How Amazing!

As a young child, I took part in a Christmas musical about the nativity from the angel’s perspective.  One of the songs that we sang went, “How amazing; how confusing! How can God the Son become a man?”  At that time, I just took the statements of my parents and Sabbath school leaders regarding the plan of salvation in blind childhood faith.  I never really tried to wrap my head around what it all meant; so, it took me a while to really understand just how amazing it is that Christ died for me.

Romans 5:7,8 reads, “For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die.  But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”  Everything that we as a human race do comes after what is known in the economic world as a cost/benefit analysis.  We examine how much we are going to sacrifice and we compare it to how much we are going to gain.  And it is here in Romans that we see God’s cost/benefit analysis, and it boggles our minds.  God says that he is willing to sacrifice everything for a chance to save someone who has made no indication that he is going to accept the gift that he is being offered.  Paul compares this analysis to those that we perform.  He reminds us that we as humans are reluctant to even lay down our life for our heroes, and yet God was willing to die for the yet unrepentant scum.  And, all of this, not because He was going to gain anything, but because He loves us.

In examining this seemingly twisted line of heavenly logic, God has been called by many “crazy,” or “underhanded;” crazy because He seems to have sacrificed everything for nothing, and underhanded because no one would really give up all that for nothing; he must have some other motive, right?  But God is neither crazy nor underhanded.  I have experienced first hand the results of this “illogical” plan and the immense freedom that it brings when we accept it.  While I regret the choices that I have made and the pain that I have caused my Savior, I am more thankful than I could ever express to have been the subject of God’s immense love, a love that even the angels have not experienced, a love that makes everything alright.

So now, eleven years later, I am beginning to better understand just how amazing, just how confusing the plan of salvation really is to us in our limited understanding.  So as we ask ourselves the question: how amazing, how confusing; why would God the Son become a man, we realize that perhaps the only answer we will find for now is: love.