OUR LORD WHO IS OUR GREAT REDEEMER

In the book of Leviticus chapter 25 verse 47–49 is a distinct article of the law of Moses about how a person who sells themselves to be a slave could potentially be recovered out of bondage. The passage says this:

“ ‘If a foreigner residing among you becomes rich and any of your fellow Israelites become poor and sell themselves to the foreigner or to a member of the foreigner’s clan, they retain the right of redemption after they have sold themselves. One of their relatives may redeem them: An uncle or a cousin or any blood relative in their clan may redeem them. Or if they prosper, they may redeem themselves.

This redemption law gave an opportunity for a person to be redeemed by compensation paid to the holder of that person to satisfy the price of release from the contract of ownership.

This legal framework of redemption pointed forward to the salvation story where  our eternal Lord Jesus Christ, by living a sinless life and then suffering the death of a criminal on a cross, paid the contract price for our release. 

Because Jesus was born as a man and lived in everyway as a man and yet did not sin, He was qualified to pay the price to redeem us from the bondage of the law of sin and death.

Under Levitican law, a person, were he able to afford the price of his own redemption ( after gaining an inheritance for example ),  could redeem himself but in the case of redemption from sin,  no person, other than Jesus, could afford the high cost of remption because "All of us have sinned and fallen short of God's glory. (  Romans 3 verse 23 ) and thus no one can pay the price of perfection to redeem themselves.

Let us humbly give thanks to the Lord Jesus for the Great Redemption He paid on our behalf.

Amen.

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OUR LORD WHO IS THE GREAT SALVATION

The Lord Jesus is our Great Salvation.

In Hebrews 2 verse 2 - 4, we are given a scale by which to measure the importance of the salvation of our Lord Jesus Christ. The passage goes like this;

For if the word spoken by angels was stedfast, and every transgression and disobedience received a just recompence of reward;

How shall we escape, if we neglect so great salvation; which at the first began to be spoken by the Lord, and was confirmed unto us by them that heard him;

God also bearing them witness, both with signs and wonders, and with divers miracles, and gifts of the Holy Ghost, according to his own will?

These verses reference the words spoken by angels that, when overlooked by men, were followed by a just renumeration.  

If the word of angels drew sure and swift repercussions when disobeyed, how great a recompense are we to expect if we neglect so great a salvation provided for us by our Lord's sacrifice on the cross especially when the divine credentials of the Lord Jesus were publically and frequently attested to by God through signs and wonders as well as gifts of the Spirit?

Our Great Salvation gave us a treasure so precious as to redeem us from darkness. We neglect this free gift at our peril.

Bless the name of the Lord.

Amen.

OUR LORD WHO IS THE GREAT LIGHT

We who were lost and in deep despair can relate to the words of Isaiah the prophet when He describes a people trapped in pitch blackness and suddenly, an overwhelmingly bright light appeared.

Isaiah describes the event this way;

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light: they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.

Interestingly, when Mathew quotes this verse in Mathew 4 verse 16, it goes like this:

The people which sat in darkness saw great light; and to them which sat in the region and shadow of death light is sprung up.

It seemed like over the passage of time, the people who were walking in darkness when Isaiah was writing were now sitting in darkness like they had given up and had ceased wandering in the dark and just sat down. 

We get the picture that these people, after a protracted period,  became  despondent and gave up trying to find a way out of the uncharted gloom they were trapped in. 

It was at this time of having given up and fallen into despair and just sitting  in the impenetrable darkness when a Great Light sudden appeared. 

How those people must have trembled and wept and cried out when the Great Light shone over them and showed them the way out of the shadowy desolation.

Our Lord is a wonderful God, who appears in blinding incandescent light to chase back darkness and bring us into His marvelous light.

Amen.

OUR LORD WHO IS THE GREAT KING

In Mathew 5 verse 34 - 35, Jesus tells us not to swear by Jerusalem for it is the city of the Great King. The passage says this:

“But I say to you, make no oath at all, either by heaven, for it is the throne of God, or by the earth, for it is the footstool of His feet, or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the great king.

In this verse, Jesus includes a quote from Psalm 48 verse 2 which goes like this;

Beautiful in its loftiness, the joy of the whole earth, like the heights of Zaphon is Mount Zion,the city of the Great King.

Here, the majesty and beauty of mount Zion from where our Lord Jesus reigns is called the city of the Great King. 

Our Lord Jesus is the Great King which is the post He attained from God the Father when he ascended into heaven having defeated sin and death and had risen from the grave. 

The coronation of the Great King is described in Psalm 110 verse 1 - 2;

The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool.

The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of Zion: rule thou in the midst of thine enemies.

His rulership as the great King of Zion was established here and His greatness is demonstrated in how He rules his kingdom while it is embedded in the midst of His enemies and being able to govern the details of this vast kingdom with customized attention to each individual administered with grace and mercy and gentleness and righteousness.

How wonderful is our Great King.

Praise His name forever.

Amen.

OUR LORD WHO IS THE GREAT I AM

Our Lord and God exists. He is. He has being.

When, in Exodus 3 verse 14,  Moses asked God whom he should say sent him; 

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM”; and He said, “Thus you shall say to the sons of Israel, ‘I AM has sent me to you.’”

The God who is, told Moses to reference Him as 'I AM'. God is and it is from his being that all other things including us are derived.

As Acts 17 verse 28 affirms;

 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’

Our Lord's being is the only non-paradoxical explanation for our own existence.

Efforts to explain our existence by other means unfailingly result in peculiar contradictory mental constructs that elucidate nothing  and  obfuscate everything.

The Lord our God is good.

Praise and honour Him.

Amen.

OUR LORD FREED US FROM BONDAGE

Right from the drawing board, the Lord designed the human being  as an autonomous entity who could choose his own path and who could relate to His creator out of his own free will.

On the schedule of the garden of Eden, the Adam and Eve would operate all day carrying out their assignments of stewardship as they chose and in the cool of the evening, the Lord would visit and share the daily events that they was experiencing.

When the human race chose a route of operating apart from God, we fell under the dominance of the kingdom of darkness and lost our freedom because the dominion of darkness is characterized by deception, bondage, sin and ultimately, death.

To remedy the fall of mankind, the first step of the salvation that the Lord provided for us was the emancipation from the bondage of darkness. 

By the sacrificial death of Christ our Lord on the cross, legal provision was made for us so that by faith, we can now re-enter  the freedom of the kingdom of God.

This pivotal notion is encapsulated in the words of Jesus in John 8 verse 34 - 36;

“Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is the slave of sin. “The slave does not remain in the house forever; the son does remain forever. “So if the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.

Jesus makes us free as we were designed to be because by His salvation, we are no longer slaves but are sons born into the household of God.

Amen.

OUR LORD WHO HEALS US

The most prominent part of Jesus' ministry was the healing of the sick and the disabled.

Everywhere He went, people with all manner of conditions approached Him and He graciously healed them.

In some cases, the Lord healed leprosy and in other cases, He restored sight to the blind.

In some cases, paralytics were able to walk again while in other cases, the deaf were able to hear.

In some cases, epileptics were freed from their debilitation and in other cases, people with withered limbs were able to stretch them out again.

In one recorded case, a woman with severe menstrual problems was cured while in another, a man plagued by demonic spirits was liberated from them.

In every variant and form, human afflictions were met with the power and authority of the Lord Jesus.

These afflictions were summarily reversed in order to restore the sufferers to normal lives by the miraculous capabilities weilded by the Son of God.

Bless our God who heals us.

Amen.