….thinking about it, while preparing for my message tomorrow.

In the history of God (if we can even speak of such a thing), what is the greatest “crisis”?  Is it when Christ hung on the Cross, bearing our sins, and the Holy One became sin for us, and He cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me”?

Or is it in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus said, “Not My will, but Thine be done?”

Or was it when He said, “I delight to do Thy will,” and “took upon Him the form of a servant”?

Or do we go all the way back to Creation, to another garden, the Garden of Eden?  Back when Almighty God, even knowing what Adam would do, knowing that sin and death was going to come into the world, and knowing what a loving and holy God would do in response, knowing all those things, He said, “Let us make man in our image”?

If we can even properly talk about “when” an eternal God makes decisions in terms of time, we might go back before Creation, and ask, “How and why did He even start this whole thing rolling, knowing where it was going?  Why did He make us?”  The simple answer that He loved us seems so insufficient, when we didn’t even exist, and our future held rebellion against Him.  Why did He love us, then?  The only answer is that He chose to.  He chose Creation and the Cross, not because of anything in us, but because He chose to love.

And then we are amazed again at the grace that made us, in our need rescued us, keeps us, and does His work in us until the day He takes us all the way home.

Maybe we can’t really talk about a “crisis” for God, certainly in the sense that we think of a crisis.  But we can see “decisions” He has made, if it is even appropriate for us to call them that, and stand in awe of how much He loves us.  We’ll not fully comprehend all of His wonder and His grace, but we can praise Him, and we must.

Maybe this all sounds somewhat incoherent, but if someone wants to accuse me of not being able to find the right words to talk about God’s grace, I plead guilty.  After all, it will take us all eternity to praise His grace, so we shouldn’t expect to handle it sufficiently here and now.