Conspiracy of Love

It was an elaborate plan, cloaked in surprising simplicity.

He enlisted the help of two young accomplices, but could have pulled it off without them, of course. He can do anything. Still, there was no doubt they would cooperate. It was the perfect front.

After all, who could imagine the Creator would link arms with His own creation to buy them all back?

No one realized what an unthinkable ransom it would take to recover what had been lost. All they knew was a Hero would come. Briefed for years by God’s agents—Isaiah, David, Micah—the communiqués He gave them were passed on faithfully.

·         “A virgin will conceive and bear a son.” 

·         “. . . Oh Bethlehem . . . A Ruler of Israel will come from you . . .”  

·         “He was despised and rejected--a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care.” 

·         “He was wounded for our rebellious acts. He was crushed for our sins. He was punished so that we could have peace, and we received healing from his wounds.” 

But even with all the encrypted messages, we didn't recognize Him. The Plan didn’t materialize the way we expected. Few of us could decipher the coded missives. They sounded so poetic, so analytical, so . . . confusing. Sometimes they read like events had already occurred—seven hundred years before zero hour.

Who does something like that?

Don’t feel too bad—even the Evil General couldn’t figure it out. So much for enemy intelligence. Once set in motion, he could not stop The Plan. He gave it his best shot, though, and used every demonic device up his sleeve. Infanticide in Bethlehem. Plots by religious leaders to kill the Intruder. Demonic attack. Traitor friends. Fatigue, hunger, and rejection.

But the Hero seemed untouchable.

In desperation, the enemy pulled out all the stops until, finally, at the pinnacle of the Infiltration, he executed a full-on assault, all his forces in a pincer attack. He played his ace. God’s Son was framed and murdered. Stopped in His tracks. Silenced. To every eye witness, it seemed the operation had failed.

But it hadn’t.

The enemy went too far. It was a  divine ambush, a strategic move that set up evil's forces for failure. And pride made the enemy the pawn in the Trinity’s liberation conspiracy. Like the most shocking case of mistaken identity ever, humanity’s Hero pushed us all out of the way and took every bullet the firing squad could unload. He stood in our place and devoured death. Then God raised Him from the dead and, in so doing, He raised us up, too.

Guess who never saw that coming.

The enemy played right into the Hero’s hands. If he had known how to decipher those dispatches, he would never have crucified the King of Kings. Operation Redemption was in the heart of God before sin ever stole His creation.

“Who believes what we’ve heard and seen?
    Who would have thought God’s saving power would look like this?

He took on his own shoulders the sin of the many,
    he took up the cause of all the black sheep.”

His love for us would not allow Him to let us go, so God put on a disguise of flesh and lived among us. Then He dispatched His most trusted emissaries with one final message:

“This will be a sign for you by which you will recognize Him: you will find a Baby wrapped in swaddling clothes and lying in a manger.”

The greatest undercover operation of all time . . . began with the cry of a baby.