So we went over some really in-depth stuff in the past few posts of this series. In order to understand what love is and how it is manifested within the human condition, we first had to see what man’s purpose was on this earth. Which is to glorify our Creator. 

Then we moved over to how our modern society has taken our views of love and has distorted it solely to mean ‘tolerance’, mainly tolerance of things that go against inherent good; or, our instinctual knowledge of good that has allowed us to thrive as a species. 

In the next post, we defined the three loves that are of mortal birth. These three loves mimic the divine love which we haven’t gotten to yet; however, we saw that man in his fallibility has corrupted even these animalistic loves into his own perverse ideas. 

Finally, we saw how man has rejected divine love and why he did it. Man is inherently selfish above all things and divine love is unselfish and is based in servitude. We can only natively experience that divine love, it is unnatural to want to provide that love. Therefore, true love, the perfect love, is a choice that must be made. This choice is absent of emotion, but in the place of emotion we must provide our God given intellect to make that decision. 

Imagine now for a second, you are God. You created a masterpiece known as Earth and surrounding it the rest of our known reality. You placed all of these creatures to inhabit the Earth to enjoy and observe and take care of. Then you think, it would be kind of cool to have a creature I could converse with and love and take care of. Kind of like we have a dog (yes that analogy again). 

You, as God, create man. You have placed man in a beautiful portion of the beautiful world in an amazing reality you have created. For a while man is happy. You tell man, you can do anything you want on this planet I have given you. You can play with the animals, eat the food, enjoy each others company, and enjoy my company. You can’t however, do one thing. 

Finally, the day comes, man is tested and man fails to do that one thing. 

You would be heartbroken. Now you say, Well Michael, I’d just start it over. You could do that, but then all of your hard work would be for nought. You now have a virus in the system, you have sin and this creation took the intelligence modeled after you and is running amok with it. 

This is how much God tried to preserve His creation. He took the most righteous individual on the planet and His family and wiped out the rest of man, thinking that would solve the issue. Then man goes and builds a tower to mock God. 

Ok, So then God chooses another man who is righteous, and tells him, “I’m going to make a nation out of you and I will guide that nation as my chosen people.” As that nation grows, God gives them rules, laws, and regulations to follow to differentiate themselves from the rest of man. He blesses them with an amazing nation that is self sufficient and relatively powerful in comparison to the empires which surround it.

On top of it all, the other nations begin to see how blessed this nation is among all of them. 

Internally though, time and time again, they continue to reject this unconditional love. Through punishment and chastisement from God, they continue to reject him. What. A. Mess. 

At the rate the human race is going, not only is there not going to be anyone that truly knows Him but no one will listen due to their propensity to enable the virus which known as sin that has corrupted His perfect creation. 

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He just wants to enjoy His creation. He can’t enjoy it however while there is sin. God is perfectly good, due to His nature He can’t sin. He can’t enjoy a relationship with someone that doesn’t enjoy good as well, that makes it a point to do wrong things.

Think of the most righteous person you know. They sin just like everyone else. They make mistakes just like everyone else. God knows this, and He can’t be around people because of this. He can’t walk with them, or talk with them, or enjoy them. Just like a dog that is disobedient, that bites his owner, that defecates around the house, that eats all the table food without warning, God doesn’t want to be around us because of that and He can’t.

“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us”, figured out a way to have a relationship with us. See, the “Wages of sin is death”, or conversely, the result of sin is death. God warned Adam in the beginning if he ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, he will surely die. (As I am writing this post to Christians, I will not go into the plan of salvation; however, if you have never heard of God’s plan find a bible believing church in your area to understand more). So our punishment of sin is death, and in reality it is hell. God didn’t want this, but He knew something had to die in the place of the sinner. 

So, He instituted the ordinance of sacrifice. An animal would die in the place for a person’s sins for a predetermined amount of time; however, this was temporary as the Israelites (the nation and people mentioned above), continuously rebelled. But God continued to look for the right time to provide an ultimate sacrifice for the human race. I personally believe God was done with trying to get just a certain people to obey Him, knowing full well it was nigh impossible to actually get someone to obey for the rest of their lives. 

So God found a solution, and the solution was Something Extraordinary. God second personage of the Son, or the word (which is translated from the word logos in Greek, meaning intelligence) would inhabit a mortal imperfect body, to become a sacrifice for the whole human race. Through the power of perfection equipped with eternal goodness, it would release humanity from the chains of sin and that virus would be crippled. 

This is God’s plan and what He decided to do. “For God so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish but have everlasting life.” This is beyond human comprehension, this is divine. This is…

Something Extraordinary.