It’s amazing what some will do for love.
What a bold risk. What incredible carelessness.
Whoever heard of a God who loves
so passionately,
so recklessly?
A god who demands and rages? Certainly. But a God who loves enough to lower Himself to be one of us? To embrace poverty and helplessness? To play by His own rules to the point of dying, because He would rather die than live without us? Who every heard of such love? Until Jesus, no one!
Why would God take such a risk and so recklessly endanger His one and only Son?
It was for love.
It was because God’s great heart yearns for your friendship and mine, like an abandoned lover, a heartbroken father, a grief-stricken friend. And as long as there is any hope of restoration, He cannot rest.
This is why he launched the most extreme rescue mission ever attempted with no guarantee of a positive outcome. Having risked so much, still He allows us the dignity of choice. We can choose to accept His offer of friendship or not. God places His great heart in our corrupt and careless hands. We have the power to grievously wound the heart of almighty God. We can reject Him. The choice is ours. Yet His desperation to restore His relationship with humanity drove Him to hazard the risk. Jesus temporarily resigned His rightful position as God of the universe and walked away from wealth and worship to participate fully in our experience by becoming one of us. He entered a world of pain and poverty, of death and despair, of hunger and hopelessness.
Though he was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as god. He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form. And in human form he obediently humbled himself even further by dying a criminal’s death on a cross.
Philippians 2:6-8
The baby Jesus grew up into the God-man who laughed and loved and cried, but never sinned; the Galilean carpenter who swung a hammer, healed the sick, and washed feet. The splendour and safety of heaven were left behind – God wagered it all in the wild hope that His love will be returned, not rejected. But in God’s sovereignty and wisdom, the danger, the dark side of Christmas, becomes Good Friday.
“Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13). “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.” 1 John 3:16.
