Crowned with Glory

“…Jesus, who was made lower than the angels for a little while, now crowned with glory and honor because he suffered death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

(Hebrews 2:9, NIV)

            We can never get over the magnificence of what God has done for us in Jesus Christ our Savior.  God the Son humbled Himself and became man, lived among us—living the perfect obedience to the Father we failed to do, died in our place “so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”

            He died so that we could live; He lives and reigns, and so our hope in Him is unassailably secure.  But meditate on that clause, so strange and beautiful, that Christ went to the cross to “taste death for everyone.”  Certainly we must all face death, until the Lord returns.  But what we face is only the least and smallest sense of death; it only frightens us because we are small and faith is hard.  Christ has borne the terrible reality of death for us, has devoured it and robbed it of all power to harm.

            And the One who drank our poison overcame death, and sits now exalted at the Father’s right hand, enthroned in the heavens, “crowned with glory and honor.”  He is worthy of all our praise and adoration.  Our Savior lives, our Redeemer reigns.  Let us worship His wonderful name.

Patheos: The Bad and Ugly, and the Good

The bad and ugly:

Father Sean OLaoire:  “There is not a serious bible scholar alive today, who believes that the Exodus ever happened or that Moses ever existed.”

Aw, man!  Who knew that all those orthodox Christian scholars who believe Moses existed, many of whom have doctorates from institutions like Oxford, Aberdeen, Harvard, University of Chicago, etc., are just a bunch of incompetent hacks?

The good:

Anne Kennedy, as usual.  Pip pip.

Not a Moment, Not Any

“Grant, Lord, that I may not, for one moment, admit willingly into my soul any thought contrary to Thy love–Amen.”

-E.B. Pusey, quoted in Great Souls at Prayer, 155.

For Him

“Blessed is the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavens in Christ.  For he chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless in love before him.  He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for himself, according to the good pleasure of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace that he lavished on us in the Beloved One.”       (Eph. 1:3-6, CSB)

Reading this passage in the CSB, the phrase “He predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ for himself”, I was struck by those last two words, for himself.  Granted it is an interpretive decision that might be disputed (cf. NIV, ESV), but the point is surely true: our adoption in Christ means that we belong to Him.

This underlines how essentially the call to holiness is connected with salvation in Christ.  Those who receive the wonderful gift of God’s adoption and the inheritance of eternal life have been adopted by God for Himself.  The same words that are the most joyful we can express are also a clarion call to discipleship: “I am His.”