10/25/2021 Ephesians 5:1-2 [NIV]

 10/25/2021 Ephesians 5:1-2 [NIV]

Follow God’s example, therefore, as dearly loved children and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

‘…fragrant offering…’. This phrase always struck me as odd. I know what Paul means, but imagining Christ’s bloody and cruel death by crucifixion to be a fragrant offering hints at something terrible about God, bordering on horror. Terror is the opposite of Horror. They sound like they are both bad, and both are to be feared, but they are not the same. Terror comes from the Light, and Horror comes out of darkness and shadows. We feel terror in the presence of God Almighty and exposed as sinful and unworthy to stand before Him. Horror uses overwhelming fear to paralyze and draw us into darkness and eternal isolation and hopelessness.

If the death of Christ served no redeeming purpose, then it is indeed a horror and stench of death. But as an obedient sacrifice to God *for our sins*, it is our hope and freedom from slavery to sin. Paul writes in another letter that the fragrance of that offering passes into the Believer, who becomes terror personified to the world, but also the hope of redemption to those who are open to the light, and the stench of death to those who refuse to turn from their own self-imagined goodness.

Some who believe themselves to be Christian try to present their own imagined goodness to the world. Their hypocrisy and judgmental legalism lacks real love and becomes a stench to the world that lets them ignore their own danger and draws them deeper into their own self-imagined goodness.

Only by following God’s example of complete humility and obedience to the directions of the Holy Spirit within can Believers truly and courageously walk in the way of Love before a lost and dying world, and be a fragrant offering that draws them to the Light.

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