The Bible Matters Because _______________. Shembull

By ShareWord

Why do heroes rescue? 

YouTube is stocked with videos of heroic acts of courage. People going above and beyond to pull helpless animals out of danger. Medics saving lives in the midst of personal peril. Firefighters jumping into flames, policemen risking their lives to save the innocent. Soldiers sacrificing themselves for their country.

What’s the motivation? 

If you’re a professional rescuer, your motivation is likely duty. You live by a code to honour and protect, and rescue is hardwired into you. You get paid to make sure people see another day.

If you’re not one of those professionals, your motivation in high-risk rescuing situations will probably boil down to either instinct or emotion. You’ll either respond without thinking about it because it’s who you are. Or you’ll feel moved to help out of pity, compassion, or love. 

When you look at the great rescue that God undertook to save us from our sins, it all comes down to love. We deserve to die for the rebellion that rises in our hearts every single day. His pure holiness is in stark contrast to our spiritual filth.

So you’d think His natural “instinct” would have been to let justice be served and to condemn us to the death we deserved. 

But God, choosing to be a merciful judge, placed our punishment on His Son instead. Why? Because He loved us! 

What a gift! There’s no taking credit for that one. Only a God who has an indescribable depth of love for us would be willing to go to that extent to rescue us. 

Returning that kind of love is impossible. We can never do anything remotely close to it. All we can do is live our new lives filled with gratitude for being rescued. 

It’s this sense of gratitude you so often see in people whose lives have dramatically changed after they surrender to Christ. They have a keen sense of just how precious their rescue was. 

Can you imagine the joy God feels when one of His creations stops rebelling and accepts the rescue that He initiated so long ago? 

Reflect today on how far you would go to rescue someone you loved deeply. How passionate and unrelenting you’d be in doing whatever you could to ensure your loved one would be safe from danger. 

Now multiply it many times over to understand how much God loves you!