Jesus is Lord

Sometimes all I really want to say is, "Jesus is Lord."

There's a universe in those three words. When you say them, you're saying that the man of Galilee, the carpenter's son, who was brutally executed by the Roman authorities, at the instigation and collusion of the religious elites in Jerusalem, just about 2000 years ago, sits enthroned in the eternals, and that all that happens, anywhere, anytime, is under His hand. That's Lordship.

And so we are led inevitably to the old questions regarding how it is, and why it is, that such a God as this, the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings, should submit himself to that, should humiliate himself so completely, should suffer so thoroughly the rage of sinful men; and finally our minds return again to that issue so central to the thought of the Biblical authors, but away from which our own thoughts seem always to stray: that is, the issue of sin.

There is no getting around it. There is no gainsaying, excusing, justifying, ameliorating, or underestimating this problem. The chasm, in human terms, is too wide. God is too righteous, man is too fallen, and so if he is to love us, as was always his intention, if he is to have fellowship with us, it is he who must act. We are enslaved, he is free. We are helpless, he is strong. We are fallen, He is risen. We are defeated, he is victorious. The cross, that's where all this happened. Understand this, and you understand God.

God's love was acted out. It wasn't merely a feeling in His heart, but a full-fledged act of self-giving on our behalf. If we claim to have intimacy with God, yet we spurn the blood of Jesus as unnecessary, our intimacy is a delusion, a wishful fancy, a whistling past the graveyard.

Jesus of Nazareth, who died on Golgotha's tree, is Lord.