Incredible God

I read something the other day, something I have heard countless times before. Something that never really struck me in it fullest and most incredible entirety, that Jesus Christ took our sins upon Himself. Until I read it once more in “One Minute after You Die,” it had never struck me for how profoundly loving an act that was. A sure sign of an incredible God.

The physical, mental, and emotional pain Christ endured in His crucifixion must have been unimaginably horrible. As the spikes were driven through his wrists and feet, the cross dropped and bounced into the hole on Golgotha, and His side pierced with a spear Christ hung for hours until the afternoon when the Jewish households began to slaughter their Passover lambs. His anguish could not be gauged or imagined. He declined the offer of the pain relieving wine and gall. And he died. And His more terrible pain and suffering began.

Christ bore our sins on Himself. He paid for our sins with His life. The God of all creation, the Lord of all, the sustainer of the universe so loved His creation that He became a man and suffered at the hand of his created man. He was mocked, insulted, spat upon, abused, whipped, crucified, pierced, and died at the hands of the very beings he created. But His greatest pain by far was yet to come.

Christ paid dearly for our sins and not just with His life, but with His death. He bore the punishment for every sin of everyone who held or would hold Him as their savior. He was punished for every murder, rape, molestation, assault, robbery, lie, angry thought or word and every good left undone—Christ was punished in the most painful way for every single sin committed by every believer who has or will cast their faith on Him as their savior. Countless sins subject to countless punishments of all kinds fell on Him who loves us. The pain and suffering of all that punishment must have surpassed the pain and anguish of crucifixion. And then He was resurrected and ascended into Heaven.

Millions if not billions of people believe something about “all religions being equal.” Maybe that is almost true for those who are living on Earth. Maybe most if not all religions offer their adherents some degree of comfort in their lives and some form of justification for who they are and what they do. And many of these religions offer some way that is claimed to give something better in another existence. The believers in these religions need to believe, say, or do something to reach that promised existence.

Christians believe that God loves His children so much that He became man and lived on this planet only to be abused, insulted, and murdered by his creatures. That’s incredible. It is so much easier to believe that if you say the right words or observe the right practices that you can find some type of Heaven. It’s more incredible to believe the Creator would allow Himself to be abused and murdered by His created beings.

Isn’t that what we should expect from Almighty God—something so incredible as to be almost unbelievable—almost?