Healing Rays of Righteousness

Read Hebrews 2:14-18

I enjoy looking out our windows and watching snowflakes coming down, accumulating and covering the cold, hard, brown landscape with soft whiteness.  As I watch, my meditative thoughts become focused on the beauty of God’s goodness and love for me and my world.

A gift bag that my wife and I filled with Christmas gifts had the following poem by Robin Fogle, titled “Snowflake Angels,” printed on its outside.

“Snowflakes are a gift from God  That float on angels’ wings,

Delighting all who see them  With the beauty that they bring.

They glow with crystal brilliance  That comes from God alone,

Then join to make a snowman  With a newness all its own.

And like each perfect snowflake  We, too, were made to be

A wonderful example  Of God’s creativity.

So when you see a snowflake  All pure and glistening white,

May you also be reminded  You are precious in God’s sight.”

How precious am I you ask.  How can I know God loves me? Let the Christmas story tell you.

According to that biblical story, it is because God so loved the world, you and me, that he sent his one and only Son, Jesus, into our world as a helpless, needy human baby just like you and me, to suffer the growing-up pains and temptations of childhood, teenager, and young adult years, just like you and me.  And in responding to God’s call to be God’s redeeming servant in the world, he suffered ridicule, rejection, injustice, and death as a human, just like you and me.

And the writer of Hebrews tells us in verse 17 that Jesus had to be made like us “in every way, in order that he might become a merciful and faithful high priest in service to God, and that he might make atonement for the sins of the people.”  Furthermore, “because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.”

That, my friend, is how precious you are to him.  That is how much Jesus loves you.  You and me are the only reason he laid aside his glorious royalty, his all-mighty sovereignty, his perfect holiness, to come down and live as a human person in our human world.  And, in order to rescue, redeem, and reclaim us as his brothers and sisters in the great, eternal family of God, he had to taste the bitterness of human sin and experience first-hand the painful sufferings of human life.

In his book “Consider Jesus (Daily Reflections on the Book of Hebrews, p.76), Donald R. Jacobs writes, “Those are forceful words.  He had to be made like me in order to save me.  …I can scarcely take this in.  How can the One who fashioned the universe submit to be fashioned as a human being?  What love!  What grace!  I marvel at the thought.  He became like me so that he might remake me to be like him.”

Jesus makes it clear in his conversation with Nicodemus that God did not send him “into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world.”  (John 3:17).  This is the good news the angels proclaimed to the shepherds on the night of Jesus’ birth into our human world, “Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is Christ the Lord.” (Luke 2:11).

Truly, truly, God reaches out to us, not with the arm twisting of divine imperialism, but with the persuasive power of patient long-suffering love.  And the falling snowflakes silently but beautifully proclaim the wonder-filled truth that we are fragile and so very precious in God’s sight.  “O how marvelous, O how wonderful is my Savior’s love for me.”

Pray with me;  Father God, I thank you for loving me, forgiving me, redeeming me, and adopting me into your Kingdom family of brothers and sisters together with Jesus.  Thank you, thank you.  I love you, Lord God!  Amen.

“Healing Rays of Righteousness” – January 30, 2019