Love Rejected

Love Rejected

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were surrounded by the love of their Creator.    But the day came when they didn’t believe in God’s love for them when they didn’t trust His command to not eat from the forbidden tree.    Unbelief  is rejection.    Such a simple act was that mistrust — that unloving act with awful consequences.

But, God continued to show His love with the promise of a Savior.    Over the centuries, God continually kept proving His love by saving His people from countless predicaments and giving more details of the Savior He would be sending.

When the Savior finally came, Jesus declared God’s love and mercy again for all mankind to see and believe.    That love of God was profoundly shown with Jesus’ faithful preaching of God’s truths, backed up with miracles for the proof of His authority.

As Jesus preached God’s eternal truth, many people were awed with the infinite beauty and wonder of God’s love for each and every one of them.    They were drawn into desiring more of that knowledge of being honestly loved.    Even today, our aim is to know that love, believe in that love, be transformed by that love, and to glory in that love.

But, to everyone’s troubled puzzlement, Jesus then displayed even more of God’s love and mercy in the pain and suffering He endured during His lifetime, trial, and death.    This seemed to be opposite of His power to perform miracles.

When Jesus, God Almighty, allowed mere humans to mock and ridicule Him day after day and eventually crucify Him, the ultimate in saving love was displayed for all the world to see forever and ever.    But, the degradation and shame of humankind was also displayed forever — and ever.    The most awful shame in this world is for lowly, corrupt mankind to reject the self-sacrificing, saving love of God Almighty.

In their arrogance, hatred, and jealousy, mere humans were displayed exactly as they are — foolish, sinful, and fully deserving of eternal death because of their rejection of God’s love.    They rejected their own basic need for God Almighty’s love and salvation.    That’s like refusing food, water and shelter.

People still reject our heavenly Father’s free offer of salvation by faith alone.    They prefer to work their own way to a heaven of their own description in an attempt to take credit for their own “goodness”.    That sort of rejection of our Lord’s love is blasphemy, to say the least.

What does that say to us?    Are we that same kind of people — people who look for love, need love, but often reject God’s love with arrogant disobedience and pride?    Are we so powerful that we can afford to reject God’s continued offer of free salvation through a simple faith in the atoning work of Christ on the cross?

To actually see the filthiness of our sinful natures and then to realize that we are still loved should bring about a deep reverence for God’s faithful patience with each and every one of us.    Then we can pray for each other with Paul in Ephesians 3:14-19.

“For this reason,  I bow my knees before the Father,  from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,  that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory,  to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man,   so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith;  and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,  and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge,  that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.”

May we be humbled with a true comprehension of God’s faithful working for us, so that we may be filled up with the fullness of God’s awesome love and forgiveness extended to us.    Then,  instead of rejecting that awesome love,  we will bow in true adoration and worship,  knowing the amazing wonder of being loved by God Almighty.

Love,   Margaret