For God so loved the world . . . (John 3:16)
GOD’S PLAN IS SO VAST that our finite minds just can’t take it in. Before God decided to give His Son for our redemption, God had to have a greater plan in mind—like the whole idea of eternal life. Or love. Which did God decide first? Loving the whole world? Or could God just not help loving because He is love?
Or did God decide first on forgiveness, knowing we would need it? Did God so abhor the idea of sin that He planned early on a way to erase sin from our lives? Think for a moment about the plentiful forgiveness God offers each of us. Who of us would have tried to conjure up a means of forgiveness? No, we would have been stuck on punishment and those sinners getting what they deserve!
Yet God provided a way to not only forgive us, but He loved us enough to devise a way to spend all eternity with us! His love frees us from sin and offers us an eternal ‘life’ in His presence with His Son—all out of this vast love God has for us.
We all know this verse so well and yet do we thank God for this vast loving plan that makes a heaven of life as well as eternity?
God’s love makes heaven out of life here and now and for eternity still to come.
Kathy Bence lives in Idaho with her professor husband, Phil.
