Marvel at Salvation – December 2

Behold, God is my salvation; I will trust, and will not be afraid; for the Lord God is my strength and my song, and he has become my salvation. 

Isaiah 12:2

I love the words used here by the prophet Isaiah, that the Lord did not just provide salvation, he himself became our salvation.  We cannot even begin to grasp how amazing this salvation is until we have a clear understanding of our state of existence as human beings.  Sin entered the world through our very first parents, Adam and Eve, and has flowed from their veins into ours ever since that day.  From that very first sin, we have been passing the blame to others and abdicating personal responsibility.  Both women and men have been cursed with hard labor, whether through your job at home or away from home, I’m certain you can attest to the fact that there are daily struggles.  It seems our work never ends, our hopes in our jobs or our families to fulfill us continue to disappoint.  Turn on the news for just a moment and the despair continues; suffering, hate, intolerance, cruelty, rejection, war, poverty, injustice, natural disasters, and on and on it goes.  And then there is our sin that doesn’t seem to go away.  The habit we just can’t break, the words we keep saying that we wish we could take back, the strain in our families, the lack of wisdom that keeps leading us into folly. 

We can put our hope in ourselves, as the saints who have gone before us have done.  Shall we see how it worked out for them?  Adam and Eve surely left the garden committed to following God and raising their sons in his ways, yet one of their sons killed the other (Genesis 4:8).  By the time Noah came along “The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of his heart was only evil continually” (Genesis 6:5).  Even after Noah and his family had been rescued through great means, Noah got drunk and passed out naked (Genesis 9:21).  Men tried to reach God on their own merits by building the Tower of Babel, and the Lord confused their language to show them that was not the way (Genesis 11:4).  Abraham gave his wife away, twice (Genesis 12:13 & 20:2) rather than trusting in God’s protection.  Lot would have sacrificed his daughters to rape and abuse and later those same daughters got him drunk and slept with him to become pregnant (Genesis 19).  And the pattern continues throughout scripture, we are a hopeless people, bent on trusting in our idols and ourselves rather than in God.  Nothing we have tried on our own has worked.  We have ruined everything.  How will we be saved?

What are we to do?

God is going to make a way!  The Lord will provide himself the sacrifice needed to rescue us from this fallen world.  The Lord will provide himself as the ransom needed to purchase us back from the bondage of sin.   Against the dark backdrop that is this fallen, sinful world, a light is coming.  Jesus is coming.  Can you believe that a perfect, holy God would choose to save a people such as us?  This time, it won’t be through a massive boat, we won’t be led by angels away from a doomed city, it won’t be through a parted sea, it won’t be through walls crumbling to the ground by a shout.  This time, God is coming in the flesh.