Humanity's Sins

“All of humanity’s sins are forgiven by God.
All of them—while we were still sinners Christ died for us.
The love that he has for us has not increased or decreased in capacity one bit since the moment he died.”

Wow. That’s the most radical thing I’ve heard in a long time.

I haven’t done a ‘beliefs’ post in a long while primarily because I’ve been thinking about a lot of things that are difficult to articulate. When I heard the pastor say that this Sunday, I figured it was as good a place as any to start.

The past month and a half or so, I’ve been overwhelmed with a sense of discovery every time I look at the Bible. I am desperately wanting to bridge the gap between the truth of scripture and present reality. I am overwhelmed by Jesus’ claim that he came to

• to preach good news to the poor
• to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
• and recovery of sight for the blind
• to release the oppressed
• to proclaim the Lord's favor

and grossly underwhelmed by dour half-hearted attempts by the church-at-large to complete the task. I am underwhelmed to the point of implosion. [Seriously, as I was telling some friends the other day, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” à la Network.]

When Christ stood up in the synagogue and read those words from Isaiah, then said, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” people—religious people at that!—got so angry, they tried to throw him off a cliff!!! [link] How’s that for intolerance?

Not much has changed in two millennia. Religious folks, as a whole, are no more interested in the message of Jesus—good news: freedom, recovery, release, proclamation—than their secular counterparts but a heck of a lot less honest about it. And all this ranting is to say, I am just now beginning to realize how very much I fit the description of the angry mob that was so willing to throw Jesus off a cliff because they didn’t like what he was saying. They didn’t understand it so they thought he was a fraud.

For a long time I didn’t realize Christ wasn’t just talking smack—trying to be poetic because somebody was going to write a bestseller about it—he was stating facts. If he, God-in-the-flesh, came to do something, by definition it will (has been) done.

I could write for days about revelatory minutia because the revelation of Christ is that big. It’s that complex. Today, I stop here. The rest is marinating…