To Be With You
Whether you believe in God or not, you must agree that any being with the knowledge, creativity, and power to imagine, let alone make, this universe is incredible! Setting aside all that is visible around us, consider the cell's Sodium/Potassium pump. It is amazing, and we take it for granted as it operates within the cells of our bodies 300 times per second!
God is indeed unfathomable in everything. However, there is one thing that we, as imperfect beings, have experienced that God will never experience. What is this thing to which we have an exclusive claim? It is the act of sinning. Don't know if you have ever thought about this, but God will never experience sin. Indeed, God knows what sin is, and He certainly knows what sin does. He has seen its effects for centuries upon centuries. He has been involved intimately with His creation as sin has tainted and ripped it apart. But God has not and will not experience the act of sinning.
Jesus has made a way for us to commune with God.
I came to this revelation while considering the extremely harsh judgment documented in the books of Leviticus and Deuteronomy in the Old Testament bible. God instructed people to be stoned to death for acts committed daily in our modern world. It was rough and tough to rectify with a loving God. Of course, God does not need my rectification. But after reading the accounts of people being swallowed by the earth and plagues breaking out on the people for "simple" sins, it got my mind whirling with "whys"?
Why would a loving God demand such actions toward people for sin? When considering this question, it is crucial to understand what was being worked out in the Jewish people of the Old Testament. A covenant had been established, and the physical descendants of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob had been "chosen" by God to be a people "set apart" to Him. According to the books of Moses, the early stages of this experiment, for lack of a better term, included freeing God's people from slavery in Egypt, 40 years of wandering in the wilderness right next to the promised land, and the eventual successful planting of Israel as a nation. The "law" is established to correctly orient this chosen people toward their God and create the physical atmosphere that would allow God, a perfect, sinless, all-powerful Being, to commune with the Jewish people, a human lot with all the rebellious, sinful tendencies of the rest of us.
How do you set up a place for God on earth? Well, you need a meticulously designed tabernacle constructed according to precise specifications. You need to sacrifice many animals and ensure that people do their allocated duties continually and without fault. Seriously, it takes a bunch of sacrifices to cover humans' sins. Trying to make the imperfect acceptable to the perfect is a challenging task. Therein lies the problem with the law. It is unattainable and, therefore, cannot make a sinful, imperfect world suitable for a perfect God. Through sin, humans and all of creation are irreparably changed from a natural standpoint. You can't put the molasse back in the bottle. Sin entered, creation was corrupted, and there was no going back. But didn't God know that? Yes. So why the law thing?
To show that humans were not capable of redeeming themselves? While this is an obvious conclusion and was thoroughly demonstrated through the law's implementation, it is not the only purpose. I think God really wanted to set up a means of communing once again with His creation. He desired the walks in the garden, the unimpeded talks with His beloved people. He wanted to be with His creation. So we go back to a previous question - how can the perfect be with the imperfect?
We see in the Israelite nation many times when its people turned away from the God who worked wonders on their behalf. We see many times when the people adopted the idols of the nations God helped them dispatch from the land. We also see times when God judged the people for their actions and other times when He had mercy on them. Throughout the rebellious times documented in the old testament books, the Lord continued to show a desire to commune with the people. If He could not commune with the people, He would commune with chosen ones whose hearts were turned toward Him. They were undoubtedly sinners like all the rest, but they desired God's presence and would not turn to anything other than Him.
Of course, the ultimate outcome, we now know, was that the perfect cannot be with the imperfect as long as the conditions rely on the actions of the imperfect. In other words, man had made his choice to disobey God. He continued in that disobedience through both the old and new testaments of the bible and continues today to disobey. If there is one constant among humans, it is our willingness to sin against our Creator. So the perfect and imperfect could not be reconciled according to the law. But God tried, and in the trying, some very unmerciful things occurred.
Why would a merciful God be so ruthless in the old testament? Because Holiness cannot commune with sinfulness. Our sin separated us from God, so the environment in which humans lived had to be “cleansed” before God could commune with us. Anything and everything that stood in the way of creating that a clean environment had to be removed. However, human beings as a collective lacked the willpower to make the necessary environment for the Perfect. Some, like Moses, Joshua, and Caleb, were dedicated to fulfilling the law even in their sin. But others were either willfully ignorant or defiantly rebellious toward the whole idea and therefore had to be removed. Does that seem unmerciful? It is.
Why would God command the destruction of entire peoples? Because the objective was a communion between the Perfect and the imperfect. Why would people be required to sacrifice animals for the atonement of their own sins? Because sin had to be atoned, the objective was a communion between a sinful man and a sinless God. Getting the Perfect together with the imperfect, the Holy with the unholy takes incredible actions. Just ask Jesus.
Jesus and the sacrifice He made is beyond marvelous! As has been displayed through the generational accounts of Israel, communion between God and His corrupted creation is impossible as long as it depends on the actions of the corrupters. But Jesus' perfect, willing self-sacrifice fulfilled the atonement requirement. Jesus' sacrifice established a new "environment," one filled with grace. He made communion between God and sinful man possible by making it dependent on the actions of the Perfect.
He allowed grace to overcome by making the Perfect sinful without sinning. The Perfectly Sinless took on the imperfect corruption of the sinful so that the power of sin would be crushed and true communion between the Perfect and imperfect would be available. In doing this, Jesus established an environment, not of this corrupted world but of God's Kingdom beyond the corrupted, where those who, through faith, believe, and through grace are saved to commune with their Savior and Lord and with their Creator God and His Holy Spirit for the rest of eternity.