Instead,
I represent those people who wake up in the morning feeling yucky. People like
me need a far different God than the ones who make their lists of good
behavior, check who’s been naughty or nice, and hand out blessings to all the
good boys and girls after checking their lists over twice.
However,
I would not want to present the idea that it matters the least little bit what
any human being thinks God should be like. God is like whom he is, and he is
what he is like, so our quest is not to make a god in our own image, but to find
the God who has made us in his.
Which
is why yucky-feeling people feel a longing for a merciful God who forgives
sins. It isn’t merely that we would like this (since no one left to his own
imagination has come up with the idea of a God who is gracious, forgiving, and
overflowing with loving-kindness). Rather, we have this longing because our
broken condition knows we were made for something more than how broken we feel,
and our hearts go looking for the kind of God who can take into consideration
how we are really doing.
Here
is a Psalm from God’s own breathed-out Scriptures, inviting us to come as we
are to the God who comes to us as he is. Let me share with you why people like
me find such encouragement in a God like him.
Psalm 130 begins with this expression to God: “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord! O Lord, hear my voice!
Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleas for mercy!” (vss 1-2). God knows that people like us can be in “the depths,” and so invites us to call
to him from there. The emphasis is on that much needed “mercy” that yucky-feeling people need to know is found in God.
“If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities,
O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness, that you may
be feared” (vss 3-4). Here is what my heart readily
acknowledges, that, if God marked iniquities, or kept a record of our sins, I
would never be able to entertain the possibility of standing before him.
However, because with him there is the forgiveness I long for, I know what it
feels like to have reverent fear comforting my heart.
“I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and
in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than watchmen for the
morning, more than watchmen for the morning” (vss
5-6). This is what happens to people who know the messed-up, miserable
condition of their souls. We feel our whole being waiting for the God who
speaks words of hope to our inner beings. We wait in expectation the way the
watchmen watches for the morning he knows will come round its daily course.
“O Israel, hope in
the Lord! For with
the Lord there is
steadfast love, and with him is plentiful redemption. And he will redeem Israel
from all his iniquities” (vss 7-8). Here is what we
can look forward to when we come to God as we are, accept him as he is, and
experience the connection between our sin and his salvation, between our
brokenness and his fixing, between our wounds and his healing. We come to
experience the satisfaction of our own hunger and thirst for the righteousness of
walking with God, and so we must call everyone around us to this same hope.
So, dear readers, put your hope in the Lord Jesus Christ!
It is with him, the God of the Bible, that there is the unfailing love the
human soul longs to experience. It is with Jesus Christ that there is full redemption
from sin. He will redeem his people from their sins, no doubt about it. Be, or
become, one of those such people.
From my heart,
Monte
© 2013 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517,
Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8 ~ in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted,
Scriptures are from the English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English
Standard Version Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good
News Publishers.)
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