Commitment

I've thinking about commitment this morning.

It started because I was listening to a sermon on forgiveness and I started musing about how God forgave us. Adam and Eve rejected God and chose to do things their own way, so God lets them go. But, He says, I will forgive them and I will do everything in my power to win them back. So to protect everybody else (ie the Angels) in the universe from the effects of sin as much as possible, He isolated us on our world and let us see two things.

One; how bad sin really is - it kills us. Doesn't get much worse than that, except that maybe all the pain and suffering we go through on the way to death is actually worse than death ... I mean once you're dead you're dead. You know nothing. No more pain, no more suffering, no more anything - which may seem like not such a bad option when compared to aspects of our current lives, but when compared to what God has promised us if we go back to Him it is a tragedy. The question becomes, do we believe God's promises? But I digress ...

Two; how much He loves us. Consider ... He locked us into this world to stew in our own sinful juices and then He comes down and joins us here and stews with us to make a way out for everyone who will accept His help.

And it was point two that lead my musings to commitment. Consider again ... God had other options ... When Satan first introduced the concept of sin in Heaven - before we were created God could have:

1. Destroyed Satan - but the cost was a universe full of Angels who were afraid of Him and obeyed so they wouldn't die ...

2. Destroyed Everything and made a new Heaven and an new set of Angels, then when we were created no one would have known about sin.

BUT, He didn't do these things, he chose to keep them all; Satan, and the Angels and then He created us, even though He knew in advance that we would reject Him. That's commitment. He's committed to us!

Consider further ... God's Son in Heaven becomes the human Jesus and lives with us for 33 years, trying to show us what God is really like, that His promises are true, and that He wants us back. Basically Jesus was God coming courting. Saying this is who I really am ... can't you love me??

And what did we do? Most of us rejected Him. We nailed Him to a cross and killed Him. And He forgave us. That shows love. Extreme ,unreasonable love - maybe obsession ...

The thing is Jesus did not have to stay on that cross - the physical pain must have been immense, but the emotional pain ... to be hung up there naked, exposed in full view of the object of his extreme unreasonable love, and then to have that love thrown back in his face, "We don't want you, we choose Barabbas!" "If you're really the Son of God why don't you come down from the cross and save yourself?"

And literally, Jesus could have come down off the cross and gone back to Heaven - twelve legions of Angels were waiting for the command to come and get Him. If He had as much as breathed a desire to be gone He would have been whisked away from the evilness and cruelty and rejection He was experiencing and taken back to Heaven in an instant. Back to Heaven where it is beautiful and peaceful and everybody loved Him.

But He didn't go, He chose to stay and see it through to the bitter deadly end. Because He knew that if He didn't stay we would all die and not one of us would get to see the fulfillment of the promises He had made.

That is commitment, and that is love. "No matter what it takes, I will save them, I love them, it does not matter that they do not love me, I will make a way for them to come to me if they want to." And so He died and then He was resurrected, (that is a whole other rather glorious story that I'll discuss some other time), and the way was made for us to be reunited with the one being in the entire universe who loves us more than we can imagine or dream. Who is so committed to us that He willingly died to to save us, and who is working everyday to show us how much he loves us.

So then what is our part?

We choose.

Either we choose to accept Jesus and love and life and joy. Or we choose to reject Him and sadly since there is only one way to Eternity we will die, but it will be a death on our own terms, rather than salvation on God's terms - I guess that is of some comfort to our pride - but for Jesus it is a tragedy. Imagine how you would feel if you loved someone exceedingly much and they were sitting on a ticking time bomb, you know the combination to disarm the bomb, you tell them the combination, and they refuse to use it ... so you are forced to stand and watch as they blow themselves up. Tragedy.

I'm choosing life, I'm choosing to be loved.