The last 3 weeks we spent time watching Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ.  We had seen it years ago when it first came out.  I cried like a baby when we saw it.  In particular, watching the relationship between Jesus and his mother affected me as a young mother.  How could she watch him suffer so?

Most of us in the class had watched it before but yesterday.   We discussed the things we had missed the first time and there are two things that I knew but just hit me hard.

One, in the movie and in most arenas, Satan is portrayed as someone dark and ugly with hands that need a manicure and an evil sidekick.  Sometimes he has horns and tail.  Certainly we’d know to stay away.  But isn’t that exactly opposite to Satan in our lives?  He and his temptations are beautiful.  Like Bella to Edward in Twilight (oh yes I did) she was his own brand of heroin.  That’s what Satan does.  He makes sin gorgeous.  That one specific sin we could fall to.  You think you’d love it.  You’d think it’d be fun.  You think you HAVE to do it.  Never does Satan make sin look like the horrible thing that it is.  Only when  you’ve said yes and you’re miles down the road does he show his true nature.  Then, he looks ugly.  Then you see the consequences of what you’ve done.  Then you see the hurt and the regret and the pain.  Never doubt that Satan can be beautiful.  The Bible says Satan is like a lion prowling for us.  It also says we like sheep have gone away.  It is when we close our eyes and go blindly into sin that we are entrapped.  Let us be wise to the nature of Satan and have our eyes wide open to what we are being drawn into.  And not saying that the things of God are not beautiful but that’s just it…we need to be discerning!

The second eye opener was realizing why Jesus says “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” on the cross.  Why indeed?  Can God forsake his Son?   Did Jesus regret what he had done?  No, in fact, that is the moment that Jesus, fully man, took on the sins of the world.  God, in his holiness, could not look on him in his sin and for a split second in history had to turn his face from him.  For me, even more proof that Jesus took on MY sin on the cross.

We went on from Sunday School to a church service yesterday where God showed up and we actually had church instead of playing church.  Can’t tell you how much I needed that.

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