How Jesus switched records with us.

This one comes from my friend Jill- who is wicked smart.

Imagine a beautiful kingdom. The King is loving and considerate. He makes sure that everyone has more than enough to eat, a great place to live and he walks around the kingdom talking to and getting to know the inhabitants. One day one of his generals decided that the King should  exercise more power. The King disagrees so he casts the general out in to the general population. The general gets a bunch of the people in the kingdom to start a rebellion. The begin a war. They destroy the kingdom.

The King sends his only son down to defeat the rebellion and he does. The rebels are now exiled from the kingdom and living in the woods. Now that they live in the woods life is pretty rough. They don't have a good food source, they are sleeping on the ground, people are stressed out and fighting. The rebels, in their misery, realize how good they had it and wish they could go back to living in the kingdom but they can't because there is a price on their heads. If they go back they will have to go to prison and live in the dungeon for the rest of their lives.

The Prince, however feels bad for the rebels because he loves them and knows how miserable they are in the woods. So he rides out to the woods and gives his Princely robes to the rebels. He cleans them up and helps them to look like royalty. Now they can go back in to the kingdom without getting arrested. Not only will they NOT get arrested but now they will get to hang out with the King again and help rule the kingdom.

This is, in a basic sense, what Jesus did for us. We rebelled against God in the Garden and were cast out. Because we were separated from God our human nature (with the help of the enemy) took over and we wrecked the joint. Jesus came to earth, destroyed the enemy's hold over death. Now when God looks at us, he sees Jesus' clean record and not our sins. He sees the perfection that Jesus was on us; us in royal garb.

When I hear the story like that I think "What! That's not fair! The rebels deserve to live in the woods." Its really great that God is not fair. He is loving.