Where’s Waldo?
Consider we are told that when Yahweh looks at us all he sees is Jesus; that he cannot look upon sin and so he must see us through the blood of Christ.
Is that really the case? Of course, the Father wants all his children to have his character, just like we want our children to have character we can be proud of. But that does not mean that each one of our children is identical. Nor do we want them to be.
Is it possible that Jesus has done more for us than become a pair of tongs that God uses when he has to interact with his loathsome creation?
Or, perhaps it is more like how a father sees his baby daughter. Of course, he sees himself in his child every time he looks at her. But he doesn’t imagine that she is his clone. He knows that even as he places his values into her, she will grow into a distinct and special adult who has her own destiny and life.
God does not wish to be in love with himself. He desires a relationship with people who can understand and appreciate him for who he really is. He wants someone to be intimate with, to play with and even to argue with. While today we know God in a deep but narrow way, we are promised that one day “we shall know, even as we are known.”
The idea that God does not like us for who we are results in believers who are not confident of their standing with God. Timid and uncertain, it is impossible for them to be effective ambassadors for Christ or to wield the awesome power of God which works through them to accomplish more than they can ask or think.”
God calls us “living stones”. The idea of God taking millions of irregular, beautifully colored stones in a billion different shapes and sizes and whittling us down throughout our lives to become identical cinder-blocks would be ludicrous, if it wasn’t so sad and commonplace.
If God looks down from heaven, can he find me, or is He just playing a game of Where’s Waldo?
It isn’t that god can’t look upon us in our sin, it’s that we cannot look upon him. He doesn’t change us into identical cinder blocks, he simply removes the extraneous impurities that make us identical in sin. It is indeed our present state that separates us from god, but it is only due to our inability to withstand the holy fire that will burn us up. By becoming man, he sanctified humanity and all the world so that, should we choose it, we might become more like him in holiness. Then, through the unceasing pursuit of god, we come into increasing contact with his holiness, and the impurities that have attached themselves to us are burned away, making us ever more ourselves, even as we become ever more like god.
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True. Jesus became sin for us, that we might be the righteousness of God in Him. We are the beloved of God’s soul. He has come to live within us and, as Paul writes, we are to be filled “with all the fulness of God.” Peter says we have become partakers of God’s divine nature. Sanctified means set apart, and we have already been set apart. We can not only face God’s divine fire, we carry it around within us, and it destroys the refuge of lies, the covenants with hell and agreements with death of all those around us.
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