It was evening in the great city of Guadalajara, Mexico when my brother eased our van to a halt on the six-lane perimeter highway.
Soon we saw the reason for the stopped traffic: an ambulance, and a form lying still on the asphalt, covered by a sheet. The young man had tried to run across the highway and had been hit. Like all fatal accidents, it was a sobering sight. But what made this scene truly heart-rending was that directly above the body was a pedestrian bridge.
The bridge was right there!
That person ran right into death, and so do we all. We all have sinned, and because we are sinners at our core, our sin pollutes even the good things we do. “The wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23). We experience physical death, in the sense that everyone in this sin-filled world eventually dies. But also spiritual death, which is an existence without God in the Lake of Fire, after death. It is not because God is resentful towards those who reject Him, but because in separation from God, who is Life, there can only be death. The one place where God is absent cannot be filled with anything other than suffering, pain, and ongoing death. Rejecting God’s presence is choosing death.
Death is not what God wants for us, though. He loves us! He created us to live with Him, He wants to share a joyful life with us. That is why Christ Jesus, God in a human body, made himself a Bridge to Life in God’s presence. On the cross, He took our sin (and its wages) upon Himself. He shed His blood so we could be made clean from sin, which would make it possible for us to live with God, both now, and after death. He is simply waiting for us to step on that Bridge, to ask Him to clean us from our sin, and give us life.
Like that young man under the pedestrian bridge, the choice is yours. You can continue on your way to certain death, choosing separation from God, in life, and death. Or you can acknowledge you are a sinner who needs to be rescued, and only Christ can give you life with God, now and forever.
The Bridge is right there.
Which choice will you make?
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