FEBRUARY 1 - When Life's Not Fair

FEBRUARY 1 - When Life’s Not Fair

 

For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal weight of glory that far outweighs them all. — 2 CO RIN THI ANS 4:17

 

When Vicky’s husband abandoned her and her two-year-old son, she needed to find work. On one fateful day of job hunting, she was brutally attacked — and shot through the neck — by a man pretending to hire her. Later that day, lying in an emergency room, she knew she would live . . . but as a quadriplegic in a wheelchair for the rest of her life.

 

In the years that followed, Vicky’s anguish and bitterness finally began to melt under her friends’ prayers, warming to the Word of God and its promises. “But sometimes I wonder,” she once told me, “about the fairness of it all.” I explained to her that it took the most unfair act in history, the execution of Jesus, to satisfy divine justice in a world full of injustice. That event made it possible for the least deserving of all — a convicted thief on a cross next to his — to gain an eternity of undeserved happiness. One day the scales of justice will not only balance, but they will be weighted in our favor, all for our good and God’s glory.

 

Vicky now understands that, even in her wheelchair, she is no better than that thief on the cross. By all that’s “fair,” she knows she should be on her way to hell and that there was nothing “fair” about Christ paying the penalty for her sins. She doesn’t deserve such mercy. And neither do we.

 

This present life of ours is infinitely shorter than the blink of an eye compared with the eternal beauty, purpose, and joy we will experience in the Father’s house. Let your thoughts linger on heaven for a while, and then give thanks to the One who made it possible — by the great injustice of dying on a cross to pay the penalty for our sins.

 

Lord Jesus, I praise you for enduring the humiliation, the injustice, and the unspeakable agony of your crucifixion to win an eternity of light and hope for me.