God Is Coming For Us

God Is Coming For Us

A child is born to us, a son is given to us. The government will rest on his shoulders. And he will be called: Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6

I’M GOING TO ADMIT SOMETHING. I don’t want to, but I want to have a transparent relationship with you. So here goes: growing up, I watched The Brady Bunch. I watched a lot of The Brady Bunch.^a

I loved the Brady family. I felt like Greg and Peter and Bobby were my brothers. Marcia, Jan, and Cindy were my sisters. Tiger was my dog, Alice my maid, and Sam my butcher.^b

There was one episode when Greg got locked in Sam-the-butcher’s meat cooler. It looked like he was going to die. What drama! What if Greg froze to death in Sam’s meat cooler? Can you imagine how the opening song would have gone after that episode? “Here’s the story . . . of a man named Brady. Who had three sons, but one froze to death in Sam’s meat cooler. Now only three men, living with their grief, Greg’s become a chunk of beef. The Bradys’ lunch. The Bradys’ lunch. That’s how Greg became the Bradys’ lunch.”

Greg was in serious trouble in that meat cooler. I watched, and I loved Greg, and I wanted so badly to enter my television, to go right into it and save him. But I felt so powerless.

Greg just stayed in his horrible situation and waited for someone to save him.

Heaven, We Have a Problem

There is a story. God is the star of the story.

God is also love.^c

God is love and lives in a perfect community of intimacy and mutual submission and serving. So God decided to create people with whom he could share his love and community.

But there was a problem. The people God created rejected his love and refused to live his way and in his kind of community. It started in the beginning in the Garden of Eden, and it’s continued throughout history with every person’s decision to sin.^d

Yet it turns out that God’s love is so great, he doesn’t give up on us.

That’s one of the things we see in the Old Testament of the Bible.

In the Old Testament, God reveals the standard for being in relationship with him. He gives the law, including, most famously, the Ten Commandments, setting the standard he expects for our behavior. In a sense, what God is doing is asking us to live and treat each other the way God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit have always lived and treated each other. It’s the way God has always done life, and he’s not going to lower his standards to be in relationship with us.

But there’s a problem. God won’t lower himself to our standards to be in relationship with us, but we’re incapable of living up to his standards to be in relationship with him. We have to keep the law to be in relationship with God, but we can’t keep the law. The apostle Paul writes, “No one can ever be made right with God by doing what the law commands. The law simply shows us how sinful we are.”^e So the law God gives in the Old Testament doesn’t lead us into a relationship with God; it leads us to see how far we are from God and that we’re incapable of living his way on our own. If we want God, it turns out we need help.

In the Old Testament, God also reveals the consequence for violating the standard, for our wrong behavior. The consequence is death. It’s been that way from the beginning, when God told Adam and Eve that if they sinned, they were sure to die.^f

We think of dying as losing life. You stop breathing and your brain stops functioning and you’re lying on the ground lifeless. But death also carries the connotation of separation. When a person dies physically, that person’s soul is separated from his or her body.

God created us to live in his love and in his community, and if we rebel against the way he wants us to do life, we die, in the sense that we’re separated from experiencing his love and life in his community.

Think of it this way: imagine I allow someone to come live in my house with my family. I explain the rules of the house. In our family, we treat one another with kindness. We don’t lie to one another. We each pitch in and each do some of the chores. But let’s say this guest refuses to live by my rules. Day after day he brazenly disregards the way our family does life together. Wouldn’t it be fair for me to tell this person that he’s lost the privilege of living with us? That his choices are forcing us to separate? Of course it would.

In the same way, God gives us life. The reason for our existence is to glorify him, to experience his love, and to enjoy his kind of life and community. If we refuse to live the way he asks, wouldn’t it be fair for God to tell us that we’ve lost the privilege of living with him? That our choices lead to our being separated from him and his community of love?

We learn that the penalty for sin is death—not so much meaning a loss of life, but a separation.

This is why when Adam and Eve sinned, they didn’t fall over lifeless. Instead, they had to leave the Garden where God was living in fellowship with them. They were walking, but they were dead. They were, for the first time, experiencing separation from God.

The consequence of sin is death, separation from God. There will come a time when we experience physical death—our souls will be separated from our bodies. And after that we will experience a third death—the eternal separation of our souls from God.

None of that is good.

We need help.

We need someone who can save us from ourselves, from our sin, and from the situation we put ourselves in.

The good news is that God sent Jesus to save us.

I watched that Brady Bunch episode and I couldn’t stand the situation Greg had gotten himself in. He couldn’t do anything to save himself, so all he could do was wait and hope.

I watched and wanted to enter my TV and save him, but I couldn’t.

God saw that humans had gotten themselves in a horrible situation. They couldn’t do anything to save themselves. In the Old Testament we see them just waiting and hoping.

God couldn’t stand the situation we had gotten ourselves into. He loved us despite our sin. And what I was powerless to do, God was able to do. I couldn’t enter Greg’s world to save him, but God could enter ours. So Jesus came into our world. He came to save us.

Now What?

• Read Isaiah 53:1-12.
• This was written hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus, yet it is an amazing foretelling of Jesus’ life and what he would come to do for us. What do you see in Isaiah 53 that makes you think of Jesus?
• Confess to God the ways in which you’ve made poor choices and not lived by his rules. Let him know that you recognize your need of his forgiveness.