God loves you and wants to have a personal relationship with you.
However, there is a problem, there is a huge barrier to knowing God. God is holy, perfect, pure, righteous, without any form of wrong or evil. We on the other hand, are selfish and naturally sinful – gravitating to wrong over right, in a state of rebellion and non-acceptance of God. We’re all born this way, no-one can claim to be without sin.
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23)
Mankind was initially created without sin, but sin entered the world when Adam and Eve sinned in the Garden of Eden, when they didn’t follow God’s instructions.
And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.” (Genesis 2:16-17)
So what? Well the consequence or penalty of sin is death, not only physical death but ongoing and eternal separation from God.
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned (Romans 5:13)
But your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear. (Isaiah 59:2)
We are considered to be sinful by God, which keeps us separated from God…with no way on our own to fix it.
On one hand we have God who created us and loves us and on the other hand we are sinful and unacceptable to God – hence the great divide as illustrated in the photo for this blog.
We can’t earn our way through good behaviour or actions into a place of acceptance before God that deals with our sin. We can’t even get a look in the door. God sets the standards. We are sentenced to death.
Being helpless and without hope of knowing God in our own strength and capability, we need to take a look to see if God has done something about it.
The following verses from Psalm 103 give us a glimpse that God has intervened out of His great love for us.
The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever; he does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. (Psalm 103:8-12)
These verses speak about us being able to have our sin/iniquity/transgression removed from us by God.
‘How’ will be the subject of my next few blog posts.
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