thecrump

I love hiking. I always have. I remember many days as a kid, my parents would take my brother and I up to the mountains of North Carolina for a day of hiking. Each hike began as a great adventure into the unknown. Sure the trails were marked and there were families with little children on the trials but to a young boy, being in the woods is pure adventure.

One of my favorite parts of hiking is nearing the top of a mountain. There on the edge of the mountain you stand on the huge boulders and survey God beautiful creation.  The great thing is you can find countless boulders to climb on making a young boy (or young at heart adult) feel like Spiderman. Of course, like always, there are dangers to climbing these rocks. There were many times I would be climbing only to find myself tumbling down parts of the rock and tearing up my arms or legs. While I never experienced the breaking of a bone due to Spiderman activity, I did gain some healthy respect for the impact of rock on skin.  I may have been the one to fall on the rock but the rock is the one who in the end broke me. The same is true of all humanity when it comes to Jesus.

You may be asking...what does hiking have to do with Jesus. Well...it has nothing to do with Jesus, but our Savior uses the imagery of a rock to describe all peoples responses to Him.

"Jesus looked at them and said, “Then what does this Scripture mean? ‘The stone that the builders rejected has now become the cornerstone.’Everyone who stumbles over that stone will be broken to pieces, and it will crush anyone it falls on." Luke 20:17-18

In this passage Jesus is describing the two responses to His  Lordship. He is the unchanging rock. There is no manipulating Him or arguing with Him. He sits upon His throne with all power and authority and there is no bulldozer, backhoe or dynamite that is able to move Him.  The reality is that when people come to the Rock they respond one of two ways.  They are either broken on the rock or they are crushed by it.

The passage above ays that whoever "stumbles" over the stone will be broken.  Other translations say whoever "falls" on the stone will be broken.  Either way, the truth is that whoever finds themselves faced with the reality of Jesus Christ and falls before Him will be broken, but that brokenness leads to healing. You see, when I fell on the rocks growing up I hurt myself but I was not killed. The same is true for those who humbly come before Jesus seeking His loving grace. It may hurt our pride and our lusts to come to Him, but in the end we are healed. On the contrary, those who reject Christ...those who refuse to break before His power and authority will not find healing. Those who reject the Cornerstone will be crushed by that Cornerstone.

This is the choice...allow God to break us of our sinful pride or be crushed under His ultimate power.  While it may hurt at first to fall on the Rock of Ages, the healing hands of our Savior will make the Rock a safe place to reside.