PRAISE HIM ALL YE CREATURES HERE BELOW;
PRAISE HIM ABOVE, YE HEAVENLY HOST!
PRAISE FATHER, SON, AND HOLY GHOST!!
AMEN.
These last few days are the highest of the Holy Days of the Christian faith. We Christians mark the days in which Almighty God walked among us in a body utterly identical to our own, a body that experienced every hurt, every pleasure, and endured every temptation common to every one of us and yet He never ever did one wrong thing. He made the lame to walk, gave sight to the blind, turned water into wine, and even brought the dead back to life.
And His good favor was returned by us by murdering Him.
Crucifixion is one of the most horrible means of capital punishment ever devised. Basically the condemned person was first lashed with a whip and otherwise tortured, and then forced to carry his cross to the execution site. He was then stripped naked and nailed to the cross and left there to die of whatever came first: shock, asphixiation, exposure, whatever. Any one of us would recoil at the prospect of experiencing that. But in Jesus's case, these details were the least of the horrors of His crucifixion.
Jesus is God, and God hates sin. Yet Jesus took our sins to the Cross, personally and on His own body. The closest comparison I can think of would be drinking someone else's puke. When Jesus prayed for some other means to be found and to "let this cup pass", I guarantee you that the prospect of drinking the vomit of billions of people, and not of being executed, was foremost in His mind.
Jesus God could have at any point in the proceedings stopped things. When one of His disciples cut off the ear of one of His captors, He restored it. When asked if He was God, he replied "I AM" and his tormentors fell on their butts.
But they went ahead and hammered him up anyway.
At some point, Jesus's very divinity fled hin as he hung naked and suffering, and He cried out: "My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? It was at that point that He became fully human, not God, but a perfect sacrifice for the sins of the world.
His last words were: : "It is finished". What was finished?
What got finished that day was the argument between God and Satan, who has always hated us because God wants the humans He created to be His offspring. There were two trees in Eden: The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and the tree of Eternal Life. God did not forbid Adam and Eve to eat if the tree of Eternal Life, but forbade then from eating of the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I cannot read God's mind, but fron all accounts I surmise that at some point He would have given us pernission to eat of that Tree. However, as in any job you need experience.
Satan however tempted Eve, and she in turn tempted Adam. The passage "Their eyes were open and they knew they were naked" does not mean that Adam and Eve were blind, it rather means that suddenly they knew that they could exploit one another based on their vulnerabilities. Look at the history of nations or for that matter of your own personal life, and tell me I am wrong. The history of this planet is a history of sin against Almighty God Himself.
But in the end, it comes down to YOU.
For God so loved the World,
That He gave His Son;
So that whomever shall believe on Him;
SHALL NEVER PERISH, BUT SHALL HAVE ETERNAL LIFE.
God is not willing that anyone will perish, but that all His creations should have Eternal Life. Walk away fron that if you will, but the alternate destination is Hell.
Some day I will be aware that my soul will shortly appear before God to be judged. And Satan will be right there as prosecutor.
And my attorney will be God Hinself, Jesus of Nazereth. And for every sin I have ever connitted, Jesus will state to the celestial court that the penalty has been paid, by Him.
Will you ignore so great a Salvation?
Why?
_For God so loved the world
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