In Spite Of

Let’s face the music—we are real stinkers!

Have you heard the rhetoric against the Jews for killing Jesus? Like somehow it is the fault of the Jews that Jesus had to die to make the way for any of us to have a renewed relationship with God on God’s terms. Certainly the Jews were sinners but which of any of us who have lived since the beginning of time have not been sinning? It was for our universal sin against God and ourselves that we all were separated, apart for God.

Which of us were different than the Jews of Jesus’s time? ‘They did not recognize Him’ ‘they did not understand the prophecies about Him’ ‘they condemned Him’ even though they heard the Truth about Him weekly. ‘They found no guilt in Him’ yet ‘asked to have Him executed.’

How long did any of us ignore who Jesus was, didn’t give our attention to the Word about Him in the Bible, wanted nothing to do with His Way even to the point of putting Him as far out of our lives as possible, turning our backs to God?

How eager were we to ignore Him, put Him aside so we could continue on with our lives our way? How willing were we to place Him out-of-sight, closed away from our attentions so we could enjoy ourselves? That would have been so easy except:

But God raised him from the dead, and for many days he appeared to those who had come up with him from Galilee to Jerusalem, who are now his witnesses to the people. And we bring you the good news that what God promised to the fathers, this he has fulfilled to us their children by raising Jesus, as also it is written in the second Psalm, ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you.’ ¹

Doesn’t that beat all!? We did everything we could to ignore Jesus ‘but God raised Him from the dead’ and then had him appear for many days to witness who knew Him so we couldn’t deny what God had done. All of this in spite of our ignoring Him. He did what He said was necessary to be done because of what we had done. In spite of us! And Father God did it to and through God the Son by ‘begat-ting’ Him into the world, incarnating the willing Jesus when we were unwilling.

So next time you think of how the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus, remember that it was for you ‘back’ to God that Jesus had to die and not for the apparent political intrigue of first century Judea. Maybe replace anti-Semitic with anti-Self for you are the reason Jesus died, it was for your sins it was necessary for God to have His Son live and die so you could live.