"God showed His love for us.." - 1 John 4:9-10 (CEV)

Having our sins forgiven may seem like a small thing regarding the whole of our Christian experience, for there is so much else that Christ reveals in our lives that we can lose sight of the fact that God did the impossible through Jesus Christ. 

God's plan was always for humankind was to spread Eden throughout the world so that we would be imagers of what our God is like and bring heaven to earth, but humanity was met with staggering failure time and time again. 

From the failure of Adam and Eve to the disastrous results at the tower of Babel where God essentially gave up on humanity and assigned watchers (or His heavenly council) to oversee the affairs of man. 

It was at the tower of Babel that God chose to start again with Abraham and Sarah by creating an inheritance for himself through their bloodline. God chose this older childless couple to create a bloodline of promise through them by faith, Abraham trusted God and His promises and it was accounted to him as righteousness. 

Well then, what can we say about our ancestor Abraham? If he became acceptable to God because of what he did, then he would have something to brag about. But he would never be able to brag about it to God. The Scriptures say, "God accepted Abraham because Abraham had faith in him." 

Romans 4:1-3 (CEV)

God's promise to Abraham was that his descendants would be as many as the grains of sand beneath his feet. God realized that the only way for an imager to become genuinely effective was for Him to intervene in the lives of His chosen people and become the word himself instead of counting on man alone. 

Abraham and Sarah were way past their productive years of childbirth, so God intervened, and the Son of the promise was born, Isaac. 

Moving forward through time with Jacob, who would become Israel, wrestled with God for a blessing and prevailed. Jacob's gift (or blessing) was a dislocated thigh (or hip) bone, which represented the effort of the flesh as opposed to allowing God to intervene on our behalf as He intended to do in the first place. 

What Jacob didn't know before he wrestled with God is that God had already chosen his bloodline to produce an inheritance for Himself, for he was the Grandson of Abraham. 

The descendants of Abraham were to be a blessing to all the nations of the world. However, there were countless moral failures, and the story of Israel reads like a script from a daytime soap opera. David and his Son Solomon were the next in line, and they, too, had many moral failures that marked their lives.

But you cannot make God accept you because of something you do. God receives sinners only because they have faith in him. In the Scriptures, David talks about the blessings that come to people who are acceptable to God, even though they don't do anything to deserve these blessings. David says, "God blesses people whose sins are forgiven and whose evil deeds are forgotten. The Lord blesses people whose sins are erased from his book." 
Romans 4:5-8 (CEV)

 God Himself would have to become the word (an imager) and proclaim the truth of His kingdom himself to make sure that the message was untainted by human failure.

God became a man to bring about the impossible; He brought heaven to earth.

Jesus responded, "What appears humanly impossible is more than possible with God. For God can do what man cannot." 
Luke 18:27 (TPT)   

Now we have the Holy Spirit who reveals Christ within us in greater measure, our sins are forgiven, and we have peace with God. We now have God's plan in its fullness, Jesus is revealed as the true God-Man and He gives us what we could not produce ourselves because of the effects of sin—true forgiveness. 

"God promised Abraham and his descendants that he would give them the world. This promise wasn't made because Abraham had obeyed a law, but because his faith in God made him acceptable." 
Romans 4:13 (CEV)

We are of Abraham's descendants because we are children of faith, and here is the most amazing part:

"For it is by his grace that we have been saved through faith, and this faith was not from you, but it is the gift of God, Not of works, lest anyone should boast." 
Ephesians 2:8-9 (ABPE)

It is faith that has been imputed to us by God Himself to trust Him and rely upon His goodness for everything. So where we began in this post with sins forgiven is always a starting point for us that reminds us of the importance of God's goodness, that He becomes what we could never become in and of ourselves, which is the righteousness of God in Christ.

Be Blessed;

Stephen Barnett