A little more “Oh!”
Jan 17 2023 - Eric Buresh
Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! (Romans 11:33)
Paul spent the first eleven chapters of his letter to the Romans showing the unfathomable plans of God in redemption, culminating in Paul’s impassioned doxology. Here, I’m using a little different language to broadly summarize Romans 1-11 in hopes of rekindling a little more “Oh!”
Let’s start with the bad news. God is infinitely perfect. He loves perfectly. He shows mercy perfectly. He creates perfectly. His judgments are perfect. He is perfectly righteous. He is perfectly just. He is free of all moral impurity. He is without any selfishness. His wisdom and power and strength are perfect and absolute. He is the essence of truth and perfectly faithful. His way is the way of perfect life, perfect peace and perfect joy. Every conceivable perfection belongs to Him.
Why is that bad news? Because you and I are far from perfect. We don’t love perfectly. We are selfish and self-serving. We envy. We covet. We are proud. We too often lie and hurt others to elevate or protect ourselves. We desire our own way, and we regularly choose our own way while rejecting God’s perfect way. Our judgment is riddled with mistakes. Our sense of justice is clouded with self-interest and fear. Every person that has existed, from Adam and Eve forward, has exercised the free will God created in us to make imperfect choices in open rebellion against God’s perfect way for us. The whole earth and all creation groans under the weight and consequences of these imperfections.
God is not pleased by our marring His perfect creation with our self-chosen and rebellious imperfectness. He loves us and is so incredibly great in mercy. He even gave us a pattern of perfection and countless generations to prove that we cannot be perfect – that we are chained to our own rebellion. But, He won’t abide our rebellion forever. God’s own infinite perfection cries out for Him to eradicate all rebellious imperfectness and all those who choose their own imperfect path. The imperfect, including you and me, will be destroyed in eternal fire and God will restore perfection in a new creation.
Unless . . . unless God, knowing exactly what we would do with the free will He gave us, has always had a plan to make our imperfectness perfect. What if God chose to place His own perfection (represented in the person of His Son, Jesus) in human flesh. Then, He could send His perfection among the imperfect. His perfect Son could teach mankind by living example what perfection looks like, but even that would not be enough. The plan had to be even more extreme – it had to provide a way to make the imperfect wholly perfect all while staying true and faithful to God’s untarnished and infinite perfection. A perfect God cannot simply pretend mankind’s imperfectness did not happen. No, to maintain His own perfectness, God would need to transform the imperfect into the perfect.
The perfect God had an unfathomable but perfect plan! God would make His own perfect Son, bear all the imperfect acts and rebellious choices of all of humanity across all time. He would make Him who was perfect bear the entire weight and consequences of all our imperfectness. Then, He would destroy His own perfect Son and along with Him destroy all the imperfectness. God did not sweep away the imperfections; He paid an unimaginably high price to impart to imperfect beings His own perfection. What an exchange -- our imperfections for His own perfection by the death of the perfect Son!
Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and His ways past finding out! (Romans 11:33)
P.S. – God, in His infinite love, made His perfect plan available to all of humanity. But, the exchange He offers is only effective for those who believe in and receive the perfection God offers by the price paid with the death of His Son, and who do not depend on their own path to rebelliously try to establish their own perfection.
P.S.S. – The perfect Son did not stay dead! Once the price was paid for our imperfectness, Jesus took up his own life. He was seen physically by many people. He then ascended physically to return to the presence of God the Father, where the Son now sits on His throne, exercising His absolute dominion. He sent His own Spirit to empower, guide, and transform those who believe and receive God’s perfect plan. Soon, the Son will return physically to earth and He will ultimately destroy all the remaining imperfectness and all those imperfect who did not believe and receive God’s perfect plan with eternal and unending fire.