He is…a Man of sorrows and acquainted
with grief. —Isaiah 53:3
We are not “acquainted with grief” in the same
way our Lord was acquainted with it. We endure it and live through it, but we
do not become intimate with it. At the beginning of our lives we do not bring
ourselves to the point of dealing with the reality of sin. We look at life
through the eyes of reason and say that if a person will control his instincts,
and educate himself, he can produce a life that will slowly evolve into the
life of God. But as we continue on through life, we find the presence of
something which we have not yet taken into account, namely, sin— and it upsets
all of our thinking and our plans. Sin has made the foundation of our thinking
unpredictable, uncontrollable, and irrational.
We have to recognize that sin is a fact of
life, not just a shortcoming. Sin is blatant mutiny against God, and either sin
or God must die in my life. The New Testament brings us right down to this one
issue— if sin rules in me, God’s life in me will be killed; if God rules in me,
sin in me will be killed. There is nothing more fundamental than that. The
culmination of sin was the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, and what was true in
the history of God on earth will also be true in your history and in mine— that
is, sin will kill the life of God in us. We must mentally bring ourselves to
terms with this fact of sin. It is the only explanation why Jesus Christ came
to earth, and it is the explanation of the grief and sorrow of life.
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