Day 48 - A Story

Well, from my mountaintop experience yesterday I have come down to earth with a bump. I am home, and it is Good Friday. I have to admit that I feel churned up inside. My mind is searching the mind of God as to why it all had to happen this way - why your own son, God, and why such a horrific death? One thing I know is that if it could've been any other way, God would have taken it. 

I think about how He stopped Abraham from sacrificing his son Isaac and how child sacrifice was commonplace at the time. It seems people thought their gods needed appeasing and the best way to do it was to murder their own children. Surely, God, you didn't need appeasing in the same way as these so-called gods?

 Here is where my imagination takes me today - a story:

I have a picture of God and He is made of fire, so bright and so hot, no one could come near. He is like the sun. Each of His children is born free. Free to follow, free to choose, free to stray. Each one, each day, accumulating evil to themselves rather like the many coins we saw hammered into the fallen tree trunks in the Lake District, impossible to extricate. God the Father with His father's heart of love, wants to take each child into a warm embrace, but knows that should He choose to do that, we would burn up in His pure heat and laser brightness, because we are so entwined with evil and darkness. The Son agrees on a plan to rescue us from that separation, by burning up in our place. He is born as one of us, except sin cannot touch Him and evil bounces off Him like a water droplet on a hot griddle. Death can not touch Him in His purity, but He runs towards it and embraces it, and He offers Himself up like the burnt offerings of old. He becomes like a magnet and all the weights and sins and wrong choices of humanity are attracted like iron filings to His sacrifice. Imagine all those coins embedding themselves into Him and as God the Father holds Him in His warm embrace, Jesus just burns up into death. So that would be the end of the story: all our impurities have been burned up with Jesus and we are now free to live again in God's presence...... except death couldn't hold Him..... oh just wait and see what happens next.........