"ABANDONED"

I was recently reading some old news headlines and ran across one that caught my attention: "ABANDONED: 11 kids, including family of 9" - Eleven children, ranging in ages from 1 to 17 were left at two Nebraska hospitals. They were abandoned by their caretakers and turned over to the state. What was surprising is nine of the children came from one family! A father left his five boys and four girls at a hospital. In the other incident, two other boys, ages 11 and 15, were abandoned at a Medical Center.

Nebraska has a law on the books that gives people the ability to abandon their children up to the age of 19 without fear of prosecution. The law was originally meant to protect infants but you can see how loose the law is. It seems that in each case, the parents who abandoned their children felt overwhelmed and decided they just didn't want to responsibility to be a parent anymore. How tragic is it to be a child and made to feel unwanted and unloved by their mother or father.

I know there are several applications we could draw from this but one thing became clear to me. Jesus became our sin on our behalf (II Cor. 5:21). God does not and cannot fellowship sin so Jesus found Himself paying the ultimate price for taking our sins on Himself: separated from God. However, not abandoned! Peter speaks in Acts 2:27, 31 that it was foretold that Jesus would not be abandoned to Hades. The Father who sent His Son on trial and the punishment for our guilt as being death, was not abandoned. God raised Him up!

Mankind is lost! Sin creates a separation between us and God but God has not abandoned us. He left us a way back into a relationship, fellowship with Himself. God sought us out through His Son and those who put their faith in Jesus, confessing and forsaking their sins, being baptized into union with Him for forgiveness of sins find a wonderful life in His presence. God has not abandoned us! The only question for us is have we abandoned God?