“Your life, if lived for Jesus, brings glory to Me. That you know! What you may not know is that it testifies of His life, death, and resurrection for all future eternities. You will always and forever be an example of His completed work. When you surrender to Him, you are doing much more than securing your salvation; you are part of a never-ending testimony of eternal witnesses to the power of the cross. Your witness also shows Who I am.”
Ephesians 3:10-12 AMP
10) [The purpose is] that through the church the complicated, many-sided wisdom of God in all its infinite variety and innumerable aspects might now be made known to the angelic rulers and authorities (principalities and powers) in the heavenly sphere.
11) This is in accordance with the terms of the eternal and timeless purpose which He has realized and carried into effect in [the person of] Christ Jesus our Lord.
12) In Whom, because of our faith in Him, we dare to have the boldness (courage and confidence) of free access (an unreserved approach to God with freedom and without fear).
Hebrews 12:1-2 NIV
1) Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.
2) Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
As precious as you are to God, all of this is not only about you. It is also about the eternal plans of God and their impact on heavenly beings.
When the angelic beings fell, they were given no mercy. They were cast from the presence of God, experiencing firsthand His boundless power and authority.
At present, some of those who remain with Him can only lie prostrate before Him crying “Holy, Holy, Holy,” because He is so magnificent. Others, especially those who were cast from His presence, to this day understand His power and authority. To them, He is undeniably Almighty God.
Enter puny mankind! Limited to functioning within the five senses, frail in comparison to even the lowest order of angel, incredibly ignorant concerning spiritual things, and so on and so on - you get the picture…
Since the cross, when the veil before the Holy of Holies was ripped in two, puny mankind - who previous to this time was truly on the outside looking in - has the kind of access to God that the angelic creation will never have. We can now come directly into the presence of God anytime we desire to go there and are accepted as if Jesus Himself entered. (Stop and ponder that, and then ask yourself why in the world we don’t spend the majority of our time in His presence. That is how limited and puny our thinking is! Of course, the Lord did say that His thoughts and ours are two different things, and this example certainly proves it. We settle for so little, and it must grieve the heart of God how often we miss what He’s made available.)
Because of the covenant that Jesus established, we go into the presence of God in His Name, not our own. God accepts us just as He would accept Jesus because we were “in” Jesus when covenant was made. After Jesus died, we were the full recipients of His kind of access to the Father.
To the angels, God providing this access for us was only one of the many facets of God that they had never seen. Each time He flows His wondrous privileges toward us, they see other facets about Him in which they are not allowed to participate.
Help me to never minimize the wonder of Your cross, Lord,
Jim Corbett
