Saviour!

Saviour!

Matthew 1:21 AMPC

[21] She will bear a Son, and you shall call His name Jesus [the Greek form of the Hebrew Joshua, which means Savior], for He will save His people from their sins [that is, prevent them from failing and missing the true end and scope of life, which is God].

A popular saying goes thus: 'the end justifies the means'. It would mean that whatever is achieved at the end is the focus and not what you did or how you did it to achieve that end. The world would use that saying to justify whatever greedy venture made money for them, but we want to look at this saying from a spiritual angle. What was the end that God was trying to achieve? It is the salvation of man. He has not desire whatsoever to see the eternal death of anyone, because there is no human life without His imprint and input. At creation, God breathed into man the breath of life, and man became a living soul. It means that, even before I knew or understood the need to have Jesus in my heart, God already did put a part of Himself in me. He did this because there was an eternal assignment He needed to get done. 

The end of all human life has to be the start of eternal life with God. Phyiscal death now becomes just a phase that leads to the eternal, and God had to lay down the path for man to achieve this. Having established the end, which is eternal life for ALL men, He then laid out the means, which is through His Son Jesus. Jesus did not just fall from the sky; God allowed Him to born in human form, so He could walk in our shoes and feel our pain. The one thing that made it possible for His life to also give life was that it was not subject to the human limitation of sin. The chain of sin was broken at His birth, so He could offer the perfect sacrifice for sin for the whole world. He knew no sin, yet He became sin for us, so that we too could become the righteousness of God. No one could offer what we now have, and need to respond to.

What makes this amazing is that it was done at a time that there were no guarantees that we would accept Him as Lord and Saviour. He did what He did at the time, in the hope that we will come to the saving knowledge of the Son, and be free from the hold of sin. That is amazing: God who knows all things still went ahead with the end in view, sure that even if it is was just for one person who will come to believe in Jesus, the sacrifice was worth it. The name and purpose were given before the physical manifestation, and the plan of God for salvation has been in place long before I was born. I just have to walk into the fullness of that purpose by accepting Him as Lord and Saviour, and living daily to please the One who died to save me. He has done His part; the response is now mine to make. Salvation is free; rejection comes at a huge cost. God's time of favour is here.