January 18, 2006

Horse 480 - Why Bother?

If I was God, why would I bother saving mankind? I mean if you were God and you knew that you'd be openly rejected, despised, ignored by a of of your creation, wouldn't it just have been easier to wipe the slate clean and start again?

I love my Ka:
Well I do, sort of. I look after it, I wash it and give it a vac occasionally. I pay for it's registration and the maintenance costs. It is my only source of identity in a sea of other motor cars, people can tell that it's me just by looking at the car. It cost me a lot of money to buy (it's the most expensive thing I own). It's fun to drive.Yet it can't love me back, it will eventually get old, rust out and die, and worse if it gets damaged will cost me even more to repair.

I love my cat:
I feed her, sometimes she lets me pat her. It's fun to watch her sleeping in the sun. But most of the time she actively ignores me, will only really pay any attention to me on her terms or if she wants something. If she was a person she'd be called a crankypuss.

I love my table:
I do not have a lot of an artistic streak in me, in fact my Year 8 Art teacher thought that I wouldn't amount to much anyway. My little table shows all the flaws of an untrained hand, doesn't really fulfil an important use; it is a wee bit ugly to be honest but it's the work of my own hands. I made it, it was my effort that made it come into existance; although unimportant, it does have its use.

What do my Ka, my cat and my table have to do with God?

Think about this, if I am created in God's image then I must by inference display similar characteristics to Him. God who is a creator and an artist loves His creation. Like my table it has its use, but unlike my table was created perfectly.
For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. Ephesians 2:10

Like my cat with me, we are capable of loving God but also like my cat, a lot of the time, most of us would prefer to ignore Him and we only ever seem to ever talk to Him when we want something. We're all capable of running around from side to side like brainless sheep.
We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way. Isaiah 53:6

I figure that since Oct 2001 my Ka has cost me something in the order of $24,190. That is quite a lot of money. It's little wonder I like my Ka when you consider I've divested so much personal cost in it. At the end of the day it still only is a car. When you consider how much God was prepared to pay to buy back something he made, which ignores him, you get a fairly good idea of how much He loves His creation, and why? He owns it.
You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:6-8

I have full confidence that the reason why God was prepared to pay so much to buy back what He already owned is that underlying character point of love. I don't consider it to be a sappy namby-pamby sort of affair either, it's a hard exacting and exhaustive thing. It would have been easier to wipe the slate and start again, but why didn't He? He chose not to, therein is the crux - He CHOSE not to. It's an elective massively insane sort of thing.

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