Jesus Restores Us

Hi, I'm Mike Whitmer.

Today's encouragement from Our Daily Bread is entitled, Jesus Restores Us. Although Sam had done nothing wrong, he lost his job on the assembly line. Carelessness in another division led to problems in cars they built. After several crashes made the news, wary customers stopped buying their brand.

The company had to downsize, leaving Sam out of work. He's collateral damage. And it isn't fair.

It never is. History's first collateral damage occurred immediately after the first sin. Adam and Eve were ashamed of their nakedness, so God graciously clothed them with garments of skin. It's painful to imagine, but one or more animals that had always been safe in the garden were now slaughtered and skinned. There was more to come. God told Israel in Ezekiel chapter 46, Every day you are to provide a year-old lamb without defect for a burnt offering to the Lord. Morning by morning you shall provide it.

Every single day. How many thousands of animals have been sacrificed because of human sin? Their death was necessary to cover our sin until Jesus, the Lamb of God, came to remove it. Call this collateral repair. As Adam's sin kills us, so the last Adam's, Christ's, obedience restores all who believe in Him.

Collateral repair isn't fair. It costs Jesus life, but it's free. Reach out to Jesus in belief and receive the salvation He offers, and His righteous life will count for you. Today's Our Daily Bread devotional scripture reading is from Genesis chapter 3 verses 17 through 24. To Adam he said, Because you listened to your wife, and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you, you must not eat from it. Cursed is the ground because of you. Through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life.

It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken, for dust you are, and to dust you will return. Adam named his wife Eve because she would become the mother of all the living. The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them, and the Lord God said, The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever. So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken.

After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life. Let's pray. Father, thank you for covering me with the righteousness of the Lamb of God. I rest in him. Amen.