still unto this day a call answered toward what remains still the way of life unknown by whomever said call is shown. At first this command was carried by Christ in that first cross taken unto a life He’d not lived as was ended thanks to sin He Himself had not known. He knew not the life of a sinner as in Him there is no sin. And so He paid the price of the kind of life that He hadn’t lived.

All so that we, through Him, are given the hope of our too finding that life that doesn't end due to the wage of sin which remains what it always was.

And that simply because He paid a debt He didn't owe to set free a people who owed a debt they couldn’t pay.

A debt we can’t pay.

Thus the iniquity.

Such is what one well-known verse quoted often this time of year uses to describe the purpose of His life:

“We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.”

And indeed, this time of year we too gather with loved ones, far or near, to celebrate the arrival of what was and remains a promise of love and kindness given so long ago but yet every day even still: The coming of a Savior. This is why I detest more deeply every year all of these _mases that so many find so witty and wonderful. You have your classic xmas, grinchmas, soapmas, squatchmas, so many mases all preceded by something that this society thinks funny to replace the reason of the season.

For no, this is Christmas, and it will remain our celebration of He who gives the season its name.

Because there is no Christmas without Christ.

Problem is that we’ve chosen a life in which we’ve so learned to replace Him that we anymore sin with such grins that speak forth a self-condemnation that we’re all but thrilled to partake of. Yes, we love our many ways so lost in which we lose more of ourselves all but every breath. A veritable mockery of life itself, these many ways in which we’ve come to live it in what is an arrogance that seems to still assume that we might prove ourselves of the ability or authority to elsewise make it out of here alive.

We won’t.

For such is the debt all men owe.

Only difference then is that given in iniquity as is now a most hopeful charity as offered unto all of us in this place.

A switching of outcomes thanks to an inequality of input.

For that is what iniquity is. It is unfairness, but even still more than this. It’s defined as an unfairness that is in fact grossly so. Immorally unfair. Criminally. This is what the scene of Calvary is, which is the very hour for which even Jesus Himself said He’d come. Because He came to atone for sin so as to make the lost whole again. He came to heal the sick, of which we are all impressively dementedly so.

Criminally so.

For as I mentioned yesterday in what was one of those rare posts that I had to write in between tears thanks to the honesty of it all, all of us have been the same kind that He healed here. Blind, deaf, dead. He came as the doctor of whom we the sick remain in need. Came to set captives free. A perfect problem proven perfectly in that unfortunately He can only pay the debts we admit owed.

And sadly we've become a people so detached from truth that even still today we can manage to look at the cross and still assume Christ the One cursed. All because our ego simply refuses to accept that He's hanging in our place.

Because we know that were we to accept that fact, it would bring with it such a torrent of realization that we’d well not survive.

At least not in the kind of life we’ve become known for having lived.

No, we know it demands change as, well, whenever someone dies as a form of punishment, that should probably inspire everyone who knows of it unto some rather deep soul-searching so as to, as we like to, ensure that we ourselves are not at risk of being found similarly guilty of whatever wrong for which this suffering person is paying such a costly penalty.

But does it?

Does the cross exist in our lives asking us to reconsider things? Does our knowledge of His misery make us rethink some of our mistakes, open us unto the humility that wonders what more of them we’re making still? Does it ask us to slow the tongue so as to ensure nothing is spoken of which proves a heart condemnable?

Does it make us wonder what of us, in us is even accidentally commendable?

After all, those are the vain glories we so love to look for anyway. Why not when it comes to faith? To truth? To eternity?

Why do we not spend any time even halfheartedly wondering as to what all possibilities there may be for where we’ll go when we leave?

If not because we know of the one thread which binds them all?

That being the fact found in how death is something all of us will endure, experience, a fact proving that these lives we are losing.

What then have we to lose in laying them down now in exchange for the call He’s issued?

If not the lives that we know we’d have to lose thanks to crosses doing what crosses do?

That’s the line we’ll not cross. We’ll cross all the others, prove that every day. Indeed, every single day someone down here does something that which shouldn’t be done. And we’ve done this that way for so long that we’re now to the point of either enacting or rather just erasing laws so as to offer us a sense of security in our doing of our favorite wrongs.

Yes, let us not bother ourselves nor our selfishness then with such weight as worrying about the legality of whatever it may be that we may enjoy.

Just legalize it. Decriminalize it. Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, right? And if you don’t got ‘em, well, there’s a colorful store on every city block plastered with flashing lights just ready and waiting for you to so indulge upon the delights of a mind given unto escaping reality.

Because we’re weak, and we like it. We like being weak. We love being weak. We love this way of life in which we mask our weaknesses and failures and foolishness with flashing lights and the guise of having fun. Yes, we are a people all about having fun and living it up whilst we can. For we know time is thin. And yet rather than make ready for when the clock stops, our clock stops, no, instead we just continue doing as the Word said we would and chase one another from bad to worse in our deceiving and being deceived.

Mostly by whatever will help us continue to assume that we’ll not die and thus will pay no price for whatever kind of life we alone, by then, will have clearly chosen to continue to live.

A lie we’ve all of us loved because we love doing as we please but refuse to accept the consequential reality that is demanded of all such freedom.

And indeed, we are free to do whatever we so chose in what is a world already filled with ways to do wrong and finding only more thereof. And thus we have so many reasons to join with those destined for damnation who laugh and mock and spit all but in the very face of He who came and died in order to take our place so that, in yet again another perfect image of inequity, we might take His.

It’s the exchanging that’s unfair, and yes, criminally so.

For Christ shouldn’t have had to suffer the way He did. Then again, we shouldn’t have had the audacity to do so many of the things we’ve done. But you see, there must be a penalty paid for every mistake made. And God, who doesn’t change, thus couldn’t change, will not change what He has deemed to be sin’s wage. It will continue to owe death every single time we cross again that line and decide to do what’s wrong instead of doing for once what’s right.

And yet we’ve crossed it so many times that we, in fear, have chosen, rather than addressing our failures and misunderstandings which continue to so lead us to wrongdoing, instead we just make it look right. We are the very people who do indeed put bad for good and dark for light.

So much so that we steal rainbows from the sky to use a signs of our pride, boastful every breath breathed whilst doing so.

And we steal language to speak not life unto those who hear us but rather filth unto whomever may listen, we don’t care.

And we commandeer music which could be used to praise our Father to rather please our neighbors or rattle the windows of strangers at the stoplight.

And we hijack Christmas to remove His Name from the title and replace it with something that has no meaning, just so we sound witty and funny and make some money as this season is anymore nothing but a marketing tool used to bolster bottom lines before the new year comes.

A year we’ve already planned to spend doing the same things all over again.

Each word, song, parade then proving that we know now what we’re doing as we take that which could be offered unto God, given in praise unto Him, and use it instead in what are ways that actively remove Him, ignore Him, defame Him even.

And we, in pride, arrogance, ego, well, we think He will do nothing because, well, He hasn’t done anything that we’ve seen.

And we’re so impressive that we’re apparently owed the proof we desire before we’ll believe anything.

Thus too proving that we don’t care that blessed are those only who have not seen and yet have believed.

Then again, we anymore seem to estimate blessings as bonuses at work given by bosses we try to please or a little loving on the weekend given from the spouses we dare remember with flowers once a year.

Yeah, we’ve got it all figured out don’t we?

Well, except for that whole ‘we’re all gonna die’ part.

Still working on that.

But friends, there’s this growing sense of urgency inside that I cannot explain. It’s as if, despite the decade of doing this, these posts are somehow all coming out in such a way that I’m saying things that I never imagined but cannot help but feel as if I simply must. It’s become cathartic in some way. It’s as if it all matters even more all of the sudden.

And I think that’s because He’s coming.

Don’t know when, none of us do. Problem is that in our pride we’ve learned only to take His patience as either weakness or in fact just evidence of His non-existence. For, if He was there, surely He’d put an end to all the wickedness in our world. Wouldn’t He? Indeed He would, and in fact He will. Issue is He said He would next time He comes as will be done not as a baby born in a manger but rather as warrior coming to collect those who are His before stealing the life away from those who are then found ill-prepared for such a thief in this night that we call life.

Are you ready?

Again, not that we can be, but hopefully we all can see some resemblance of our understanding of the sheer iniquity that we ourselves laid upon Him. Yeah, the Bible says He took it, that He chose it, that it was thus His choosing, His doing.

But friends, He’d have not had to taken our sins upon Himself if we had no sins to be so taken.

And so the blame comes right back to us yet again. And, granted, we can, as many so clearly are, continue to throw that boomerang as many times as we like or feel the need. It’s just gonna keep coming back.

What then shall we do when we haven’t another throw, another chance, another choice?

We have that now because He did take our iniquities upon His body in what was His taking on of our way of life as was, often still is, lived in sin so that we, in Him, could do as asked and put off the old self which is so prone to being corrupted by its sinful desires and rather, thanks to the fire we feel asking we hurry up and get right before we’ve been left, put on the new self created to be like Christ in what’s then a life that’s lived to honor Him.

Something we’ve all known so little of that we’re rightly terrified of even trying.

For what chance have we to get right such a thing when it is so antithetical to the life we’ve lived our lives living?

How can we please a God we’ve only learned to love offending, hurting, hating?

How can we love God when we only know to hate Him so much that we mock Him in our songs and shows and do it all if we blatantly don’t care if He knows?

We can’t. And in fact, the Bible even tells us as much. Tells us that He’s sick of our offerings. That He hates our solemn festivals. That He is not pleased with the blood of goats and bulls as such could never truly atone for the sins that those animals never chose. No, even Old Testament sacrifices were aimed at opening blinded eyes to understanding the price that was owed every single time we did something wrong.

But friends, we’ve only since then proven that we’ll even kill each other, and that over even words!

We don’t care of the price. In fact we’re so adamant that there isn’t one that we know only to live as if there will never be one.

Good luck with that.

Why?

Because this is no longer just between us and God. We are no longer just these self-perceived innocent little children who can always fall back on what’s said to be a God of such mercy and kindness and compassion and forgiveness.

Jesus is in this now.

Thus we are now no longer just doing wrong as if the only ones we can possibly hurt are ourselves. No, ever since Calvary, our every choice to do any wrong is but one more blow of the hammer that drove those nails into those limbs that came to carry what He didn’t deserve.

A choice He made so as to set us free from what we deserve and offer unto us a share in what we don’t.

Issue is that what we do deserve what He did endure.

What we don’t deserve is the hope of Heaven.

Meaning then that this may well be the one table that we should all want flipped on its head no matter what that costs.

Why?

Because there’s no other way. We were all created in the image of God and thus endowed by our Creator with the ability to be the righteousness He has every reason to thus expect us to be seeing as how, being made like He, we were righteous. Key word: WERE.

Not anymore.

Gave it up.

Laughed it off.

Left it for dead, and ironically then, ourselves the same.

Dead in a blindness that is called sin which is defiant unrighteousness. Yes, the mistakes we make on this side of having heard of His Name become not merely small accidents made in an ignorance as to the better we could have done. No, again now we know that our every mistake is a sin that has a price to be paid.

Just how many deaths do you think you can die and still find life as an option on the table?

I don’t know of anyone who’s managed to make it through and come back from even one.

But Jesus did.

Indeed, we read of this here in regard to the very reason why. He bore our sins in His body on that cross so that we, in the call to come and share, might too die to sin and live once again for the righteousness in which we were always called and created to be. He came to put an end to sin so that death lost its sting in our lives.

But He cannot, will not give eternal life to those who think they can continue to carry with them the very sin that cost Him His very life.

Because who would do that?

Friends, there’s such a simplicity to salvation seen inside how the God of Heaven, in whom there is no sin, would not then wish to have sin around Him. He hates it! Hates it so much that He killed His Son!!

What do we think He’s going to do to those who have never lived as if He even exists?

That will not go well.

That’s in fact why the promise of hell.

Not because He wanted such a lasting punishment to exist, but simply because we became of a sinful will that all but insists it does.

What amazes me is that all that He asks is that we act justly, love mercy and walk humbly. He literally wants only for us to be good, decent, upright and honorable people. And yet we think it too much, even in light of what all He’s done in Christ. Just too much. We cannot bring ourselves to desire to be better.

And many have the audacity to think there’s nothing wrong or foolish in that.

Friends, I know many here don’t believe and won’t believe and thus the same have never and will never read the Word. But if they did they’d find in there that He will come back and that when He does He will give unto all what they deserve.

For today His offer still stands to take what we deserve in our stead.

One day that offer will be gone and we will be given what we deserve.

Look, I know we’re a people all about equity and inclusion and other such delusions as whatever other political tagline may have fascinated the masses. But friends, we don’t want a fair God. We don’t want Him to treat us as we deserve.

Because our sinfulness defines us as those who deserve to die.

Maybe then we shouldn’t be so quick to stay in step with a world that mocks the very One who came to die so that we could live.

Granted, I could be wrong, been there before, but that just doesn’t make any sense to turn down such a mercy in exchange for the opportunity to continue living a way of life that makes us guilty all so that we don’t have to lose what will cause us to lose our lives.

We have to stop treating Him unfairly if we truly hope that we too would be treated so unfairly as to be given life even though we’ve lived this version choosing only death.

That is unfair, that those who deserve to die don’t whereas those who don’t deserve to die do.

The Gospel is thus unfairness in our favor. Let us not forsake the opportunity at that undeserved life that such unfairness presents unto all of us.

For if we don’t even deserve this opportunity, what then makes us think there might be another?

#LeaveNoSoulUntold