God’s Extended Hands

“In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10)

God the Father, the righteous One and the Holy One, demands of us that which we do not possess.  The right hand of His holiness is extended toward us, and He demands that we give Him holiness equal to His own.  His very nature requires him to ask perfection of all who would enter His presence, there to live and abide in fellowship with Him forever.

I remember one of my professors saying that the righteousness of God was that righteousness which His holiness requires Him to require.  But when I examine my attainments in the light of His demands, I see that I have nothing that I could ever offer to Him.  I know myself to be condemned unless He does something about it.

And then the left hand of His love shows me the Cross.  There I learn that He took my sin and provided me with His own righteousness.  Nothing else can satisfy God, nothing can replace this righteousness.  And by faith I, as a poor lost sinner, go to the Cross of Christ to receive the righteousness of my Savior.  Then I go to God and place that righteousness in the hand of His demand, and all His requirements are met, once and forever.  I am received immediately, and in me is planted the life of Christ—eternal life.  Therefore I have eternal life, now, as a permanent and present possession.

Only the man who possesses, and knows that he possesses, great wealth can live largely and help others.  A man who possesses, but is not sure whether his account is good, and therefore does not draw upon it is, for all practical purposes, a pauper.  So it is with this question of the present possession of eternal life.  I know that I am saved.  I am just as sure that I am going to be in Heaven as I am sure that my Lord Jesus Christ is already in Heaven.