DRAW NEAR
Read Time: 3 min 21 sec
QUOTE OF THE DAY
“God does not need your good works, but your neighbor does.”
Martin Luther
THE GOOD STUFF
DRAW NEAR
by Marcie Morrison | Member at Redeemer
I asked God again, “What were the first thing and the second thing that Isaiah and Jesus were talking about in Hebrews 10?”
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There are some questions I’ve asked God on repeat, and sometimes the answers vary since the last time I asked the exact same question. He is beautiful, alive, dynamic. So, I don’t question those little differences that He speaks.
When you were 5 or 6, you learned that water boils in a pot when it gets really hot. When you were 8, someone explained to you that water boils at 100 C. Still later, maybe you learned that this boiling temperature is only true at sea level, standard pressure. The world is full of nuance, and slightly varied answers for even simple things like boiling water is completely appropriate. As we grow in words and in understanding, we are able to receive increasingly complex and abstract ideas and assumptions.
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Today, the answer to the question about the first and second thing was“law” and “grace.”As in, Romans 6— whereby God’s people were subject to the law for any bearable access to God, now we are under and subject to a fuller grace. What a peculiar thing! What happened at the cross and the resurrection that moved us from law to grace? My mind wandered as I thought of God’s chosen people who started as a stream from a biological family and grew to a global river through Christ. I jotted down a few notes from my worshipful bunny trail and waited. I asked more specifically, “What did it mean for Jesus to set aside the law and establish grace?”
And I saw an infant in an incubator.
I saw gloved hands reaching through those circular, gloved openings to hold a tiny, helpless infant. The gloves were a barrier, clunky and incomplete. In the same way, the law was the way God was able to get close to His people. They were rebellious, stained, and unable to bear His holiness. Just as the law allowed partial access to His people, the gloves and equipment allowed partial access from the heart of the father to the baby he longs to hold. Appropriate for the time, but definitely not the fullness of a skin-to-skin newborn nap.
Now, it would be foolish to get all hung up about the incubator and to worship and follow IT instead of focusing on the relationship between the father and the baby inside. But we can tend toward that like the Pharisees did. They missed the desire of the Father to hold the baby and opted for the tidy counterfeit of bronzing and cherishing the empty gloves.
Draw near, because we can.
When Jesus set aside the law to fulfill it (Matthew 5), He did not debase the value of the incubator to the father or the baby. Without the box, the warmer, and the gloves, there was no way for the father to be close to his unready child. Instead, He established a new covenant in His blood. At the cross, Jesus set aside the need for the incubator by giving His elect their own life and lungs. His sacrifice grants access to the closeness the baby needs and the father wants. The cross displaced God’s wrath toward our sin sickness and implants a desire to be with Him and the very ability to recognize and receive His love.
I’ve always appreciated how every little thing is a pointer to God and His ways, even the hard things, like preemie babies in incubators. These visions always make me long for fullness, for seeing Him face to face, not through reading glasses or a piece of dim plexiglass. He reveals a teeny tiny bit, and barely in part; but then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known by the Father’s desirous love.