Always Take Another Look!

We’re living in times when far too many of even God’s people take what’s said on the six o’clock news as fact. We’ve become gullible to the point that we pass around information given to us by even FB as if we had researched it for months. It is high time that we "take another look". We should never deliver something just because everyone else is saying it’s true.

This was the mistake that the Jewish people made in the last years BC. They were looking for a promised Messiah, but when He came He didn’t fit the visualization they had in their minds. They easily rejected Him. However, this was no surprise to God, for hundreds of years before the prophet Isaiah said they would do that and gave the reasons why:

Who believes what we’ve heard and seen?
Who would have thought God‘s saving power would look like this?

^2-6 The servant grew up before God—a scrawny seedling,
a scrubby plant in a parched field.
There was nothing attractive about him,
nothing to cause us to take a second look.
He was looked down on and passed over,
a man who suffered, who knew pain firsthand.
One look at him and people turned away.
We looked down on him, thought he was scum.
But the fact is, it was our pains he carried—
our disfigurements, all the things wrong with us.
We thought he brought it on himself,
that God was punishing him for his own failures.
But it was our sins that did that to him,
that ripped and tore and crushed him—our sins!
He took the punishment, and that made us whole.
Through his bruises we get healed.
We’re all like sheep who’ve wandered off and gotten lost.
We’ve all done our own thing, gone our own way.
And God has piled all our sins, everything we’ve one wrong,
on him, on him.  Isaiah 53:1-6 (MSG)

What were their reasons – he wasn’t handsome, nothing much to look at; he wasn’t rich, he seemed to be one known to suffering; he seemed to be carrying too many burdens, not the brash ruler that was going to wipe out the Romans in a single day! They didn’t take a look at the One whose kindness and humility made the sick whole, and the blind to see. They didn’t see that the One who had no place to lay His head, yet was able to feed the multitudes. They didn’t see that the One who stole away to talk to His Father at night and by day brought back not only a message of repentance,  but the power to enable one to change. They didn’t look. closely enough. How do you see this Jesus, who says He is the Son of God?

Maria