Insurance is a big deal in my community. People have lost property because of wildfires and found some comfort if their insurance paid out on what was destroyed. Others lost property to the devastating flood of November 2021, and many found that their insurance would not cover their loss. What a horrible addition to their grief to discover that an insurance company could find a fault with their claim that would disqualify them from a payout. They not only lost so much of their personal possessions, but they also lost all the value in their home and property with not even a penny of replacement.
Why does God have an insurance plan that does not give him any room to disqualify those who receive it? Why doesn’t God act on his right to find fault with us and reject us forever? He knows our faults. Fault-finding and rejection go together. So why is it that the one person who sees every fault in us would enact an eternal-life insurance policy that was signed and sealed in the blood of his Son so that it could never be revoked no matter how many faults he could see?
I wonder about these things in the context of knowing that God has given me grace to stand strong while I am feeling weak with sorrow and grief. I know my faults and failings and I know rejection because of them. They cannot be escaped. I look in the mirror and they are staring back at me. I look in people’s faces and see their painful effect. It doesn’t matter whether the words were spoken or unspoken, or the actions were good or bad, there is the awareness of faults and failures bringing rejection.
And in this, God wants me to know he is “blameless”.
What a gift of thoughts this is to me this morning, that God brings me to consider how he is perfect in every way, and that his perfection leaves him not knowing what I feel like to be imperfect. He can’t know what it feels like to be incomplete. He can’t know what it feels like to be rejected because of a fault with him. He knows what it is like to be accused of faults, and rejected because of those perceptions, but he does not know what it feels like to have faults, or to have to admit that he somehow deserved rejection because of something he did or did not do.
What a horrible feeling it would have been for Adam to discover that he had just brought the first fault into the infant creation. He wasn’t even a narcissist! There hadn’t been time to make him one. And yet he despised the guilt he felt, and the shame he felt, and the fear he felt, such that he would try to hide from God and then blame Eve for his sin.
But there is the Creator God who is not only without fault, but as the Triune, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, they do not know what it is like to find fault with each other. They do not know what it is like to turn their backs on each other. They cannot know the personal feeling of rejection because of a fault. They do not know what self-justifying a fault between themselves feels like.
They are “blameless”.
Our “justice-issues” with God are utterly ludicrous! The Triune God is perfect in every attribute, including their justice. Both hell and the cross are perfect justice.
PERFECT!!!
And with all the wonders of worshiping while weeping, the blameless Triune God spoke this into my soul: “even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him.”[1]
BLAMELESS!!!
The wonder of it! That the one person who perfectly sees the blame and fault in me, and feels the weight of my corruption as no one on earth has ever known it, has ordained that I who am full of faults, more faults than my rejectors have imagined, will BE “holy and blameless before him”!
And so, I worship Jesus for doing this unthinkable thing that he would “be sin” for my sake. As Paul wrote, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”[2]
That’s how it is done. Jesus has some feeling of what it is like to “be sin”. And on a spirit that “knew no sin”. Never has there been a man who was absolutely without any fault, and yet was “despised and rejected” as no man has ever been hated and disowned by anyone at all.[3]
It is said that “out of wonder, worship is born”.[4] I am in awe and wonder in my grief and sorrow that Jesus would be made sin for me so that I “might become the righteousness of God”.
I do not know how this earthly life will end. I do not know how many more people I will lose in life. I hate death and what it does to us. I hate the corruption of sin in me and everyone around me. I hate how it destroys people and nations.
But there is this overriding act of ultimate sovereignty that has declared that I will “be holy and blameless before him”, before the Triune, because Jesus became sin for me.
And so, I accept the weakness in me today, and the grief and sorrow of what is broken. I know that God has already blessed me in another lookout-point of the Beatitudinal Journey[5] so that it is true worship I feel for my Father who has given me his Son and the ministry of the Holy Spirit to carry out a plan that no one (not even me) can stop. I will one day know what it feels like to be faultless in the presence of love that has eternally forfeited its right to reject me for my sin.
Now to him who is able to keep you from stumbling and to present you blameless before the presence of his glory with great joy, to the only God, our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion, and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen.[6]
(Insert worshipful sigh of relief and appreciation here).
© 2022 Monte Vigh ~ Box 517, Merritt, BC, V1K 1B8
Email: in2freedom@gmail.com
Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the
English Standard Version (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text
Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of
Good News Publishers.)
[1]
Ephesians 1:4
[2]
II Corinthians 5:21
[3]
Isaiah 53:3
[4]
G. Campbell Morgan (not sure which book it was from, but it has stuck with me
for decades)
[5]
The “Beatitudinal Journey” is the way I have come to see the eight Beatitudes Jesus
expresses in Matthew 5:1-12. God blesses his children with the experience of
poverty of spirit over our sin, mourning all that is wrong with us, meekly
surrendering to the authority of Jesus Christ as the only one who can fix what
is broken, and hungering and thirsting for the righteousness we do not have. As
God satisfies that hunger and thirst for righteousness through the new covenant
in Jesus’ blood, we become the merciful with pure hearts who want nothing more in
life than to lead people to have peace with God, even to the point of rejoicing
when we are persecuted for sharing the good news of great joy with everyone
around us.
[6]
Jude 1:24-25
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