Luke 23.33-43 Jesus crucified with two thieves

How willing are you to accept your fate?

We talk about faith as if it is easy. We talk about religion as if it would allow us to shape our lives into what we want them to be.

Ever wonder why God would choose to become a human being? Why would an all-powerful God need to take on a form of flesh and blood to save human beings? Christian doctrine phrases this concept into a “God had to” format, but really? Is that true? An all-powerful God that can create an entire universe with just a spoken word, HAD to become a human being in order to save us from our sins? I don’t think so. That doesn’t add up.

What I think is that our all-powerful God became a human being to demonstrate to us that our sins could be forgiven if we just confess and ask. God came to earth as Jesus Christ, who was condemned to die for that which he did not deserve, because we, lowly, stubborn, pig-headed human beings can’t seem to grasp that are not forgiven because we deserve it but because God wills it so. God didn’t become human because they had to, they became human because they wanted to.

We CANNOT save ourselves or others just as Jesus Christ did not save himself or others. That is not in our power.

Human beings constantly have this idea, we see it in movies and read about it in books, all the time about escaping our fate, changing our destiny. We dream about tie travel to go back and right past wrongs and change the outcome of the world. How stupid are we?! Do you not have any idea the fate that you are trying to escape?

The fate you are trying to escape is the salvation freely offered to you by your God. That’s the fate God has laid out for you, wants for you, and is working really hard to get you to stop fighting. The natural order of God’s plan is salvation for everyone! That’s what we’re fighting against. We are trying to control our own lives to prevent salvation from happening, it’s ludicrous. In death is our salvation. In this life salvation is offered and all we have to do is accept our fate. And yet… we fight it to the bitter end.

Prayer request after prayer request, heal me, spare me, fix me, don’t let them die. Do we even think about what we’re saying? Do we even stop for a moment to consider that we are asking God not to save us? Not to give us salvation? “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Recognize that in what you are praying to NOT happen, you are stopping the very thing from happening that you are actually praying for. Our innate human desire to control our fate is the very thing keeping us from the fate we so expressly desire.

Both the criminals and Jesus Christ died the same death to receive the same reward. Both the just and the unjust have the possibility to live the same life to receive the same reward. You can fight it, or you can embrace it and love it. We do not receive that which we think we deserve but that which God thinks we deserve. Thank God for that!

God will go to any extreme to save your obstinate, willful, ass. Any extreme except forcing you to do it. God allows us to choose our own fate. You can choose to do nothing, just believe and walk in the ways of God which are carefully laid out for you or you can choose to fight it and cause all kinds of problems and make your life difficult ultimately jeopardizing the one thing you really want in life. Such a shame that more often than not we choose the second option.

The criminals ask Jesus “Do you not fear God?” Of course, we fear God. But what do we do with that fear? Do we use it to run from God or use it as our reason to face God? We have wronged one another, we have wronged God’s church, we have wronged God’s people, we have wronged God’s creation, we have wronged ourselves, we have wronged everything. We deserve hell. We deserve eternal punishment. But that is not what we are given.

What we are given for our insubordination is a choice. Own up to our mistakes and face God or die. We can choose life. We can choose death. Which choice are you making?

Can you even imagine a life free of guilt? I can’t. I can’t imagine life without regret, without at least some self-loathing, without at least some hard feelings toward someone else, I can’t imagine that. The closer I get to that ideal, the more terrified I become of it and instead of walking straight toward it, veer a little off to the left.

Jesus’ guilt-free death between two guilty men going to the same destination was to show us clearly in a way God thought we could comprehend, “I want you here with me.”

You wanna know who got screwed over in this whole thing? Barabbas! Poor guy got forgiven by humans instead of God. He got what humans thought he “deserved” instead of what God thought he deserved: A welcome home. Freedom on earth is not where we are headed. Death is our destination and we can walk toward it with confidence or we can fear it. We can embrace the fate God has set forth for us, or we can fight it.

I feel obligated to insert here that you can embrace death, you do not take it. That is not our decision to make. We do not get to decide the day or the hour, that decision is part of God’s fate for us, to do otherwise is to take fate into your own hands which if you haven’t been listening is how you deny salvation. God decides our fate, not us. The only choice you have to make is whether or not to accept God’s fate for you.