Blog 4 -- When God Crossed His Arms

Ok... This post is going to be a little different from my previous ones, so bear with me.
Tonight I was listening to one of my favorite speakers, Pastor Judah Smith, from Generation Church. He did a message entitled, "When God Crossed His Arms." The title alone intrigued me. I'm going to attempt to share a synopsis of it as best I can, hopefully you'll be able to get something out of it.
_________________________________________________________

///Genesis 48///
Jacob, the father of Joseph, is close to dying so Joseph brings in his two sons, Manasseh & Ephraim, to be blessed by their grandfather. Now the custom is that the older son(Manasseh in this case) receive the "right-hand blessing." This blessing was the one with favor and double-portion. So when they go in to see Jacob, Joseph places Manasseh at his right hand and Ephraim at his left hand. When Jacob proceeds to give the blessing, he crosses his arms and places his hands on the opposite grandchild. Joseph attempts to make him realize, but the blessing is done. So what does this mean...?
Let me try to break it down. Manasseh was the deserving son by birth to receive the favor, and Ephraim was the undeserving son and could do nothing to change that. We are Ephraim. We are sinners and deserve death, but we have a Manasseh in Jesus who took on the judgment for us. So try to create this image in your head: God=Jacob and is supposed to bless the first-born and deserving child, Jesus=Manasseh, and We=Ephraim are undeserving of anything and we cannot change the fact that we were just born later (or wrong). But this is the key...GOD CROSSED HIS ARMS! Joseph's attempts to make his father realize that he was blessing the undeserving son, is like religion and the law today. It screams at us that we are unworthy and produce a people trying and trying to earn that double-portion blessing that has been given to them.
Now what was deserving to us, judgment & punishment, was placed on Jesus, and we receive all of his blessings instead! Woah. Seriously?
To take this a step further, Manasseh actually means forgotten & Ephraim means fruitful. So because of Manasseh our sins are forgotten and now we, as Ephraim, can be fruitful because of our blessing. We just need to realize that we need to forget our past in order to be fruitful; they go hand in hand. So we need to stop trying to get God to put His left hand on us because we think we are unworthy because of our past. We ARE unworthy, but because of God, we received it anyway!
Lastly I want to point of what this means to us. Ok, so if we have a Manasseh and now our sins are remembered NO MORE...God remembers nothing of our "undeserving past." So in His eyes today, we are completely deserving! Not only this, but when He thinks of us, which it says that His thoughts for us outnumber the sand, He thinks of only the good things because our past is erased! This is our confidence in God which we will not cast off, because from it are great rewards and fruitfulness.
_________________________________________________________

I really hope I captured the general idea in this blog, but feel free to LISTEN to his message for yourself (it is some super good stuff)!

Alright, I'm done for now...but remember to thank God for crossing His arms & we need to live as such! :)

~Lindz