God's Pleasure

“Just as the LORD has found great pleasure in causing you to prosper and multiply, the LORD will find pleasure in destroying you. You will be torn from the land you are about to enter and occupy. [Deuteronomy 28.63]

Oh wow, there is such a revelation of the character and nature of God in this verse!

It brings God great pleasure in causing blessings upon the obedient. But it also brings God pleasure in causing curses upon the disobedient!

WHAT????

How can that be? Well, it is all about God's love and His justice. What we don't understand is that God has bound Himself to His character so that we might have no reason to doubt the consistency of Who He Is!

God is fulfilled in His Love. God is fulfilled in His Justice. The very reason that faith is the only way a human can please God is because faith is the only way man can satisfy both God's Justice and His Love.

Just as faith secured God's blessing through the obedience of sacrifices and rituals, so faith secures God's blessings through the obedience of faith in Jesus' sacrificial death.

We all enjoy Isaiah 53.3-9, but we must also see clearly what Isaiah 53.10 says:

But it was the LORD’s good plan to crush him and cause him grief. Yet when his life is made an offering for sin, he will have many descendants. He will enjoy a long life, and the LORD’s good plan will prosper in his hands. [Isaiah 53.10]

The New King James Version says it like this:

Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him... [Isaiah 53.10a]

Justice brings God pleasure. But knowing His own character, He laid down His own life for His friends (in what we understand as "His Son") so that His Justice might be fulfilled - enabling His Love to take it from there.

We should never ignore that "...it pleased the LORD to bruise" Jesus. Instead, we should strive to understand what I am attempting to explain here. It was God's Love that did it!

If a person wishes to prevent suffering on those he loves, but the suffering is unavoidably due them, then that person's only solution (so that both Love and Justice are fulfilled) is to take the suffering for them!

What we are left with here is simply to believe in Jesus.

Father, I am absolutely blown away to see "Your plan" so clearly through Your Word today! Thank You! Help me to accurately present Your plan to all I encounter!