Jonathots Daily Blog
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“Jesus was born to die.”
That’s what the preacher said.
He seemed pretty sure of it, too, because he kept repeating it over and over again during his “sermonic” pursuit.
I listened carefully. Here was the premise for the assertion–the best I understood it:
God, who created the universe, decided on His own, from the foundation of the world, that He would save the human race (which was not yet placed in the Garden of Eden) from their sinful nature, which they had not yet manifested.
It seems that since God made these creatures called humans, He placed within them a self-destruct switch, which is triggered and causes them to pull up lame, inept and basically evil.
So God put Himself in charge of them and each of their destinies, plotting their lives, and moved them about like fleshy chess pieces, understanding that in the long run, the end result of the game would be “checkmate.” In other words, they would need a Savior, and such an individual would have to come to the world as one of them, but be secretly enhanced with the dynamic advantage of knowing that his preaching, healing, conversations, or even established relationships were basically doomed, and that ultimately, his purpose for arriving on the planet was to slowly bleed out on a cross and die for the irreconcilable imperfections of humankind.
Although there are many scriptures from this God which inform us that He completely disapproved of animal sacrifice and found it gross, we are led to believe that He ignored those sentiments and killed a human being to prove that His initial idea of “original sin” was correct.
We are to ignore the birth of this son named Jesus in deference to his death.
We are to consider his teachings, but understand that basically, because of our faulted and feeble frame, we are incapable of living out his ideas.
Motivation to aspire, dream and grow is removed from us because basically without this “saving plasma,” we are completely lost and without remedy.
We are never to look on the cross as something that happened to Jesus, but rather, for some mysterious reason, something that Jesus caused to happen.
Even though we tout that human beings have free will, we quietly negate such a notion in favor of destiny, God’s will and a pre-formed path for each and every human unit.
Then we stand back and wonder why these human beings that were created seem vacant of expressing passion or goodness, but are constantly weeping over their failures in an attempt to be worthy of their salvation, and therefore feel a need, to some degree, to constantly re-start their appreciation for the blood atonement.
We just can’t wait to get the baby to the cross.
We have a lapse in our theology because we do not understand that God, being God, is completely able to give us choice while simultaneously having insight on where things might be going.
We do it with our own children. We have fears and apprehensions that they will struggle in certain areas, but we never take away the opportunity for them to surprise us. In other words, a disobedient five-year-old who breaks a lamp and giggles about it is not immediately sent to jail.
No, we give him another chance.
So during this blessed season, I wanted to offer a counter-view to this preacher who was so positive that Baby Jesus is just a prop on the way to Calvary.
For here’s the good news. It’s found in John 3:16:
“God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son.”
But the better news is in the next verse, where it’s made clear why Jesus came. It states:
“God did not send His son into the world to condemn the world.”
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