Easter Message: Will God Ever Forgive...?

There are horrors that we people have done to our planet, to each other, that should have never been seen even once.  Sometimes, when these events are made into films, I cannot, or refuse, to even imagine, how they compare to reality.

One particular movie that struck me with such thought was Edward Zwick's Blood Diamond (2006).  Danny Archer (played by Leonardo DiCaprio), who once was a hardened soldier, a diamond smuggler, and a witness to the atrocities that was so prevalent in the region, after giving a very graphic description of his mother and father's deaths, questions, "Sometimes I wonder... will God ever forgive us for what we've done to each other" (Blood Diamond, emphasis added).


With all the cruelties and heartlessness that permeate all places of the earth and all threads of the fabric of time (blessed are we who have not experienced the extent of these), I cannot help but wonder also, "Where is God?  How can One so righteous forgive us of what we've done to each other?"


And as if to answer me and Danny Archer with His own lips, I hear this Easter message:

Jesus did not just die a martyr's death for some worthy cause.  Nor did He die sort of as a lamb going to the slaughter so that those who stood for what He stood for will be galvanized in gaining a hearing from people.  He did not even die so that someone else might live.  When He went to the cross, He went to provide a way so that the very ones who crucified Him- that's you and I- might have a way provided for our forgiveness and be rescued from the entanglements of the Hell we created in this world (Zacharias, "Four Gardens").

God provided a way for forgiveness and the way out of Hell through the gruesome death and glorious life of His Son, Jesus Christ.  We've been invited not to remain in the confusion and hurt we have made for ourselves and others.  There is love and forgiveness in the red letters.

Abraham was offering Isaac but at the last minute when He was about to bring the knife down God said, "Stop! I myself will provide." Two-thousand years ago, God Himself did provide in His Son, and as long as we reject His Son, we will be sacrificing our own sons and daughters at some altar of hatred or some altar of violence.  So, the answer is to either trust the Son He has provided or we look to a very bleak future (Zacharias, "Can Man Live Without God?").

"For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders... But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed" (Isaiah 9:6, 53:5).

Works Cited:
Zacharias, Ravi. "Four Gardens."  Ravi Zacharias International Ministries Media.  YouTube.  21 April 2011.  Video.  19 April 2012.
Zacharias, Ravi. "Can Man Live Without God?"  Ravi Zacharias International Ministries Media.  YouTube.   November 2010.  Video.  19 April 2012.
Scripture taken from The New International Version, www.biblegateway.com.


Image:
Diamonds