GodReflection: Life in the Holy Presence
Old Testament Scripture is the story of God’s endless love and His thirst for heart allegiance from humans like me.
Parallel to that love story is the display of God’s Holiness and the justice of death and destruction when men and women took lightly the realm of the Holy.
When His Holiness was challenged death resulted. To encounter God’s Holiness always provoked fear. Those who knew God lived with an acute sense of respect and Holy fear.
I cannot comprehend the distance that exists between fallen humankind and Holy God. The gap is too great.
To close that gap God sends Himself to earth in the form of His son Jesus. His mission was nothing less than to personify God’s love for His creation, and to bridge the gap between God and fallen mankind.
The mission was comprehensive.
God’s love embodied in Jesus walked upon earth’s soil for thirty-three years in the presence of creation. His blood spilled from a cross and his resurrection made it possible to enter into God’s Holy presence without the fear of death.
Jesus bridged the gap of death created by sin.
It is now possible through my dependence upon Holy Jesus to enter into the realm of Holy God in complete confidence without fear of a death sentence.
To trust Jesus and to experience the death, burial and resurrection through baptismal water allows me the security of life in Jesus as Holy Jesus lives in me.
The God of the New Testament isn’t any less Holy than the God of Old Testament Scripture. The good news is I’m now protected by blood spilled upon a cross.
Paul an apostle describes the importance of life in the Holy Presence of Jesus in the following terms:
For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.
Since, then, we know what it is to fear the Lord, we try to persuade others. What we are is plain to God . . . For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!
All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation: that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them.
And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Wow, life with the Holy Jesus places me under the canopy of God’s Grace and allows me to experience God’s love rather than His wrath.
It’s probably worth my effort to remain under that canopy, don’t you think?
Stay tuned.
Dr. Gary J. Sorrells
A GodReflection on Life with Holy Jesus
Gary@Godreflection.org www.GodReflection.org
God Reflection 