…you were bought at a price. (1 Corinthians 6:20, NIV)
Are you judging the book by its cover today, reading that title and wondering whether to read any more?
I made two long trips recently—one for a practice round and one for a tournament round—to a course in the middle of proverbial nowhere. Actually, the course is called Buena Vista, meaning (if you know your Spanish) “nice view.” The course was around a big bend, so that you could not see it until you were upon it, and the getting there meant zipping along a corridor of oil wells, tumbleweeds and plain old dirt. No chance this course was going to surprise us with beauty, right?
Right. The course itself was old and stark. But standing on the elevated tenth green or eleventh tee, guess what? You could look out across miles of cultivated farmland backdropped by the rising mountains that frame Southern California. Nice view.
Is there any chance, then, that when we talk of sin we will encounter a “nice view?” It seems impossible in light of our theological constructs that paint sin as black and cancerous and fatal.
The bad news is that every one of those descriptions fits. In sin, we are headed to an eternal death apart from Christ. It’s important that we keep that truth in mind, because many contemporary theologians would sand the sharp edges of sin, grind down its teeth. They do so in the name of grace and love.
Here’s the difficulty: love shed its blood for sin.
“We must never forget,” wrote the great preacher Charles Spurgeon, “that the gospel of Christ is holy. It never excuses sin: it pardons it, but only through atonement.” Those last words are critical: but only through atonement.
If we say that the grace of God dismisses our sin, we are right in the sense that he desires that we would turn to him in contrition and repentance, so that he may forgive and restore us. But even the grace of God does not dismiss the weight of sin. This is the sin that sent Jesus to the cross. This is the sin that demanded a just price be paid. This is the sin that murdered our Savior.
Sin is ugly. Nearing it. In it. After it. But if our eyes see Christ, see him bleeding on the cross as the perfect sacrifice for our grave error, then from sin we might indeed find a buena vista. We find grace in the blood of Jesus.
—
Jeff Hopper
May 29, 2012
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