Before the World Was

Continuing on my journey through J. Oswald Sander’s, The Incomparable Christ.

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It’s summer and every day ends with fireflies blinking. I stay outside at dusk to watch the darkening yard fill up with them. Another day just whirled by and it feels like I just stumbled along. Most days, really, I spend groping around, trying to figure out how to live this blink of my life. It’s just not good enough for me to simply exist here. I want to know how to fully live. I hunt for meaning because I’ve just got to know what’s most important. I can’t stop thinking about how I only get this one chance and it’s all so brief.

I’ve been reading about Jesus and at the moment I feel silly. Like, am I wasting my life thinking about Him?  What does He have to do with today, anyways? But I can’t get away from Him. And I don’t honestly want to. There’s just no one else like Him. I read it there in His Word and I sit dazed–He’s the only one who’s always been around. (Psalm 90:2) Someone who made all this that I see but wasn’t made Himself. Someone who calls Himself, “I AM.” And He calls Himself that because He is and always was and always will be. (Revelation 1:8) That hurts my head a little when I try to think about it.

And then I read how this Jesus once left His glorious Heaven and He came down here with us. The One who had no beginning began. And for the first time, Heaven and earth met up. Forever-life rendezvoused with our here-and-now. Humanity and Deity fused. He was God. And somehow, some mysteriously mind-blowing way, He became man. A God-Man. I don’t get that.
Can you see it? The One who inhabits eternity put skin on. He walked around on our dirt. He rubbed shoulders with us. I don’t understand so I read it again slow:

Since the children are made of flesh and blood, it’s logical that the Savior took on flesh and blood in order to rescue them by his death. By embracing death, taking it into himself, he destroyed the Devil’s hold on death and freed all who cower through life, scared to death of death.

It’s obvious, of course, that he didn’t go to all this trouble for angels. It was for people like us, children of Abraham. That’s why he had to enter into every detail of human life. Then, when he came before God as high priest to get rid of the people’s sins, he would have already experienced it all himself—all the pain, all the testing—and would be able to help where help was needed. (Hebrews 2:14-18)

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 He had a mission–a great rescue mission–to save me from cowering through life, from being so afraid of dying that I couldn’t fully live. He took on this broken world’s pain and dark so I could overcome mine. He died a cruel agonizing death so I could live a healed, whole life. Again, my mind is just too little to really understand. But long before this girl stood in her yard watching fireflies blink, even eons before the world began, He was. And this was His plan. That gives my little blink of life a little more meaning. And I just can’t think of anything more important than living in awe of Him.

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