My Redeemer Lives

“For I know that my Redeemer lives, and at the last He will stand upon the earth.” 
~Job 19:25

I feel so blessed every day when I wake up knowing I worship the living Christ. I am blessed because He called me His own. I am blessed because He loved me so much He died for for me, but more than that, He rose again so I would have everlasting life. He loves each one of us so much that even if there was only a single person on Earth in need of redemption, He still would have died on the Cross.

Few, if any of us truly know what it cost Jesus to be our Savior. Even if we can identify with the ridicule and abuse He endured, none of us can know the suffering of dying on the Cross. It was much more than the physical agony because He also had to take on every sin we ever committed.

"For our sake he made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Corinthians 5:21)."

Jesus had never sinned, yet He became sin. What does that mean? Look around, we see sin in our own lives, we see sin on the news, we see sin everywhere. From little white lies to adultery to murder and everything in between, sin is all around us. Sometimes we pretend we don't see it, or we ignore it in our own lives, or we change the channel so we don't have to watch, but we know it's there. 

 "And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which means, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34-36)."

Why did Jesus think God had forsaken Him? God is holy and cannot look at sin. Jesus was covered with our sin. But at the moment Jesus took His last breath, some phenomenal events took place. First, there was an earthquake that would have rocked the Richter scale. Second, the ground shook so hard, it opened the tombs of the dead; and third, the resurrection power of God caused the dead to come back to life. The fourth interesting thing recorded in Matthew 27:51-54 is that the sequence of these events brought faith in Christ to the people who were watching (v. 54).

Jesus' death, burial and resurrection are the most important events to ever happen. They not only represent the greatest sacrifice but are the pinnacle of our faith. Our Redeemer lives!

Read Joshua 16-19
1 Chronicles 6:54-81

A Year of Blessings by Marie McGaha ©2018