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Viewpoint from Veronica Baldwin for 21st March 2014 

 

 
Veronica Baldwin
Gorleston Baptist Church

 
How great is our God.    A statement?  A question? A fact?     All three!   I believe God is the greatest.  I believe God is love.  I believe there is no-one like our God.  The more I discover what God is the more I hold him in 

Dove right

awe.   To know that God, the Creator of all things - the great galaxies, the vast expanses of space, the sun, our planet and everything it contains, our mountain ranges, the vast seas, this God who reigns in glory and in power, who cannot die, who dwells in light so unimaginable that we could not stand before him in our earthly bodies – this great God came down to earth as a human baby to live and eventually to die for us.  And not just a cosy death.  It was an agonising death, cruel torture, flogging, humiliation, slow and painful crucifixion.   It is mind boggling.  We must have needed some saving!  Why?  Why did the God of the universe have to die for us? Because we are not good enough to save ourselves.  God is holy.  We are not.   

The Bible tells us we are all in a state of sin.  To save us Jesus had to die in our place as our substitute.  He was sinless and only he could pay the price.  Only he was good enough, because he is God.   But more than that – Jesus was the last Adam, the last one of the race of Adam.  It ended there.  Because we are all “in Adam”, born from his line, we were all in Adam too.  When Jesus died as the last Adam, we died “in him” too. Now here is the good part, when Jesus rose from the dead, we rose too, spiritually, because we are now “in him” spiritually.  We have been set free from the law of sin and death. We are now right with God.  God took the sinless Christ and poured into him our sins.  Then, in exchange, he poured God's goodness into us. How good is that!  But all this is only by faith, only by accepting Jesus as your very own Lord and saviour.  You have to believe, you have to confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and you have to believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead.  Do that and you are born again.  You leave the race of Adam, and you are born into the race of Jesus, into eternal life.  God will never force you, you still have free will.  But how can you turn down God who shows how much he loves you by sending his only son into this world to bring to you eternal life through his death?.  In this act we see what real love is:  it is not our love for God, but his love for us when he sent his Son to satisfy His anger against our sins.  He can accept us because Jesus has taken away our sins.  How great is our God?  How great is our God.  How great is our God.