Hebrews 9:27-28 (NLT)
27 And just as each person is destined to die once and
after that comes judgment, 28 so also Christ was offered once for all time as a
sacrifice to take away the sins of many people. He will come again, not to deal
with our sins, but to bring salvation to all who are eagerly waiting for him.
These verses tell us we are destined to die and then
there is a judgment by God. By God’s grace and mercy Christ was offered once as
a sacrifice for the sins of the people. Christ did this once to bring salvation
to all.
Author Henri Nouwen tells the story of a family he knew
in Paraguay. The father, a doctor, spoke out against the military regime there
and its human rights abuses. Local police took their revenge on him by
arresting his teenage son and torturing him to death. Enraged townsfolk wanted
to turn the boy's funeral into a huge protest march, but the doctor chose
another means of protest. At the funeral, the father displayed his son's body
as he had found it in the jail—naked, scarred from electric shocks and cigarette
burns, and beatings. All the villagers filed past the corpse, which lay not in
a coffin but on the blood-soaked mattress from the prison. It was the strongest
protest imaginable, for it put injustice on grotesque display.
Isn't that what God did at Calvary? … The cross that held
Jesus' body, naked and marked with scars, exposed all the violence and
injustice of this world. At once, the cross revealed what kind of world we have
and what kind of God we have: a world of gross unfairness, a God of sacrificial
love. [Philip Yancey, Disappointment with God (Zondervan, 1997), pp. 185-186]
There is an old hymn I love, GRACE GREATER than our SIN,
by Julia H. Johnson, which says in the refrain:
Grace, grace, God’s grace,
Grace that will pardon and cleanse within;
Grace, grace, God’s grace,
Grace that is greater than all our sin!
There is NO sin greater than God’s grace. There is
nothing that can keep us from God and His love for us.
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