Our Needs Are Found in God's Grace

Khen Lim

Image Source: greakweekendholidays.com

Before I left to return to Malaysia, I had spent more than twenty years living in Australia. My life was dramatically different from what it is today. Back then, I had a carefree single life steeped in pleasure and self-interests.

One of the most pleasurable things I loved doing was to go bushwalking and the place to be was called The Grampians, located north of the state of Victoria. There, you’ll find wonderful places to visit where the views can be breathtaking. One of these views can be found on our Lux Mundi website masthead. Several of these places offer unmatched scenic beauties but can be fairly treacherous to get to where one careless step could mean the difference between life and death.

Back then there were hardly any signs warning you to be careful. You walk at your own risk and the assumption is that you know what you’re doing. And yet despite the great dangers, there are dozens of tourists, including families with young children, walking about as if unknowing of the imminent dangers and as if strolling carefree! It can only be a miracle that there have not been any deaths that I personally know of.

There are moments when we are in immense danger and not even know it. Some of us are simply unaware but there are also those who refuse to bother. The young ones tend to tell us to go live our lives and live dangerously!

Cresting the sharp perilous peaks and being oblivious to them can be a serious problem. It’s like dealing with the danger of dying and not aware of facing God’s punishment. It is not uncommon to find people strutting through life, lurking uncaringly and within a heartbeat of a fiery doom and still not be concerned with God’s wrath.

It doesn’t dawn on them that in the aftermath, they will face His judgement and account for who they are today. And if these people do not awaken from their slumber so as to clamour for the only redeeming gift, God’s Grace, then all is lost. It is, after all, God’s abundant amazing Grace that is found in the cross of Jesus Christ; that even in the hour of His death, tethered on nails and brutalised physically and wantonly, He could still seek His Father for forgiveness on behalf of sinners like you and I. This is Grace uniquely and gratefully personified in Jesus.

Those standing about, watching leeringly at the crucifixion were in grave spiritual danger but most of them were oblivious to it. The Roman soldiers saw it purely as a day’s paid work and as gory as it was to have someone else’s blood in your hands, it came with the territory, so to speak.

Some in the crowd saw it as gruesome but all the same, interesting spectacle; certainly no less so than to gleefully watch hapless Christians being mauled to death by a pride of lions. How-ever many were saddened, believing that a good man was being mistreated unjustifiably and inhumanly. Yet they too failed to establish the connection between their sins and what His death meant for they merely viewed Jesus’ death at the cross as a politically vendetta, a backlash by the Sanhedrin against someone willing to speak out for the poor, disadvantaged, marginalised and downtrodden. To them Jesus had overstepped the hastily drawn margin on the sand because He was willing to confront their sins. Jewish leaders had never encountered someone, Jesus, who readily laid down His life. And so once they had Him crucified, there was nothing but relief. A troublesome preacher was gotten rid of, for He did nothing but hindered their lucrative religious business.

If we look at things this way, we can understand why so many people were, in varying extents of spiritual danger, completely ignorant of their own sins and the big need to fall under God’s Grace.

And so, into this picture, we hear a cry from Jesus hanging on the cross, a cry that clearly pronounced two important things – that of the sinner’s grave need to be saved and the ever present, wonderful and amazing grace of God.

“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing.”

This was the first of seven last statements that the Gospels recorded in which Jesus spoke on the cross within His dying hour. But this particular one is more than sufficient to remind us to keep falling under God’s Grace for herein, our needs are consistently and perfectly met.