Plan A

I could make up some lame excuse for not having written for a little while, and I could say that I have simply been too busy with school and such. But all of that would be a lie, because the truth is that I went to one class all this last week. All day Tuesday, the sky dumped absurd amount of snow and other wintry precipitation all over Joplin (as well as all over a large chunk of the country, from what I hear), and this resulted in three snow days in a row for me. It has been snowing some more today, but not as furiously as it was earlier this week. Right now large flakes are gently floating down from the clouds, and it's all very beautiful, in fact. It's the kind of a snow that is featured on Christmas movies.

This week I have been reminded of an important fact in several different settings. In my Sunday School class last Sunday, we were studying Isaiah 53, which is well known because of how vividly it describes the way in which Jesus would lay down his life in order to take on the infirmities and sorrows of his people. This is an incredible passage of Scripture that should be read and reread over and over again. Tucked within it, though, is a significant little idea. Verse 10 says of the suffering servant, "Yet it was the Lord's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and thought he Lord makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the Lord will prosper in his hand." It's God's will that all of this would happen, even hundreds of years before it actually would. Just hold on to that idea for a moment.

A couple days later, I was reading the first chapter of Ephesians, where Paul describes how God has blessed us with "every spiritual blessing in Christ." Verses 4-5 say, "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will." These are some pretty loaded sentences, and they immediately raise all sorts of theological questions concerning predestination and God's foreknowledge and such. This is fertile soil for a theological debate. Here's how I read it (though I haven't studied this passage in depth): God chose us (the church) before creation, and he predestined us (the church) to be adopted as his sons. This was God's will from the start. To bring the church to himself. Not that he picks and chooses who will be saved and who will not, overriding any sense of personal decision. But God does love and choose the church. Again, hold on to that.

Finally, in my Romans class this morning, my professor talked about how, in the first few chapters of Romans, Paul develops the argument that all people, Jew and Gentile alike, are under sin and are in need of Jesus. There is no room for spiritual superiority here, because all are on equal footing--both the pagan who indulges in every sinful desire and the judgmental Jew who believes he is safe because of he pedigree. What my professor pointed out is that it was always God's plan to justify sinners through Jesus.

So what does all of this point to? It shows that God's intention and will from the beginning was to rescue the church through faith in Jesus. It is not as though God's original plan was to only save Israel, who would maintain the sacrificial system for all of eternity, but that he later changed his mind because he could see that wasn't working out very well. God's purpose didn't fail, forcing him to scrape together some sort of second-string scheme. What biblical history shows us is that God's intent from all of eternity was to send Jesus to die on the cross and to form the community of the church. The church is not God's "Plan B." It was in his mind from the beginning.

It is popular today to get down on the church. A lot of people, even a lot of Christians, like to bash the church every opportunity they get. But let's remember how deeply God loves and cares for the church. We are adopted as his own children through Christ. The church is like a bride, and it is unwise to insult a person's bride. Especially when the groom is Jesus himself. No, I certainly think  the church needs to be critiqued from time to time, and we need to constantly be reforming ourselves and growing more into who God would have us be. But let's be careful of getting too down on the church, and let's remember how it fits into God's plan for the world. At the same time, this should create within us an incredible sense of gratitude and self-acceptance. No words can adequately describe God's love for us. He chooses us first. We're his first pick. He doesn't take us because no one else is around, or because those he really wants are unable. God loves the church. He loves us. And that's a fact worth being pumped up about.