Behold the Lamb

“...the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world.”

~ Revelation 13:8

Somehow the fact that Christ was crucified from the start always courses through me like some new thought. In other words, God is not reactionary, and His death, this holy suffering, was what He'd originally deemed the ideal plan for His creation.

For one who is stuck in this temporary realm, where one event follows another, the Fall looks like it preceded God's redemption; appears like it was a “salvage” operation – but that is only evidence of the discrepancy between human wisdom and God's. It's mind-boggling to grasp that sometimes He only manifests His outer workings after some time-bound event has taken place, and perhaps it's for that reason that we finite creatures struggle to accept that He's the driving force fully sovereign over all we witness.

Perhaps the issue isn't so much in recognizing that God's removed from time, able to see all eternity when we can't even perceive the next moment ahead of us. Perhaps instead the battle is in seeing how God, having known all that was to come, didn't choose some other way.

But if He's omniscient, then He understands completely the ramification of every choice He presents us; if He's omnipotent, then no one can thwart His plans; and if He's all-loving, then every purpose ordained is for the best of His beloved – which means that we are never in a quandary; never locked into some situation for which God hasn't been prepared (since the 'foundation of the world,' no less).

And in that, there is great comfort, for such a reality means that the God we serve is not passively allowing our wills to play out to our detriment, nor is He practically mustering some good of what's been twisted, but is passionately and pro-actively administering a design which He knows to ultimately yield our best.

As Ephesians 1:3-4 says, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ, just as He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world...”