Outrageous Love

How can morally upright people go to hell and the worst offenders of mankind be forgiven?

I sometimes feel the seemingly injustice of God's love. I wonder if I am the elder brother in the Prodigal Son parable, or like Jonah in his bitterness toward God for forgiving the Ninevites. I instinctively feel that people should deserve what they get, whether good or bad.

How quickly I forget that Jesus was butchered on that tree. God can forgive whomever he choses--from the greatest to the worst of mankind.

If Jesus bore God's wrath on behalf of a sinner at great cost to himself, who am I to oppose it?

If he clothes repulsive, despicable people in beautiful robes of His own righteousness, who am I to object?

If he chooses to love the unlovely ones and to adopt them as his own precious children, who am I to speak against them?

God's love is not unjust. It is generous and overflowing in ways that are outrageous to me.

But perched on my high hill of self righteousness, I wonder. Would I not have done all that and more without Divine restraint.

This generous love that exchanges death for life, wounds for healing, mourning for dancing, overflows to me too. It flows over me in an unconditional and unrelenting stream that washes me clean.

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith...so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. ~Romans 3:23-26