Many churches throughout the world use a Bible reading schedule called a "lectionary." It's just a fancy word meaning "selected readings." Posts like this reflect on the readings for an upcoming Sunday or other Church holiday, as found in the historic one-year lectionary.
One of the glories of God, brought out in Isaiah 12:1-6, is that he forgives things which anger him. This is something we really misunderstand terribly. In verse one it lays the picture out clearly. God is angered with his people. They are sinful. They do bad things and it provokes God to anger.
What does God do? He turns his anger away. This should be an earth-shattering concept to us. It isn’t that sin doesn’t anger God. It isn’t that God is never angry. It isn’t that sin doesn’t deserve penalty. None of that. In fact, sin is bad. It angers God. God sees enough sin to anger him every moment of every day, and he has been doing this since the fall in the garden in Genesis chapter three. The person who sins deserves death, and that includes every last one of us.
God turns his anger away from us. He resolves his anger, not by taking it out on us or on our world. He takes it out on himself. God the Son, Jesus, who is of one will with God the Father and God the Holy Spirit, receives in himself the penalty for our sin. That’s why he dies on the cross. That’s why he was despised and rejected by people. That’s why he cries out to the Father from the cross, recognizing that he is forsaken. That’s the only way he can die.
Yes, God dies for our sin, for your sin, for my sin, for the sin of the world. Sin is really that bad. And God hates sin so much that he would rather die than let you bear the penalty for sin.
This is a show of God’s glory. The Lord is our strength, and he has done gloriously.
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