“And the Lord said unto Noah, ‘Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.'”
The offer God extended to Noah was an invitation to be saved from the judgment that was coming. God has also told you and me that judgment is coming – physical death that ushers us into eternity, where our sin has condemned us to hell. Hell is a place of intense, unending physical suffering, darkness, dissatisfaction, and worst of all, separation from the One for Whom we were created. (Matt. 13:49-50).
At the same time God warns us that judgment is coming, He issues an invitation to come into the Ark He has provided as the means of salvation from it. Jesus Christ is the Ark in which we hide, our Savior from the storm of God’s coming judgment. Have you accepted His invitation to “come in”?
Perhaps thinking to satisfy the crowd’s thirst for blood without actually going so far as to execute Jesus, Pilate had Him flogged. The flogging would have ripped the flesh off of His back, exposing His internal organs. History records that flogging victims either passed into unconsciousness, went insane, or died. The miracle is not that Jesus survived the whipping, but that He submitted to it! How easy it would have been for Him to defy them and, without cursing but in righteous judgment, send them all to hell!
Why? Why would God allow His Son to endure such physical torture? The answer had been given years earlier, when Isaiah solemnly prophesied, “Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows. . . . He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed” (Isa. 53:4-5, NIV).
Thank Him now for bearing God’s judgment that should have been yours!
God has clearly commanded you and me to “be filled with the Spirit.” But an unconfessed sin or resistance to His authority will block the “flow” of His life within us. If we do not deal with it, our spiritual lives become stagnant and we lose our attractiveness and usefulness to God. And we have nothing refreshing about us that would draw other people to Christ.
What is hindering you from being filled with the Holy Spirit? To be filled with the Holy Spirit is to be under His moment-by-moment control. He has not been given to you so that you can keep Him confined to a particular area in your life. Let Him loose! He is Lord! The amount of power you experience to live a victorious, triumphant Christian life is directly proportional to the freedom you give the Spirit to be Lord of your life!
God is righteous and just. But God is also loving and merciful. He cannot be less than Himself. Satan, in his temptation of Adam and Eve and in his plan to defeat the purpose of God, failed to take into account the very character of God. He failed to realize one very important thing – how much God loved the man and woman He had created and the depths to which His grace would go in order to bring them back to Himself. It never entered Satan’s wicked, self-centered imagination that God would commit the fullness of His eternal, divine nature to bring man back into a right relationship with Himself. It never occurred to Satan, who ever seeks his own preeminence, that the Creator of the universe would lay down His own life in atonement for man’s sin. But that’s exactly what happened. The solution to the problem of sinfulness is the cross of Jesus Christ.
“Come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens, so that we may make a name for ourselves” (Gen. 11:4, NIV).
In their pride, the builders of Babel assumed they could work their way into God’s Presence and He would accept them on the basis of what they had done. They were wrong then, and they are still wrong today.
God has said that “All our righteous acts are like filthy rags,” (Isa. 64:6, NIV) and “There is no one righteous, not even one,” (Rom. 3:10, NIV) and “Without holiness no one will see the Lord” (Heb. 12:14, NIV). So how does one get into heaven? Jesus gave clear instructions, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven,” (Matt. 7:21, NIV) and “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6, NIV). All religions are man’s organized, rebellious, prideful attempt to get around God’s stated will and way and work and Word. Instead of arguing with Him, just come to Him through Jesus.
