IBS Application for Psalms 144:3

“O Lord, what is man that you regard him, or the son of man that you think of him?”

“What am I, Lord, that You would even bother to concern Yourself with a messy, evil person like me? Why give me a thought, let alone obsess over me? Why?” I have asked myself those questions a lot lately. I have repeatedly sinned in the same ways lately, and all have been related to a lack of willingness to move past myself in order to just have joy in the Lord. While He has ever been so willing to just be there for me, I slapped His hand away every time. I still have trouble trusting Him, clearly.

But the miracle that is His love still stands in the face of all my selfishness. Why does He still come after me so fiercely? Why pay heed to this wretch of a man who simply grieves Him when He tries to show me love and grace? And most perplexingly of all, why would He love me with such a love as to obsess over me?

His love is indeed wondrous. I do not understand the “why” of how He loves me, nor will I ever understand that fully in this life. None of us will, if we are being honest with ourselves. That God would decide to love us so much in spite of our evil nature, which would naturally bring great division between us and Him by the sheer fact that God, being pure, and that He ought not to concern Himself with so worthless and despicable a people is an incomparably high mystery.

Regardless of what the answer is, if there is one to be found beyond the simple, yet infinitely powerful truth that God is love, and He needs no other reason to love us, we cannot be too concerned with this for too long. We need to be looking for something in this truth to respond to.

For me, I find the truth that He didn’t need to love me to be of great importance, because it comes with the added truth that He was so obsessed with me, even before He created the universe, that He foresaw that I would be born into sin and death, and planned to give Himself up to die for me in my place, and in the place of every other sinner that would ever live, all before creating anything. What great love is this! To foresee His own suffering and death before the foundations of the world, and still deem it worth it to love us as sons and daughters for His own pleasure is mind-boggling!


The response that would be befitting an unbeliever who hears this truth would be to seek salvation and rescue from death in sin. But what about for a believer? There may be other responses that God calls others who have received salvation to, but for me, I find that He has simply asked me to thank Him and pray for a renewed fire for the joy that lies in the salvation I have in Him. My application will be to do this every morning as part of my devotions for the next week.

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