the grandeur

I was stuck over this weekend by thinking about how God is so much more awesome than we really give him credit for.

In a lot of ways, we affirm God's goodness and love and mercy and awesomeness and holiness and all those things. And we get that stuff - we try to pack it in our little heads and go through life with it. But he's so much more!

This was really driven home for me when I thought about how incomprehensible Jesus' sacrifice was to the 1st century Jews. Think about it! The Israelite nation had been promised a rescuer and a Savior for the past thousands of years - sometimes vaguely, by way of archetype and sometimes very precisely, by way of prophecy. In retrospect, the OT has clearly spelled out all we need to know that our salvation would be by way of sacrifice.

But the 1st century Jews had no concept of this! They were reading the same texts we read now, but their eyes glossed over the passages in Isaiah referring to Christ's death, or they ignored the clear prescription for atonement in Leviticus. Not because they didn't understand it, but because they would never, in a million years, associate those passages with God.

"Sure, there's going to be a 'suffering servant!' Isaiah says so clearly! But God would never stoop that low!" "Sure, 'without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sins!' But think about how good God is - he set up the sacrificial system that allows us regular atonement!"

The leap from, "God allows us atonement through the sacrifice of animals" to "God provides us atonement through his sacrifice" is absolutely unthinkable. Sacrilegious. As the chief priests spat on Jesus and beat him, surely they must have thought  "There is no way this is God - if he were, he would never allow this!" Their mocking at the cross carries the same overtones: "The reason we know you're not God is because you're staying on the cross! God would come down!"

Never in a million years would they have thought, "The reason Jesus stayed on the cross was because he was God," and God is always more loving, always more righteous, always more good than we will ever imagine.

Kinda drive you to worship, eh?