PELICAN GRIEF

How many possess the urge to adopt the oil-covered Pelican drenched before the cameras which have focused upon the Gulf disaster?  That poor animal sat in a seemingly irrecoverable coating of black tar.  What an immeasurable and undefinable mess!

BP has worked for weeks to contain this oil leak a mile below the gulf's surface.  Liquid gold sneezes and coughs its harmful way to affect not only wildlife but human welfare.  It is as disaster which seems to have no immediate solution.  Life is stricken by this oil line which wheezes man, fish, and bird into strangulation of some form.

Could this be but a token visual of sin contaminating God's creation?  Is BP's efforts to shut off the spewing spill an illustration of sin's insistent spread to more than A & E imagined in the Garden?  Can anyone or anything run deep enough to shut off the greasy sin supply?  And then to clean up the mess....who can step up for such a task?

Enter Jesus.  Yes, the Father submerged Himself as the tool labeled, of all things, human.  God sunk to the depths of humanity (as a human) to do the impossible.....to clean up the to-far-gone-to-do-anything-about-it sin spill. 

The task wasn't to cover the mess from Louisiana to Florida.  No, this call was to recover damaged life from the Garden to the grave.  Centuries' worth of leak pelicanized every man and woman.  Tears of frustration and hopelessness filled the prayer-waves. 

The wonderful news is God was not stumped as BP.  He didn't try.  He did.  He sent His only son to sweep up the sin-pool by becoming the sin.  God fought fire with fire and the ideal Rescuer became our sin that we might become clean in the sight of God....II Cor. 5:21.

As we observe the mess, the challenge, and the great need in the Gulf, may we be reminded of the work Jesus has done to save every believer from dying without a solution.