John 20:28
Thomas answered him, “My Lord and my God!”
Thomas had no right to demand such a personal audience with the Almighty God and to personally inspect him. For man to put God in the dock is a crazed and mad thing but, unfortunately, tragically, it’s the way of sin. Sinful man is always demanding that reality conform to his whims and that he be the final reference point for all truth. That Jesus has come to him, after dying for his sin, after all that unfathomable suffering, and then to be dishonored in such a way, is one of the great wonders of God’s love! It’s one thing that He died for us while we were yet sinners, but quite another that He pursues us even after the fact, bringing us to Himself in spite of our intransigence and pride.
So, there He stands and Thomas sees Him and says that great thing. He calls Jesus God, not a God, but the God and this is the thing to remember. The fullness of God is in Jesus Christ our Lord and here He stands, with so much humility and love for His children. How great a truth! How life altering a thing is the love of God in Christ Jesus!
Over the years I’ve seen a variety of marriages go bad. Husbands have cheated on and left their wives and children; wives have cheated on their husbands. In every case, though the specifics differ, there’s the fact of dishonor and the rejection by one party of the responsibility of faithfulness. And in every case, without fail, the infidelity has caused great shock to one and all, especially to the injured spouse. Assuredly, no good ever comes from it and sometimes when Christians get together to talk such instances come up and we’re right to be appalled at the sin of adultery. There’s another issue lurking beneath this, though, and that’s man’s – every man’s – spiritual adultery against God.
As bad as the issue of cheating on one’s spouse is, as much destruction as it brings to one and all, the behavior of man towards God is infinitely worse. We see it best in Hosea where God, to give us an idea of what salvation really means, orders His prophet to marry a whore, Gomer. Hosea marries her but she does what a whore would do and is unfaithful to him. She leaves and shacks up with another man who’s a bum. Unable to take care of her, they exist in abject poverty. God sends Hosea to the man and gives him food so that they can survive, which the man presents to Gomer as the product of his own efforts. What a great picture of mankind living in sin and defiance of God, consuming His multitude of gifts and never thanking Him. What an offense!
Ultimately, Gomer falls so low that she’s sold off into slavery. Any sane man would have nothing to do with such a woman as that. She’s stripped naked at the marketplace and lecherous men begin to bid on her. But God, to show us how His love for us works, orders Hosea to redeem her and so he does. And once he spends even more precious money on his whoring wife, basically owning her now, he’s commanded by the Lord to restore her to the position of wife, not slave. This is the pursuing love of God in action. It’s the very thing that’s rescued you and me from the slavery of sin that we’d sold ourselves into. This is – God’s redemptive work and love of spiritual whores – unequivocally and unarguably, the greatest wonder in the world. He owes us nothing but wrath and scorn and yet we get grace and more grace.
Sometimes we might be overwhelmed by life and wonder if God is really like this. Jesus shows us here that He is. And, as Donald Grey Barnhouse says, “…everything in the Word and in experience shows us that He is. He will give man the trees of the forest and the iron in the ground. Then He will give to man the brains to make an axe from the iron to cut down a tree and fashion it into a cross. He will give man the ability to make a hammer and nails, and when man has the cross and the hammer and the nails, the Lord will allow man to take hold of Him and bring Him to that cross. He will stretch out His hands upon it and allow man to nail Him to that cross, and in so doing will take the sins of man upon Himself and make it possible for those who have despised and rejected Him to come unto Him and know the joy of sins removed and forgiven…”.
Have you run away from God. Have you hidden behind some flimsy bush that’s He’s created? Of course you have and, behold, He has come to you in love. He’s there with His arms outstretched, ready for you with all that love that changes one’s life and breaks their heart in the sweetest way. Oh, Christian, don’t you know that everything you have, just like with Gomer, was provided by God and we use those things and are so thankless and yet God comes after us? Thomas saw this the moment he laid eyes on the risen Lord and all he could say was the truth, “My Lord and my God!”
The thing to know about the religion of Jesus Christ is that one can’t see the majesty of God’s love – its unscalable heights and infinite nature – without also knowing the grotesque depths of our whoredom too. We have not been redeemed in any casual way but pursued by Almighty God even in the throes of our rebellion as we wantonly used His gifts and spat in His face. Worse, we added the appalling insult of demanding He prove Himself to us as if His honor was in question rather than our own. To know this, to really chew on it, is to see Him standing there, having taken some path unknown to us, to arrive ahead of us on our selfish journey, to cut us off and tell us, with all that great love, “Here I am…and I died for you.”
When a man or woman sees this, they see the love of God breaking through all their sin and the failures and shame sin brings. When they say, “My Lord and my God,” they say that His love has found them and they now see how ugly sin is. To not see the whoredom and ignominy of sin is to not recognize the holiness and love of God. Many try and separate the two, and speak of God’s love without the reality of man’s sin but this is mere sentimentalism and isn’t in any way biblical. God hates sin and it cost Jesus Christ the cross. So, those of us who come to Christ see that great love over against our sin and this produces in us, progressively, sometimes slowly, but always, a new mind and heart that loves God and hates sin. Oh, that we would all see how greatly we have deserved judgment so that we might know for ourselves the greatness and wonder of God’s love and say with Thomas, “my Lord and my God!”
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