Advent - Pt 3

Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34 ESV). Today, as you light the second candle, focus on the coming of Christ who brings forgiveness from our sins. John Stott recalls the death of, Marghanita Laski, one of our best-known secular humanists and novelists. Not long before she died in 1988, in a moment of surprising candor in a television interview, she said, "What I envy most about you Christians is your forgiveness; I have nobody to forgive me." How tragic! In the movie, Troy, based on Homer’s Iliad, the king of Troy comes to Achilles after he has killed his son in battle. Priam, the king, kneels and kisses Achilles' hands. Achilles asks, “Who are you?” Priam answers, “I have endured what no one on earth has endured before. I kissed the hands of the man who killed my son.” May I say with boldness that God has kissed our hands with his grace in redemption? We certainly are responsible for the death of Jesus. It is our sin that brought him to Calvary to be executed in such cruelty that it staggers our imagination. Yet, knowing that day would surely come, God created Adam and Eve and all of us, their progeny. We have all chosen to follow in their steps of rebellion and sin. We bear the full responsibility of our sin, which is death. We crucified Jesus. Yet, the Father sends his Son to die on our behalf. He makes the atonement for us. He becomes our substitute and God forgives us fully and forever. Martin Luther once read the account of Abraham offering Isaac on the altar in Genesis 22 with his family. His wife, Katie, said, "I do not believe it. God would not have treated his son like that!" "But, Katie," Luther replied, "He did." Oswald Chambers writes: We trample the blood of the Son of God if we think we are forgiven because we are sorry for our sins. The only explanation for the forgiveness of God and for the unfathomable depth of His forgetting is the death of Jesus Christ. Our repentance is merely the outcome of our personal realization of the atonement which He has worked out for us. It does not matter who or what we are; there is absolute reinstatement into God by the death of Jesus Christ and by no other way, not because Jesus Christ pleads, but because He died. It is not earned, but accepted. All the pleading which deliberately refuses to recognize the Cross is of no avail; it is battering at a door other than the one that Jesus has opened. Our Lord does not pretend we are all right when we are all wrong. The atonement is a propitiation whereby God, through the death of Jesus, makes an unholy man holy. Hallelujah! We are forgiven! Celebrate his birth with that thought!