Please yourself

Whatever the Lord pleases, he does, in heaven and on earth, in the seas and all deeps. - Psalm 135:6

Please Yourself... A phrase I heard my mum say quite often when I was growing up. It usually said with a little exasperation because yet again I wasn't listening, intent to embrace her words even if she hadn't said it. I was, no matter the consequences, going to ignore her advice and do it my own way.

The above verse drives me to my knees because it reminds me that God, who could always do whatever he pleased, chose to do something that seems impossible.

He sent his Son to die in my place. It wasn't if he had no choice. As John Piper puts it:

God never becomes the victim of circumstance. He is never forced into a situation where he must do something in which he cannot rejoice. He is not mocked. He is not trapped or cornered or coerced.

In fact the prophet Isaiah says:

Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise him; he hath put him to grief - Isaiah 53:10

The hardest act of God is said to be pleasing to Him. And Jesus on his way to the cross says: "For the JOY set before him".

Pleasure and joy sit uncomfortably with me when associated with hurt and death. Set by it's self there can be no pleasure no joy. But set in the context of God redemptive plan for all mankind the landscape changes.

Only then can the beauty and "the a fragrant offering" (Eph 5:2) of the sacrifice of God be seen its true context.

The barbaric becomes the beautiful because God was free to please himself.