The Gospel turns everything the way human reason says it shouldn't be. Christians today are so hard on the apostles, pharisees, and other people of Jesus' day. We are no better. We have God's law, and his Gospel, we have the benefit of having the words "It is finished". We have Paul and the other Evangelists, and Epistle writers who explained things in ways that almost no one knew for thousands of years previously. Those people had shadows. We have completed fact.
Yet we do not trust. We do not want a God who has done it all for us. We want to do things for him. We want to convince ourselves that we can make ourselves better Christians; that we are better Christians than the person in the pew next door. We want to make our own faith stronger. We want to help the Holy Spirit, we want to do the work for him.
Praise be to God that in spite of all we want to do, he does it for us. For us he removes the stumbling block. Through faith, the confusion of the Gospel is made crystal clear. Christ died for you, he died for me. We have that completed fact. We have our justification completed on the cross and declared from an empty tomb. We have a savior who sits on high, mediates for us at the right hand of the Father. We have an almighty Lord who has us in his heart and is preparing a place for us.
Yes, we don't really get it. We will never get it all while we are still here in these shadows of a paradise to come. But we have a Shepherd who is calling us to himself. We have his voice.
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