GOD'S "PLAN A"
Loyalty is my desire, not sacrifice, not whole-offerings but the knowledge of God. Hosea 6:6, N.E.B.
One feature of modern high-level management training is teaching executives to have backup plans. While planning and hoping for success in every new product line, every sales or service campaign, it is still wise to have contingency plans. If the first goals are not reached, the whole plan should not be scrubbed. The wise manager has a plan for redeeming as much as he can from the efforts invested. He knows that "Plan B" may not be as ideal as "Plan A," but it's far better than having no plan at all.
God is a wise manager. Creating this new and unique order of beings on this planet was quite an adventure. His "Plan A" was that we should enjoy unbroken, ever-growing friendship with Him, for our mutual joy. But giving us as He did that unpredictable capacity of free choice, from the foundations of eternity, He designed a "Plan B." Should His people ever break the life-sustaining relationship with Him, He designed that He Himself (in the person of the Son) should bear the ugly death of separation.
It was not long before our first parents and all their children were very much in need of "Plan B." As a four-thousand-year pledge that He Himself would die in our place, Jesus provided the symbol of the sacrificial lamb. Every sinner, convinced of his destiny of eternal death, could bring a lamb to the altar as an expression of his hope in the Lamb of God as an atonement for his sins.
It was also not very long before God's people began to prefer "Plan B" to "Plan A." There seemed to be something so very convenient about it. They could continue to live with some degree of carelessness, sometimes even committing overt sin. But the solution (they thought) was simple: Let the lamb bear the problem. Furthermore, bringing lambs to the Temple seemed easier than intimate fellowship with their God. They came to think of "Plan B" as God's ideal.
Hosea's plea did not diminish the sacrificial lamb. Indeed, who could live without it? But he reminded them (and us) that God's "Plan A" is not that we should settle into an endless cycle of sinning and repenting, sinning and repenting. Our highest calling is to enter even now into unchanging loyalty to Him. For that, precisely, is God's "Plan A."
Loyalty is my desire, not sacrifice, not whole-offerings but the knowledge of God. Hosea 6:6, N.E.B.
One feature of modern high-level management training is teaching executives to have backup plans. While planning and hoping for success in every new product line, every sales or service campaign, it is still wise to have contingency plans. If the first goals are not reached, the whole plan should not be scrubbed. The wise manager has a plan for redeeming as much as he can from the efforts invested. He knows that "Plan B" may not be as ideal as "Plan A," but it's far better than having no plan at all.
God is a wise manager. Creating this new and unique order of beings on this planet was quite an adventure. His "Plan A" was that we should enjoy unbroken, ever-growing friendship with Him, for our mutual joy. But giving us as He did that unpredictable capacity of free choice, from the foundations of eternity, He designed a "Plan B." Should His people ever break the life-sustaining relationship with Him, He designed that He Himself (in the person of the Son) should bear the ugly death of separation.
It was not long before our first parents and all their children were very much in need of "Plan B." As a four-thousand-year pledge that He Himself would die in our place, Jesus provided the symbol of the sacrificial lamb. Every sinner, convinced of his destiny of eternal death, could bring a lamb to the altar as an expression of his hope in the Lamb of God as an atonement for his sins.
It was also not very long before God's people began to prefer "Plan B" to "Plan A." There seemed to be something so very convenient about it. They could continue to live with some degree of carelessness, sometimes even committing overt sin. But the solution (they thought) was simple: Let the lamb bear the problem. Furthermore, bringing lambs to the Temple seemed easier than intimate fellowship with their God. They came to think of "Plan B" as God's ideal.
Hosea's plea did not diminish the sacrificial lamb. Indeed, who could live without it? But he reminded them (and us) that God's "Plan A" is not that we should settle into an endless cycle of sinning and repenting, sinning and repenting. Our highest calling is to enter even now into unchanging loyalty to Him. For that, precisely, is God's "Plan A."
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