God: "I looked for someone to take a stand for me, and stand in the gap" (Ezekiel 22:30)
If the story of the fall reveals our own sin and guilt, it surely also reveals the amazing depths of God’s love and mercy. It was the Son of God who placed a sword at the entrance to the Garden of Eden. He did it not just to keep Adam out. He did it so that, at just the right time, he could walk through in our place, to satisfy God’s just wrath and make a way for us to enter back in, through the gate, to eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in the glorious presence of God.
Howard Hendricks once described the local church as a football game: Twenty-two people on the field, badly in need of a rest, and forty thousand in the stands, badly in need of exercise.
