22nd September 2015

One of my ministry colleagues informed me that his daughter needs to get her adenoid removed. I nodded with compassion, but confessed my ignorance, and reached for the digital doctor, and marvelled at what I read: A mass of lymphatic tissue strategically situated at the back of the nasal passage, armed and able to capture rogue, airborne germs. The wonder for me however, came in this fact, that these silent sentinels start their formation in the sixteenth week from conception, and so are ready for guard duty from the very first breath in the delivery suite.

Could it be that the Maker prepared us for life in a fallen world? Not that the adenoid and their partners in defence, the tonsils and the appendix, would be surplus in a perfect world. But it seems to me that these anatomical marvels fulfil their most heroic and sacrificial purpose in a world full of germs.

That’s just like the Maker, not just to think ahead, or to know ahead, but to actually plan ahead, to foreordain. And not just with the provision of complex and clever lymphatic tissue, but with the solution for what would come to be our greatest need in a fallen world. For the Book speaks of Jesus as ‘the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world’. A Saviour foreordained from the perfections of eternity, to take his place in the breezeway of this world, to trap and absorb our sin, and to heal us by his sacrificial wounds.

DM 22^nd September 2015