AP

Judges 19:22  While they were enjoying themselves, some of the wicked men of the city surrounded the house.  Pounding on the door, they shouted to the old man who owned the house,  “Bring out the man who came to your house so we can have sex with him.”

I feel sick on the stomach, even degraded, to be a citizen of this corrupted world, especially when what I read is the sort of thing that is so common in our own society.

And when I think that Jesus, the pure, spotless Son of God, was prepared to come down a manhole into this sewer in which we live (Philippians 2:2-8) to rescue us from its consequences, I am overwhelmed by the utter height and length and breadth and depth of God’s boundless, amazing love and grace.

The prophet Isaiah may have just been reading Judges 19 when he wrote, “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isaiah 64:6a).  The Hebrew words used by Isaiah, translated into English as “filthy rags”, refer to ‘menstrual cloths’ which, in more modern times with sewerage systems, were flushed away into the sewer (and used to clog up my Treatment Works at Malabar!) – so he is infering that, in the light of God’s holiness, the sewer is where even our most ‘righteous acts’ belong.  And Jesus knew that, by becoming Man, he was descending into a ‘Judges 19’ world – and still he was ‘obedient to death, even death on a cross’ to redeem us from such a sordid place and, by his redemptive work, to clothe us with his righteousness and so fit us for heaven.

Whereas I never find Judges 19 very edifying reading, and even feel a bit ‘ashamed’ that I am reading it, it is important for me to be reminded of the lengths to which my loving, gracious, compassionate God was prepared to go to rescue me from my ‘native’ environment and prepare me for the Heaven I was designed to inhabit, and to which Jesus has now gone to ‘prepare a place’ for me, and for which the Holy Spirit is now, step by gracious sanctifying step, patiently preparing me.

Isaac Watts helps me to express how I feel:  “Alas, and did my Saviour bleed?  And did my Sovereign die?  Would he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?  Was it for sins that I have done he suffered on the tree?  Amazing pity!  Grace unknown!  And love beyond degree!. Well might the sun in darkness hide  and shut his glories in, when Christ, the mighty Maker, died for Man, the creature’s, sin.  Dear Saviour, how can I repay  the debt of love I owe?  Lord, take my very self, I pray, your work, your will, to do.  At the cross, at the cross, where I first saw the light and the burden of my heart rolled away; it was there, by faith, I received my sight, and now I’m rejoicing all the day!”

– Bruce Christian