Our Mediator

"For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men...."  I Timothy 2:5-6a.

The Israelites had vowed that they would obey God on several occasions.  But, before Moses had come back down the mountain, they asked Aaron to build them an idol.  Aaron didn't hesitate.  He told the people to bring him their gold earrings, which they did.  Scripture says,  "He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool.  Exodus 32:4a.  Yet when Moses confronted him, Aaron blamed the people as though he had no choice in the matter, saying, "You know how prone these people are to evil.  They said to me, 'Make us gods who will go before us.....So I told them, "Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off."  Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire and out came this calf.'"  Exodus 32:22b-23a, 24.  That's not exactly the way it happened.  Aaron yielded to the temptation to change the truth in an attempt to make himself look better. From time to time we face that same temptation.  Do we always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth regardless of the consequences?
     Moses was so angry about the idol that he broke the stone tablets on which God had written the Ten Commandments.  Yet when God threatened to destroy the people, Moses interceded for his fellow Israelites.  Moses acknowledged the immensity of their sin but asked God to forgive them.  So God relented and did not destroy the people.
     We, too, have a Mediator who asks God to forgive our sins.  I John 1:1b says,  "We have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, the Righteous One."  My husband, John, was a lawyer, and this was  one of his favorite verses, because an advocate is someone who pleads our case.  John won some of his cases and lost some of them, but he was convinced that Jesus would never lose his case, nor ours.

Father, thank You that Your Son, our Savior, intercedes for us on the grounds that He has already paid the penalty for all our sins.  Thank You for forgiving us because of His sacrifice.  Amen.