Gospel

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“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the LORD.
“For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts.”—Isaiah 55:8-9

We humans often carry on about how incompatible we are with each other.

We also fail to see the real incompatibility between two persons: unholy man and holy God. Isaiah wrote about something God said. How God thinks indicates how different He is from us. The difference is as high as the heavens.

The difference, the incompatibility, is eternal; infinite.

This is what Christians today call our separation from God. Our unlikeness, from our sinful nature, is infinitely alien to the image of God. It reveals an infinite incompatibility.

The beauty of the Gospel is about God, in spite of the apparent incompatibility, choosing to become like one of us, to bridge the gap and lessen the incompatibility.

The incompatibility still exists. Our compatibility is positional, as God declares us justified, blameless. He says we are holy because of our choice to believe the Gospel. We are aware of an on-going incompatibility, though, when we recognize our sin, especially those sins like fear, worry, going our own way or with worldly thinking. It’s only because of Jesus does God choose not to do anything with us in our incompatibility.

That is, almost nothing. That same Jesus that bridges the gap, becomes the Model to show us how to be more compatible, by pursuing holiness. He seeks to provoke us to love Him as a way to motivate that pursuit.

It’s interesting to note that Love has a way of making the lover want to be like the one loved. It happened with God. He now wants us to experience that.

The thing is that we will find over time that we are less compatible with the world we live in. That makes us more alien to those who don’t believe as we do.

Either way, until we face the Lord, we will have an element in us that makes us incompatible with Him, with Him loving us in spite of that. That same element will also make us odd to the world. We find ourselves in a strange middle.

Let’s not forget the problem: our incompatibility.

Let’s not forget the solution: God’s Son.

© 10-21-08

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