NEW YOU

Does something haunt you in your past? Maybe something done to you, or maybe something you've done? Does the future look bleak - even an eternal one, a heavenly one - because this hurt will always 'have been'?
 
Despair creeps over the soul like a mist, and not even death and destruction can rewrite history... Or can it?
 
Now listen to this story - the most important one you will ever hear - and consider:
 
God made you. He made you in the image of God (Gen 1:27), and this is a powerful responsibility. Like Lucifer, we have used our God-image and capacities to rebel against God, to reject him, to compete with him. We have God-like power for destruction, for evil. Maybe this is all too clear to you.
 
Now here is where we need to heed. Really look and listen to this truth: God put a rescue plan in action, that would satisfy the soul...
 
So here we stand, in pools of our own blood and that of others. We are destroyed. It is here that God puts his own glory aside (Phil 2:6-7), after hundreds of years 'foreshadowing' and 'foretelling' this moment (Is 7:14; 9:1-7; Is 53). He 'becomes nothing', becomes one of us. What happens here is the only thing we would accept from a God we blame. He allows us to beat and kill him, to get all our anger out on him, to hate and betray and mock him. He allows us to pour out all the hell in our souls over him like a drink offering.
 
And here he takes us even deeper. He takes this 'sin' on himself and 'becomes sin for us'. (2 Cor 5:21) He takes death into himself, and dies with it - like any hero who has to sacrifice himself to defeat the enemy.
 
So our sin is on him, and death in him, and death itself dies with him. (1 Cor 15:54-58)
 
Then Jesus rises from the dead - 'the firstborn from among the dead'. (Col 1:15-20) He comes back to you and me, his killers. In fact, he uses his blood, the blood we spilt, to buy us back. (Rev 5:9) And with his defeat over death and all sin of all time, he offers to give us - to create in us - 'a new heart and new spirit.' (Ez 36:26)
 
He offers you not only a new future, but a new past. It is a bloody affair, God's blood on our hands, but it is a God-sized, spiritual truth: to write you a new future, and write you a pure past. Call on him.
 
'Come, let us reason together,' says the Lord. 'Though your sins are like scarlet, I will make them white as snow.'
​(Isaiah 1:18)