Easter

I saw myself
Ugly, bleeding, upward pleading,
Finding no reply--
No comfort, no rescue, left to die.
I looked again and it was Him.
So when I kneel before the throne
The Father looks at me
And sees Him
Who paid sin's debt for me.

Love has won! And Christ is risen!

Day 16

John 3:16 says, “Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” Isaiah 55:6 says, “Seek the Lord while he may be found; call upon him while he is near.” How can both be true? Jesus says people are already sentenced to the penalty of sin–hell–while the prophet Isaiah says God is nearby, waiting to deliver when we call on Him. They are both true, but each is speaking from a different perspective. Jesus speaks in the passage from a heavenly eternal perspective, while Isaiah speaks from a time-specific context-specific perspective.

When God looks at us before we accept the righteousness of His Son as our own, all He can see is sin. I like the phrase, “God hates the sin but loves the sinner,” but this is true only in perspective. There is also the phrase, “You are what you eat.” To God, when we are outside of Christ, we are also what we do, because our only security is our own righteousness, which isn’t saying much. So when God sees an unrepentant sinner, from a heavenly perspective, all He can see is sin.

When we receive Christ’s righteousness by faith, all God can see from an eternal heavenly perspective is the unblemished purity of His Son. Our identity merges with Jesus’, so we are already seated in the heavenly places (Ephesians 2:6). Our sentence suddenly changes to one declared innocent, and so the execution of that declaration is already being carried out when we realize God operates outside of time, but we are still constrained by time.

Unbelievers are not yet doomed but already condemned. Believers are not yet fully sanctified but are holy (1 Peter 2:9). When we understand this more and more, we see ourselves accurately and we can find loveliness in what still appears to us as unlovely–ourselves.

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