The Offense Of The Cross

 

The Offense Of The Cross

Jeremiah 34

Galatians 4:22 – 5:11

Luke 15:11 – 32

 

     Free!  Free!  How can it be free?  Giving God’s revealed nature, this should come as no shock.  This world, on the other hand, demands payment to secure freedom.  It is in Her great whoredom that she reduces the cost of a man’s soul to pilfering gold.  Our God values differently.

     His beef with Israel in Jeremiah’s time was that even in distress, they could not get it right.  Was not God the giver of life, freedom, and enablement?  Did He purposely organize the Israeli machine under a covenant to grind upon the wheels of slavery?  Hadn’t they witnessed His great deliverance from Pharoah’s hand?  Yet they remained the captors even of themselves.  To free, then enslave again, made no sense and God let them know through the mouth of Jeremiah.

     Galatians talks of further bondage.  Sarah and Hagar.  Two dichotomous vents breathing heat to the sky.  One in the expelliarmus forcing of Abraham’s hand of the first born.  The other in victim mentality nearly imploding under a hot sun of rejection.  The first is God’s allegorical picture of free by faith.  Hagar, however, gets the stick as His example of works righteousness.  What’s the dif?  Attitude.

     The F-16 is defined by its attitude.  Pitch, roll, and yaw.  Is it upside-down, right-side up, or standing on end in the mud at the end of the runway?  Attitude in a jet aircraft means all. Gotta keep the intake fed.  Starving a General Dynamic’s engine means throwing JP-8 out the tail without burner thrust.  We prized ourselves in being “Boys of the Air” versus “Grunts on the Ground.” 

     Sarah, in the least, didn’t consider herself an Egyptian grunt far away from God’s promises.  The slave was second class, right?  “Throw her out Abe!”  And she was expelled.  Paul raises Cain years later as the circumcision tries to creep in on his herd of turtles once liberated by sound doctrine.  God refers to the entire conundrum as a past lesson useful for our present.

     Faith is the only substance which God can hold in His just hand to balance a soul in justification.  Faith, not works, propels the person to A+ on God’s rule list.  The prodigal son came to his bean on this one.  Convinced of his father’s goodness, he made the trek back to free food land.  He came back in faith.  The other crabby son thought he was better because he had checked all the boxes.  He did not understand his father’s heart.

     It is the will of God that He justify ALL by faith.  We are the ones making the choices.  Will we impose slavery upon ourselves by checking the boxes of legality or will we enjoy the freedom of faith?  Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.  If God accepts our brother or sister, shall we not accept them with all their differences? Peer pressure, pigeon-holing, and downright prejudice threatens our unity.  The offense of the cross means all are the same in His eyes.  All have approached Him in the name of His son.  And for this reason, He reminds us it is by a free gift and not of our own.  For it is not of works that man may boast.  God Himself justifies.