President Biden made headlines this week for granting a presidential pardon to his son, Hunter. Whether you agree with the action or not, imagine the pressure of the situation: Highly charged public sentiment, deep fatherly love, the highest of profile cases, the incontrovertible guilt of your child, a political legacy hanging in the balance, the power and ability to seal or ease your son’s fate.
And President Biden signed the pardon document.
As God the Father surveyed His fallen and sinful creation, the people He loved so deeply who had strayed so enormously, He faced an even greater challenge. It wasn’t a signature that could grant pardon to His lost children. The painful consequences of corrupting all creation couldn’t be reversed with a divine command. Humanity’s headlong course of rebellion was not a matter of judicial paperwork. Someone righteous and good and caring had to stand in the gap. Holiness needed to overcome unholiness, perfection had to snuff out imperfection, light needed to eradicate darkness.
So, God the Father commenced the first Advent by sending His Son into the hostility of the world. Total sacrifice initiated divine pardon.
The culmination of that pardon was thirty-three years distant from the manger. That is when God’s perfect and beloved Son was crucified for the sins of the world. All pain was heaped upon Jesus as the Father abandoned His One and Only who was made the embodiment of sin: ugly, rejected, guilty, repulsive, bearing the fault and sting of everything bad and hurtful.
This was the most agonizing pardon in history. And it was for you. By grace. Because God loves you zealously and eternally.
Jesus’ miraculous resurrection sealed the broken power of sin and death, the full price paid for the world’s pardon. The living Word, cleansing water, and nourishing bread and wine deliver the personal pardon to each broken heart and soul, making them new and free. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are!” (1 John 3:1)
This is the excruciating and pressurized story of Advent. A father and a pardon.
It is the story that transforms hopelessness and sadness to relieved rejoicing: “Who is a God like you, pardoning iniquity and passing over transgression for the remnant of his inheritance? He does not retain his anger forever, because he delights in steadfast love. He will again have compassion on us; he will tread our iniquities underfoot. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. You will show faithfulness to Jacob and steadfast love to Abraham, as you have sworn to our fathers from the days of old” (Micah 7:18-20).
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