Author: Bellissiwarriors

My daughter has a sign that says “If plan A doesn’t work out, the alphabet has 25 other letters.” While I love the persistence this inspires in her, the truth is that God has no other plans because He needs no other plans.

Jesus is God’s plan A. He has always been the plan. When sin entered the world, God didn’t have to scramble to come up with a solution. The Old Testament law wasn’t plan B and Jesus’ death on the cross plan C. Jesus had been God’s plan from the beginning.

On the day of Pentecost, Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, told the crowd, “You followed God’s prearranged plan. With the help of lawless Gentiles, you nailed him to the cross and murdered him” (Acts 2:23). Jesus knew this was His purpose – He told the disciples “that he, the Son of Man, would suffer many terrible things and be rejected by the leaders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He would be killed, and three days later he would rise again” (Mark 8:31). The betrayal, the trial, the beatings, the execution – none of them were a surprise to Jesus. After all, the prophet Isaiah had foretold all of the things that would happen to Him hundreds of years before His birth (Isaiah 53). How could Isaiah have known these things would happen if God hadn’t already planned them?

We’re bound by time and can only watch it unfold, or look back at what has already been. But God is timeless – He sees all of it, in its entirety, in the same instant. At the moment of creation, God saw not only the beauty of the Garden of Eden, but also the darkness of the Garden of Gethsemane. He saw not only the fall of man, but the triumph of the Son of Man. He saw the earth’s beginning, and He saw its ending.

God is not making things up as He goes along – His entire plan, all His work, was formulated at Creation. When He pronounced it good, He was looking ahead through all the ages yet to come and declaring the goodness of all of it. Of you. Of me.

Long ago, even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. His unchanging plan has always been to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. And this gave him great pleasure.                   Ephesians 1:4-5

God loved us before we were a twinkle in anyone’s eye. He loved us before we did anything to deserve being loved. He knew every way we would hurt Him by our sinful selfishness, and He loved us anyway. Why? Because His love for us is greater than our offense against Him. Because He doesn’t want to exist without us. We are His children and we give Him great pleasure.

Your life is God’s plan A for you, too. You may feel like it’s taken some unexpected twists and turns. But God isn’t scrambling to figure out how to fix the mess you find yourself in. Nothing that has happened or will happen to you is a surprise to Him. You were part of God’s good plan from the beginning. He made you with purpose. He designed you with the blueprints in hand, laid out the pathways of your life to lead you to Him, and stashed everything that you would need at each place along the journey that you would need it.

As God’s plans unfold before you, may you walk with confident hope. You aren’t following someone whose vision is as limited as your own. You are trusting in One with unlimited vision, who has seen what you have not yet seen, and who is able to say, Trust me. Keep going. It will be alright.

I’ve been thinking about the word “redeem” lately. Its primary meaning is to gain or regain possession of something in exchange for payment. The Bible makes it clear that the job of the redeemer is to regain, to buy back, to make secure. We see an example of a family redeemer in Boaz, who made Ruth and Naomi secure when he married Ruth. He also secured her first husband’s lineage and inheritance (Ruth 4).

Boaz and Ruth’s grandson was King David. There were many years between David’s anointing as Israel’s next king and his coronation. During that time, he and the men who followed him lived among the Philistines. One day the men returned home to find that their enemies, the Amalekites, had raided their town and destroyed it. They carried off the women and children and everyone else. As the men wept over their lost families, David turned to God for guidance:

Then David asked the Lord, “Should I chase them? Will I catch them?” And the Lord told him, “Yes, go after them. You will surely recover everything that was taken from you!”     1 Samuel 30:8

We, too, have an enemy, a thief whose goal is to steal and kill and destroy (John 10:10). You don’t have to live very long on this earth to know that he’s good at it. God sent David’s descendant, Jesus, to go after the enemy and recover everything that was taken. In Him, God made payment to our captors in order to regain possession of those who belong to Him. He extricated us from bondage to sin (Romans 6:6) and released us from the debt that we owed. His life was accepted in exchange for our lives (Mark 10:45). He made our future, our inheritance, secure (1 Peter 1:4). It’s not a temporary situation that can change at any moment. What He has purchased cannot be taken from Him (John 10:28).

Jesus then goes with us to regain possession of everything that has been lost.  He helps us recover what we have given away. He goes with us to each enemy who stole from us, and He pays the ransom for what they took. He goes with us to each pawn shop where we traded pieces of our hearts in an effort to gain the world, and He makes payment for what we left there.

After we gather all the scattered, bartered, broken pieces of our hearts, we lay them before the Redeemer to be made whole. Because Jesus doesn’t just pay back, He restores. He puts us back into the condition God intended for us from the beginning. He exerts His unstoppable power to make up for the bad things we’ve done, and to overcome the bad things that have been done to us.

To redeem is also to make good on a claim.  To exchange something for its value.  When we redeem a coupon, or a gift card, we exchange it for something of value in return.  God gave us incomparable worth when He redeemed us with the most precious, most worthy thing in all of the universe. Jesus transfers the value of His life to our account.

This is what it means to be redeemed.

I will tell of the Lord’s unfailing love. I will praise the Lord for all he has done. I will rejoice in his great goodness to Israel, which he has granted according to his mercy and love… In all their suffering he also suffered, and he personally rescued them. In his love and mercy he redeemed them. He lifted them up and carried them through all the years.                  Isaiah 63:7,9