Disengaging the Engine from the Caboose muddles our understanding of Christianity.
The Son of God paid us a brief visit for approximately thirty-three years at and about the city of Jerusalem in a region of our planet called the Middle East more than two thousand years ago. He came not to just tell us he loves us. He came to tell us how much he loves us.
'How do we tell them how much we love them?' the most Holy Trinity asked themselves. 'We pay them a visit. We let them torture and kill us. We rise from the dead. And we continue to love them nonetheless. If this does not tell them how much we love them, nothing can or will."
At Bethlehem, God personally hand delivered to us a love note. Imagine. A love note from God to us. It was the most unusual of love notes. It was not just cold ink written on dead paper. It was the word of God written on life itself. It lived and breath. The love note took the form of a baby born in the most humble of circumstances.
The delivery of the love note was so important an event in the history of humanity that God also delivered to us a guarantee of its genuineness.
At Calvary, God let us put the love note to the test. If the love note were counterfeit, his love for us would fade as we tortured him and would die when we killed him. However, it neither faded or died. It survived the test. We killed him but he did not stay dead. Moreover, when he emerged from the black hole of death, his most sacred heart was still filled to the brim with love for us. He passed the test. The love note was genuine.
We baptized him in the boiling cauldron of pain and suffering. We impaled him on the Cross with the same insouciance with which a fisherman impales a live worm on a sharp hook. We hung the pinata to the tree and beat it to a bloody pulp with sticks. However expressed , the bloody baptism into which we immersed him is meaningless if we disengage it from the facts that emerged from the bloody baptism. He did not stay dead and he did not stop loving us.
The bloody baptism is the means God gave us to measure the magnitude of his love for us (John 15:13). The bloody baptism is the answer to the question, "How much does God love us?". God let us get away with murder - with deicide. We killed our God while he was human, alive, tender, vulnerable and our guest. What worse could the children of Adam and Eve do to their God? Our baptism of him in a boiling cauldron of pain and suffering ought to have, at the very least, pissed him off. It ought to have triggered his reflex for revenge, retaliation and retribution. It ought to have transformed him into the God who hates us. When the fuse is lit, the bomb ordinarily explodes. But, remarkably, it did not. The fuse worked but the bomb was a dud. The God who fashioned us out of the mud with his hands continued to love the mud even though the mud tortured and killed him. Wow!
The price he paid to rescue us from godlessness came not from His limitless divine resources. He paid the price from His limited human resources. He paid them all for us. He kept not a penny for Himself. He has never paid more for anything else. The exorbitant price he paid for us is the best evidence of his exorbitant love for us and our exorbitant value to him (John 15:13).
If you disengage the evil baptism into which we immersed him from his love for us, there is no way to measure the magnitude of his love for us. Therefore, never disengage.
To say. 'God loves us' is true but incomplete. We have the proof of how much God loves us. The proof makes a difference.
We tortured and killed the God who fashioned us out of the mud with his hands, yet, he did not stay dead and he did not stop loving us. We buried him into the black hole of death, yet he emerged alive and with his most sacred heart still filled to the brim with love for us.