This week's verse for consideration is 1 Peter 3:18.
Original from December 14, 2022
Examine
"For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive by the Spirit."
Notice
God
God is our Savior.
God is righteous.
God's Son, Jesus, died for us.
God raises us as He raised Jesus.
Lesson
We must never forget that we deserved to be separated from God forever, but instead, because of His Grace, He sent His Son to die for us, so we could be with Him forever.
Jesus died physically, but not spiritually. We, too, will died physically, but not spiritually.
Our righteousness comes from Jesus.
Do/Thoughts
         For most of my life I thought cremation was wrong, that it was some sort of desecration of the body. I thought the same thing about organ donation. Wasn’t it some sort of mutilation of the corpse?
         Then, Dad was cremated. Hold on a minute! My dad was one of the strongest Christians I knew. How could he possibly agree to cremation? Or did I need to rethink my ideas about cremation (and organ donation)?
         I was worried about desecrating the body by destroying it. And then I realized something – the grave was going to turn us back to dust. Did it matter how fast the process was going to happen? And when we rise again, it will be with heavenly bodies, not these earthly rags.
         I was bothered that there was no grave to visit. But how many graves have I visited? And I don’t need a grave to honor or remember my loved ones. They live on in my heart and I honor them with my life.
         What about organ donation? Ultimately, who gave us the gift of organ donation? God. He brings about these daily miracles of life. Humans could not prolong life this way if it were not God’s Will.
         And what is my point in all this?
         Simple, we die physically, not spiritually. God doesn’t want us mutilating corpses – that is evil. But cremation and organ donation are not mutilation. Cremation speeds up a normal process. To dust we return and are raised spiritually as Jesus was. Organ donation is a gift of life. After death, organs just rot. Here, in the living world, they can help bring life. We die physically, and we are made alive spiritually by the Holy Spirit through Jesus.
August 11, 2024
Prayer:
Psalm 22:16-18
16 Turn to me and be gracious to me,
for I am lonely and afflicted.
17 The troubles of my heart have multiplied;
free me from my anguish.
18 Look upon my affliction and my distress
and take away all my sins.
Outcome:
"15 But the gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died by the trespass of the one man, how much more did God's grace and the gift that came by the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, overflow to the many. 16 Again, the gift of God is not like the result of the one man's sin: The judgment followed one sin and brought condemnation, but the gift followed many trespasses and brought justification."
(Romans 5:15-16)
August 13, 2024
I Peter 3:18 brought me to Romans 5:15-16. the words seem so clear, but Jesus' life, death, and resurrection are full of mystery.
God, who is eternal and immortal, became a man, whose years are numbered and is mortal. God entered a body that could so easily be sinful and made it perfect and holy. We can say "God became man," but that means so much more than these simple words and in many ways is beyond our human comprehension.
After taking on human form, God, as Jesus, suffered and died for us. God is eternal, how can He die? Because He was fully man and fully God. Why would God suffer and died for us? Because our sins must be paid for. The sin that began with one man had multiplied to fill the whole earth. Yet, it took the death of one man to wipe away all sin - past, present, and future. One man made a huge mess that seemed impossible to undo. Then one man came along and cleaned up the impossible mess. Adam and all of us who have come after him have suffered for our sins. Adam gave in the devil, but Jesus defeated the devil.
What is this teaching me about God?
God's love for us is so great that He suffered more than once for us, once as the Father and once as the Son and as the Holy Spirit. Jesus' suffering is so easy to focus on that we lose sight of how God, the Father, suffered. He had to watch people do terrible things to His Son. As a parent, I can relate to that pain. Then He suffered a torturous separation from His Son. The suffering was more than just Jesus - God, the Father suffered and the Holy Spirit suffered as the link that connected them.
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