God's way.

God gave us, humans, through Moses, the laws. I believe that this is God saying to us, “OK, you want to control your own lives, without ME, so then follow these laws. Remember, there are consequences for disobeying them. If you don’t follow these laws and you don’t take care of disobedience, you will never have peace.” And so, we have no peace because something inside us (our sin nature) makes it hard to keep the laws God gave us.

 

God, in His infinite wisdom and His great compassion, became a human in the person of Jesus or Yeshua, as the Jews call Him. He obeyed all those laws that He Himself gave us to obey, the ones we cannot. He became that spotless (without sin) lamb who the Jews used to sacrifice during Passover. He took our punishment upon Himself and was put to death in our place. The amazing thing was, He didn’t stay in the grave; only God can accomplish such a thing. On the third day after he was crucified, He came out of the grave, alive. Many people witnessed seeing Him and the wounds on His hands and feet and side; before He disappeared in the clouds, about 40 days after He arose from the dead.

 

I believe our religions too often, become like the laws are to the Jews. Right now, I’m thinking about just Christian religions like Catholic, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Pentecostal, and on and on, but this analogy probably holds true to other non-Christian religions as well. I said in the previous post that religion is like our way of coming up with a recipe for life. You must be baptized some say; some say dunking is the only way, some say sprinkling. Some say you must go to church or synagogue every Sunday or Saturday whichever the case. Some say you must be able to speak in tongues. Study the Bible, feed the poor, tithe to the church, visit the sick, the orphans, the widows, and on and on. I hope you can see how, in a way, this is like making a recipe for life.

 

I’m not saying that these things in our recipes are wrong. They are what we should be doing. The problem is that they are something we try to follow just like we would try to follow a recipe or instructions to make a cake, or build a house, or assemble a bike, or whatever. They don’t give us what we hoped for or what we would have liked to have.

 

God, through the person of Christ Jesus, says, “Marry with me. Through our marriage and the power of the Holy Spirit, we will become as one. You won’t have to try and do things on you own accord anymore. We will do them together. Those things you’ve tried so hard to do will become more natural to you as we become as one in our marriage.”

 

God becomes our husband and we become His wives, in submission to Him. His way is so much easier and is as it should be! Who knows better than God, the creator?