Squash us, Lord!

"Life would have been so perfect without you! I might as well squash you with my thumb and start over." That's what my response would be if somehow I was God and I saw all of my creation willingly sinning against me and doing everything I commanded them NOT TO DO. That's what makes it incredible though (actually He takes all the credit), how God can seemingly shrug it off when we ask for forgiveness, as if it never happened. Of course, in all truth sin is always a big deal to Him, and it's never shrugged off or forgotten completely as He is an everlasting God, but once we have accepted Jesus' sacrifice, God no longer looks at that sin. In that sense, His love is so massive that there is NO WAY we could escape it even if we wanted to (which many of us do at some point in our lives).

'I, I am he who blots out your transgressions for my own sake, and I will not remember your sins.' ~Isaiah 43:25 (ESV)

In the book More Than a Carpenter by Josh & Sean Mcdowell, they bring up the passage about Jesus healing a crippled man who was lowered into the room from the roof by his friends. Jesus claims to forgive the man's sins...and he says this before he even heals the man! The religious folk in the room are outraged, of course, because only God can forgive sins. Jesus was implying that the man had personally sinned against him, and was therefore claiming to be God. What I am trying to get at here, though, is that Jesus forgives the man before he even utters a word. This implies that Jesus knows the man to be a sinner and also knows that he was willing to do anything to seek forgiveness and be healed. Jesus had but to search the heart of the man in order to know his true intentions.

God is a powerful God, much more so than I could ever be were I in His position. My love is temporal, as loving as I can be, but God's love is forever. That moment when Jesus forgave him must have been a simply astounding one for the man. I can almost feel the shivers rushing up and down his body as he realized the implications of just those few simple words. Jesus could have been lying, and nobody would be any worse off, but somehow I think the man who was forgiven knew without a doubt that this was the son of God. He must have been overwhelmed to the point of tears, and probably would have been fine living the rest of his life a forgiven cripple, but still Jesus took the opportunity to heal him after all he had done and been through. The man was then free to go out and proclaim the wonders of the Maker's unending love, and I don't doubt he did just that! 

Here is a link to a great worship song called Search My Heart.