In His Image

Life in 6 Words – Week 1 – “God”

“God created us to be with Him”

February 28, 2021

Today, we’re starting a new series which will lead us up to Easter. The purpose of this series is to help us see the work and power of God in our lives. Today, we’re going to look at the fact that everything starts with God. It comes in the statement - - “God created us to be with Him.”

So, let me ask you, can you think of movies which contain a powerful love story? I asked this question on FB this week. There were lots and lots of answers.

Honestly, they were all over the place in their answers. I guess the one with the most votes was The Notebook, but we ran the gamut from Beauty and the Beast to Ghost to Shawshank Redemption to Fault in our Stars to Brian’s Song to the Passion of the Christ and lots more. I was surprised nobody put Titanic or West Side Story.

Sadly, nobody put one of my favorite movies on the list. And before you judge me, it is a love story. You may not think of it from first glance, but when you think about it, the movie Braveheart was a love story. (SHOW PICTURE)

It might not be so obvious at first, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s pretty gory, but the basic theme is this - - -

William Wallace (who is a real figure in history). It was Wallace’s broken heart after his wife, Murron was killed by the English, which fueled his passion and kept him going.

Even at the end when he’s tortured, he imagines seeing Murron through the crowd. He had a blood stained scarf of hers he always carried with him. Wallace has the blood-stained cloth as he is being killed. The scenes cut back and forth from him imagining Murron in the crowd and finally when he’s executed, that blood-stained cloth drops to the ground in slow motion. That cloth represented the hard-fought love that kept Wallace fighting against English tyranny.

Braveheart is an unlikely love story and when we think about it, so is this (the Bible). From Genesis 3, after the Fall of humanity into depravity and sin, that blood-stained thread of Christ’s coming death is seen. When you think about what God did for humanity, the first sacrifice occurred when God covered Adam and Eve's nakedness with animal skins. That was the first sacrifice and Jesus was the last sacrifice that covered us in His grace.

As William Wallace held onto this blood stained cloth, we see the image of blood throughout the Bible. We see sacrifices and substitutions throughout the Old Testament. We see it when Abraham goes to offer his son Isaac on the altar and finds a ram caught in the thicket to be offered instead.

We see it when the Israelites are entrenched in sin and are being decimated by poisonous snakes and God commands Moses to make a bronze snake and put it up on a pole so that everyone who looks at it will live.

That blood-stained thread is seen in the story of Rahab, who ties a scarlet ribbon in her window as the sign of her deliverance in Joshua 2:18. The spies tell her,

“…unless, when we enter the land, you have tied this scarlet cord in the window through which you let us down, and unless you have brought your father and mother, your brothers and all your family into your house.” - Joshua 2:18

That blood-stained thread is seen in Exodus 12 with the lambs blood on the doorposts on the night of the Passover in Egypt, to David’s description of a crucifixion in Psalm 22, to Isaiah’s description of a suffering Messiah, who would die a gruesome death for our sins.

The Old Testament, like the movie Braveheart, seems brutal and violent, but underneath all of the violence and intensity is a passionate love story that’s ultimately unveiled in graphic detail in the New Testament.

The GOSPEL is the ultimate love story!

We talked about this verse a few weeks ago. It shows the power of God’s love for us. In Romans 5, Paul wrote --

8 But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Romans 5:8

Think about these words from Paul about Jesus. God shows us the power and depth of His love in that while we were and are in sin, Christ came for us and died for us. That’s the power of God’s love for us. It’s a theme which runs from Genesis 1 to Revelation 22.

We’re going to break the story into 6 weeks, as we focus on the Gospel story. There can be 100 different stories, but for this time, we’re doing 6 - -