God loves us

God created us and He loves us.

This is the most fundamental truth the religious establishment ever missed.

God created us and He loves us.

When I have a period of doubt, and there are times when I do, I think about the amazing fact that in all the vast, known universe, there is only one planet like ours, surrounded by a bubble of fortifying oxygen, blanketed in water and fertile dirt, bursting with trees and grasses and flowers and vines, teeming with fish, birds, animals and even insects of amazing designs.

Only one.  Only one beautiful little blue gem of a planet circling a star --not the biggest nor the smallest star, but exactly the perfect star, the perfect size and distance from earth to warm this heavenly body to make it the perfect environment to support life.

This little planet, so exquisite in design, is protected by the orbits of other, larger planets, some with formidable asteroid belts that orbit around them, providing a shield of sorts to protect earth from stray meteors that could smash us if they were to collide with us.

This little planet, loved by God, sparkles with His great beauty, from mighty waterfalls and ocean waves to pristine dewdrops glistening on an intricate spiderweb.  He planned and brought into being giant redwood trees, white blossomed baby's breath, and knobby squashes.  He put fleet footed squirrels into the forests and ferocious lions on the plains, and in the jungle He set apes and monkeys to frolic with their round-eyed babies clinging to their backs.  He made rhinoceroses, antelopes, bears, hippos, rabbits, foxes, cows, elephants and alligators.  His bird collection and fish collection encompass more shapes, colors and fancy features than we could ever finish recording, not to mention the butterflies and the crickets and the beetles.  And fireflies.  My goodness.  Who would have thought fireflies?

Then, into all of it, all the beauty and variety and humor and delight, among mountains, islands, seas and rivers, He placed humanity, a man and a woman, to share with Him in enjoyment of all the good things He had made.  And the man and the woman were His piece de resistance.  His magnum opus.  His favorite.

Yes, God loves us, and we are His favorite part of all that He created.  Everything He created, including us, was for joy, and for Him to enjoy.  All of the things He created before He made us were His intentional gifts for us to enjoy.  He prepared a playground, a museum, a school, a park, a cathedral of beauty and wonder and amazement--He created Eden--especially for humanity.  Then, like a parent presenting gifts to a child on Christmas morning, He set Adam and Eve into the midst of it and watched with delight to see them discover and enjoy.  Their delight was His delight, and His delight was in their delight.  He asked nothing but to love them and be loved by them, for them to be astonished and thrilled by all He had made for them, and for them to trust Him to give them everything good.

We must understand this, this basis of love, this delight God has in His creation, and especially in the creation of man and woman.

Some religious people say that God hates us, that sin makes us ugly, disgusting and totally worthless.  We are worms, they say, and there is no explanation for why God would love us.  We should be ground into the dirt and left to decompose, we are that revolting, we in our squalid sin.

Sin does disfigure us, it is true.  That is why God hates sin.  God sees sin as a cancer on His beloved creation, a wasting disease that He will overcome.  He knew before the foundation of the world that sin would infect His perfect, beautiful world and bring destruction to His handiwork.  He knew, but He chose Jesus, before the foundation of the world, to overcome the destruction of sin and save us, redeem us, purify us, and present us faultless before the throne of God, without blemish.  He chose us to inherit eternal life with Him in the New Heaven and New Earth, the New Creation, Eden restored, Paradise.

This, God says, is how much I love you.  I gave you everything, and then when you turned away from me and destroyed your lives by seeking satisfaction outside of my providence, I came to save you, to bring you back.  I came to show you the truth, to help you see what is good and desirable for life, and to make you new and holy.  You are my precious masterpiece of creation.  I treasure you, and I will save you.  I love you.  I love you, and I will fix what you can never fix.  I will pay what you could never pay, and I will suffer what I do not want you to suffer.  I will die for you, so you can be redeemed from this death-trap of a fallen world and live with me forever in Paradise.  I love you that much.

This is love: 

Not that we loved God, 

but that He loved us 

and sent His Son 

to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

~1 John 4:10

For God so loved the world 

that He gave His one and only Son, 

that whoever believes in Him 

shall not perish but have eternal life.

~John 3:16

For God did not 

send His Son into the world

to condemn the world,

but in order that the world

might be saved through Him.

~ John 3:17

But God shows His love for us 

in that while we were still sinners, 

Christ died for us.

~Romans 5:8

God Loves Us.

Where is our security? Where is our hope?

Now that I am in my fifties, I am learning things about life that I never imagined I would learn.

My least favorite thing is that people whom I thought were believers in Jesus can fall away from faith.

"Once saved, always saved," they used to tell us, and Eternal Security was the doctrine of all doctrines.  "Did he ever make a profession of faith?" people would ask when someone's unchurched relative died, and everyone hung on a positive answer, believing that a raised hand at a VBS event when he was seven years old is absolutely sufficient to cover for years of rebellion and dissipation, culminating in a tragic and untimely death.  Instead of life insurance, it's eternity insurance, and it's quick, easy and cheap... free, in fact: a free gift.  Say the sinner's prayer, write your name and a date in the back of a Bible if you're particularly concerned, and go on your merry way.  You're fine.  You're covered.

But are you?  Are you really?  It would be nice, but can you claim that you're saved, that anyone is saved, if there is no evidence that the Spirit of Christ is present in the life at stake?

We don't save ourselves.  We don't save ourselves by doing good works.  We don't save ourselves by saying a particular prayer.  We don't save ourselves by walking an aisle or making an informed decision.  We don't save ourselves.

God saves us.  Only God can open sin-blinded eyes and move a soul to be awestruck at His glory.  Only God can cut out a heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh.  Only God can awaken a mortal soul from the deadly stupor of sin and make it long for something better.  Only God calls and draws people into His kingdom.  Only God.

Why should He save me, and not someone else?  Why should He enable me to perceive things about Himself that someone I deeply love is simply unable to see?

And why do people--who seemed to see and believe at one time--fall away?  I hate this.  I really hate it.  I cannot tell you how much I hate it.

I went through a phase where I did not believe in Eternal Security, because I saw random people falling away, and it seemed obvious that "Eternal Security," at least the way I heard it taught in certain Baptist circles, could not be true.  Like "Free Will," and, "The Trinity" -- "Eternal Security" is not a term that the Bible uses as such.  Those of us who grew up in church must be careful to separate what the Bible actually says from what it does not say, although we have been taught something over and over again.

The Bible says nobody can snatch a believer from the hands of God (John 10:27-28).  In context, you see that these believers listen to Jesus' voice, and He knows them, and they follow Him.  They listen.  They follow.  He knows them.  A real and substantive relationship exists.  This is not a hastily procured contract for eternity insurance.  This is a covenant of love.  Jesus says, "I give them eternal life."  Notice, He does not say, "I will give them eternal life in the future."  He says, "I give them eternal life."  He gives eternal life immediately, when His Spirit takes up residence in the temple of our bodies.  The immortal Spirit of God comes into us and grants spiritual life where before there was no life, only death left by the curse of sin that infects every soul born into the physical world.

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ--by grace you have been saved.  ~Ephesians 2:4-5

This transaction comes from Him, and only from Him.  We were dead in the natural sin-state that infects all of creation (Ephesians 2:1-3), but God, by His great mercy and love, graciously gave us life by joining us with the eternal, immortal Spirit of Christ.  He knows us.  He calls us.  He quickens us, gives us life, awakens us to Himself.

When this happens--a real thing, a spiritual birth, an implantation of everlasting spiritual life by the Spirit of God--then I think it is true that nobody can undo it.  Once a person has received eternal life, been indwelt by the Spirit of Christ, a forever miracle has occurred, and there is no going back.  Eternal life is eternal.

Paul writes in Romans 8:35-39 that nothing can separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

When God calls us, and justifies us through the atoning sacrifice of Christ, and indwells us by His powerful and precious Holy Spirit, it is forever.  He will never leave us nor forsake us (Hebrews 13:5).  He who began a good work in us will be faithful to complete it (Philippians 1:6).  He will transform us into the image of Christ from one degree of glory to another (2 Corinthians 3:18).  He will present us blameless before the glory of God with great joy (Jude 24-25).  He initiates it.  He continues it.  He completes it.  He does it all.  Our job is to believe and to abide in Him. (John 15).  But even when we are weak, He is strong.  His power is made perfect in our weakness (2 Corinthians 12:9). 

It's His power.  His sufficiency.  This is why God could say to Satan, "Have you considered my servant Job?" (Job 1:8).  God knew Job's faith would prevail, because God Himself was in Job, strengthening Job when he had no strength of his own.  The book of Job is a display of the sustaining grace of God, the power no evil can overcome.  There is a children's song that I listen to almost every morning (because it is in my CD alarm clock), and it says, "As I hold onto my faith, Jesus, You are holding onto me."  This is a beautiful and true picture.  I am able to endure and persevere and keep believing when it seems that despair should overwhelm me, because the Spirit of Christ in me will not abandon me.  He holds me together.  He is in me, but even more reassuring, I am in Him.

So what about those who fall away?  Why do they?

I think they must not have received the Holy Spirit.  If they had, they would be transformed by Him, and He would not leave them, and He would complete His work in them.  These are all promises, and God always keeps His promises.  John writes that those who leave the fellowship were not of us, and their leaving shows that they were not children of God (1 John 2:19).  This is one of those awful passages, on the order of (but not quite as horrible as) Hebrews 6:4-8.  But the Holy Spirit of Christ never leaves His true children.  And we can always pray for those who do not believe, hoping that the Lord will call them, too, and enlighten them and save them.  One of my favorite promises of God is in Luke 11:13--our heavenly Father delights to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him.

The Lord's desire is to save.  He takes no pleasure in death (Ezekiel 33:11).  His entire mission is to bring life and hope back to a broken world (John 3:17).  He offers the water of life (Isaiah 55:1), and calls all who will come to partake of it (Revelation 22:17).  He is more merciful than we can comprehend.  He knows that we are dust (Psalm 103:13-14).  He heals our waywardness, even our apostasy (Hosea 14:4).  He understands our weakness (Hebrews 4:15-16), and He wields powerful wrath against the enemy who deceives vulnerable mortals and leads them astray (Psalm 60:11-12).  He hates what sin does to His beautiful creation, and He is mighty to save (Zephaniah 3:15-17).  He is not a weak deity up in heaven wringing His hands in despair over the state of the world (the way we do).  He is joyful, almighty and confident that His plans and purposes will succeed (Psalm 115:3, Isaiah 46:9-10).  Eternal glory is the end of the story.

It will be okay.

Strengthen the weak hands 

and make firm the feeble knees.  

Say to those who have an anxious heart, 

"Be strong!  Fear not!  

Behold, your God will come with vengeance, 

with the recompense of God.  

He will come and save you."  

Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, 

and the ears of the deaf unstopped.  

Then shall the lame man leap like a deer, 

and the tongue of the mute sing for joy.

For waters break forth in the wilderness, 

and streams in the desert; 

the burning sands shall become a pool, 

and the thirsty ground springs of water.

~Isaiah 35:3-7a

There is yet hope for the blind and the deaf.  The living water of the Spirit of Christ is a well of life, reviving the hearts of men.  He will come and save us.  Oh, come, Lord Jesus.