A Few Days after Christmas, A Temple Visit, and Why It Matters for Your Salvation
About a week after the first Christmas night, Mary and Joseph took Jesus to the temple. You can read about this in Luke 2:22-40.
This temple visit of the 8 day old Jesus is significant for a number of reasons. Among them is that by being brought to the temple and submitting to this ceremony of dedication, Jesus was beginning a life of active obedience to the Law of God (Luke 2:22-27. At eight days old Jesus was conforming to the Law of God blamelessly. That matters. But why?
It matters because this means that from His earliest days Jesus was putting into practice the perfect righteous obedience to God's Law that would later be imputed or reckoned or credited to our account upon our faith in Him.
In order to live in God's favor and presence, we need to have a perfect Law-keeping record (Leviticus 18:5; Galatians 3:12), which in ourselves, we don't. We are Law-breakers, not just by our failure to keep ceremonial laws but in our repeated wilful failures to keep the absolute moral laws of God. We choose to disobey God time and again. And God cannot condone, nor can He tolerate the presence of sin before His eyes.
This is why all works-based religions are exercises in futility. No matter how hard we try to get it right, we don't. Even if I got it right perfectly from this day onward, it would not remedy my bad record in the past. When it comes to saving myself through works it is a classic case of "I can't get there from here."
Enter the Incarnate Son of God. He comes to earth and starts living life on this fallen planet; only He lives it differently than everyone else. He gets it right--right down to ceremonies performed on Him and to Him when He's 8 days old. And by doing so throughout His life He attained a perfect record of righteousness.
This righteousness would later be offered to all who would believe in Him as Savior and Lord. God promises that the righteousness of Christ becomes ours by faith, so that we might live before Him forever (Romans 4:5; Romans 5:17-21).
Thank God for our Lord's 8 day old visit to the temple. If we see things rightly, we know that even then He was saving us by His obedient perfect life, an obedience one day to be counted as ours.
Amen.
This temple visit of the 8 day old Jesus is significant for a number of reasons. Among them is that by being brought to the temple and submitting to this ceremony of dedication, Jesus was beginning a life of active obedience to the Law of God (Luke 2:22-27. At eight days old Jesus was conforming to the Law of God blamelessly. That matters. But why?
It matters because this means that from His earliest days Jesus was putting into practice the perfect righteous obedience to God's Law that would later be imputed or reckoned or credited to our account upon our faith in Him.
In order to live in God's favor and presence, we need to have a perfect Law-keeping record (Leviticus 18:5; Galatians 3:12), which in ourselves, we don't. We are Law-breakers, not just by our failure to keep ceremonial laws but in our repeated wilful failures to keep the absolute moral laws of God. We choose to disobey God time and again. And God cannot condone, nor can He tolerate the presence of sin before His eyes.
This is why all works-based religions are exercises in futility. No matter how hard we try to get it right, we don't. Even if I got it right perfectly from this day onward, it would not remedy my bad record in the past. When it comes to saving myself through works it is a classic case of "I can't get there from here."
Enter the Incarnate Son of God. He comes to earth and starts living life on this fallen planet; only He lives it differently than everyone else. He gets it right--right down to ceremonies performed on Him and to Him when He's 8 days old. And by doing so throughout His life He attained a perfect record of righteousness.
This righteousness would later be offered to all who would believe in Him as Savior and Lord. God promises that the righteousness of Christ becomes ours by faith, so that we might live before Him forever (Romans 4:5; Romans 5:17-21).
Thank God for our Lord's 8 day old visit to the temple. If we see things rightly, we know that even then He was saving us by His obedient perfect life, an obedience one day to be counted as ours.
Amen.
Labels: Gospel, Justification, The Work of Christ
posted by Tim Shorey at
10:07 AM
1 Comments:
O the preciousness of the active and passive obedience of Christ!!!!
Utterly and hopelessly lost otherwise.
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