God's Love and Blessing and Wrath

<p>GOD’S LOVE AND BLESSING AND WRATH</p> <p>When Adam and Eve disobeyed God after being tempted by Lucifer the first thing they did was to hide from God in the garden, and they covered themselves with fig leaves. That was the beginning of a mistaken mindset of hiding from a God whom they thought was angry and was now going to punish them for doing wrong. The fig leaves were a useless way of covering up their shame and guilt for doing wrong. That was not God’s way of thinking, and he needed to change that mistaken mindset. God told Adam to come out into the open and talk to him. He was going to cover Adam with the skin of an animal (lamb, ram, sheep, goat?) to replace the useless fig leaves.  So God shed blood and covered Adam. This is a prophetic picture for us of God providing Jesus as a blood sacrifice for the sins of humanity. This blood sacrifice covers the shame and guilt we all experience as sinful human beings, and the fig leaves represent our futile attempts to cover our shame of exposure by covering up for ourselves instead of letting God’s mercy cover our shame.</p> <p>Without a mindset of faith and trust in God for this, we will always live at a distance from God and hide like Adam because of shame and guilt instead of coming close to him through his loving mercy and forgiveness. That was the beginning of a lesson from God to us, that he does not want us to hide from whom we think is an angry God that wants to punish us. He wants us to know that we do not have to hide who we really are with our weak and frail humanity but to let him redeem us with his sacrificial love - the sacrificial lifeblood that he shed for us then and always. </p> <p>God used another prophetic picture of sacrificial lifeblood for us when he told Abraham to offer his only son Isaac on an altar. God had promised Abraham that he would be the father of countless children and in him all the families in the earth would be blessed. Abraham had to wait 25 years for the promise of a son to be fulfilled and then he was told to of