Over the hedge...

Walking past a school one morning, I had an interesting experience. I happened to be walking past at the exact moment a football came flying over the wall. Naturally, this was accompanied by the dismayed cries of many children. The wall was very high, and behind it was an even higher hedge. Furthermore, there is a basketball cage within the playground that I'm fairly certain the children would have been inside. In other words, even if one student happened to break the rules and leave school grounds, retrieving the ball would require quite some effort.

But because the ball happened to come to rest just underneath a car within a few feet of me, I was able to pick it up. As the children continued to cry, I threw it back over the fence. Their distraught screams suddenly changed to "YEAH! WOOHOO! THANK YOU! THANK YOU!"

Who were they thanking? The truth is, they had no idea. The barriers between us were too high. I could not see them, and they certainly could not see me. Furthermore, if they saw me, they would never know it. So, why were they saying "thank you"? Because they knew the football didn't return itself...

Man and God are quite literally worlds apart. We are flesh, He is spirit. We are temporal, He is eternal. We are dependent, He is subsistent. We are barely coming to know our own portion of creation, how, then, can we know our Creator? We can know Him less than those children can know me. But we can also know Him the same way as they know me.

In Acts 17, we read "Then Paul stood in the midst of the Areopagus and said, “Men of Athens, I perceive that in all things you are very religious; for as I was passing through and considering the objects of your worship, I even found an altar with this inscription:

TO THE UNKNOWN GOD.

Therefore, the One whom you worship without knowing, Him I proclaim to you: God, who made the world and everything in it, since He is Lord of heaven and earth, does not dwell in temples made with hands. Nor is He worshiped with men’s hands, as though He needed anything, since He gives to all life, breath, and all things. And He has made from one blood every nation of men to dwell on all the face of the earth, and has determined their preappointed times and the boundaries of their dwellings, so that they should seek the Lord, in the hope that they might grope for Him and find Him, though He is not far from each one of us; for in Him we live and move and have our being, as also some of your own poets have said, ‘For we are also His offspring.’ Therefore, since we are the offspring of God, we ought not to think that the Divine Nature is like gold or silver or stone, something shaped by art and man’s devising. Truly, these times of ignorance God overlooked, but now commands all men everywhere to repent, because He has appointed a day on which He will judge the world in righteousness by the Man whom He has ordained. He has given assurance of this to all by raising Him from the dead.”" (v22-31).

No wonder atheism is so historically rare! We all know there is a God because we were all born in the right place at the right time. But just as a ball flying over a hedge does not prove the identity of Brian, so also does general revelation get us only so far. We need God to step over the hedge, so to speak.

And He did.

In the person of Jesus Christ, God entered our world and told us exactly who He is. We can now know Him as fully as He can be known. And that is a highly desirable thing. See, there's an element of God that doesn't fit into my analogy of the school. God is not just some passive observer who just happened to be passing at the right time to do us a small, relatively insignificant favor. He is our God. That is, He is not merely our Creator, but also our judge, our jury, and our executioner. And my friends, we are guilty as charged.

This puts us in serious danger. We have earned the wrath of God, we cannot survive the wrath of God. It's a debt we can't pay. A wage we have no desire to collect. We're doomed.

But God's sojourn on the Earth was not a social call. It was a rescue mission. He came with a message called the Gospel: The God who takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:32; 33:11) was pleased to crush His Son, making His soul an offering for sin (Isaiah 53:10). Thus, we are told, "He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him." (2 Corinthians 5:21).

We do not have to receive our penalty, because our penalty has been received. Our evil thoughts can be forgotten. Our evil words can be expunged. Our evil deeds can be covered. How? Through faith. Those who confess Jesus as Lord, and believe in our hearts God raised Him from the dead, will be saved. So, the ball is now in your court. Will you trust the God who stepped over the hedge, or will you wonder into the broad road leading to destruction?

AI usage

The header image was generated by ChatGPT.