Plea

When Christ, in flesh and blood upon our planet, encountered our everyday humanity, it wasn’t for the purpose of summing up our deficiency or evaluating the depth of our sinful condition.  He wasn’t altogether that interested in the stuff.  The humans of planet Earth seemed to have enough zealous preoccupation in each others sins to go around.  No, the Christ had come to us to become personally acquainted with our cause.  To feel the itch of the skin we wore.  To drip with the sweat of the labor we endured.  To experience the groaning of the weight we carried.  To endure the pressures of the feelings we felt and the thoughts we thought.  To know for Himself the inner plea of the human soul.  That plea to be saved from his or her personal demands for salvation.  

Did my last statement make you think?  It sums up the depravity of the human situation: We demand to be saved!  And we will have it at the cost of anyone’s life.  It is the truth.  What have you lost in this life?  What portion of possessions, intellect, value, relationships, physicality, future, dreams, passions, welfare, emotions, favor and so on and so on and so on, have you lost in this life?  Undoubtedly, your existence has been thwarted by many an injustice.  What have you done about it?  What do we usually do?  Well, the normal human would try desperately to replace what was lost.  They would seek retribution.  They may even turn their anger upon themselves for allowing the act of injustice to take place.  The normal human would experience and act out of all sorts of despair and anger and rage and bitterness and envy and strife and rivalry and so on and so on and so on.  Yes, according to our current less-than-human state, this is how the normal human would respond to injustice.

Our cause is legitimate.  We legitimately have a need for justice in our personal stories.  But we humans, governed by our own hearts, could not possibly get that justice… .in a just way.  We commonly kill, steal or destroy in some sphere of humanity, to get back what was unjustly taken from us.  We commonly take a life to replace our own.  We want saved.  We want to save our own lives.  We want to put all the lost pieces of our own lives back together at the cost of someone else.  And here we encounter one of the classic Christian scriptures: “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.  For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.  For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life?  Or what shall a man five in return for his life?” Matthew 16:24-26. 

 Jesus Christ descended into our story to be a personal part of our misery.  The misery caused us by the injustices of life.  And He came to personally do the very opposite of what we do.  He wouldn’t take a life in exchange for His own.  In a slow and suffering, lengthy moment, He would give one. …for us.  He met the requirement of our plea.  End of story.