The Perfect Exchange.

Whoop! it’s my 5-year blogging anniversary (blog-versary, haha) and a perfect date to grace you with my first post for 2021. I know, ‘how can you just be hearing from me in July?’. I’m sorry, and I hope it’s not too late to apologize. If it’s your first-time here, welcome! and make sure you check out my other posts, after reading this one of course.

I have this ‘thing’ for numbers and what they represent, especially in the biblical context. Like how the number 5 signifies ‘grace’ or how the number 7 signifies ‘perfection’. The number 5 in particular is one of my favorites, not only ‘cos I was born on the first day of the 5th month of the year (hehe) but mostly because it represents grace – God gifting us the prefect exchange we neither earned nor deserved.

An exchange is simply an act of giving anything and receiving another thing in return, especially of the same kind. Like in boarding school, where some students would exchange meals like ‘eba & egusi soup’ for ‘pap & akara’ (for those that can relate. lol). Typically, before this food exchange or any other kind of exchange can happen, the parties involved would have thought about the value they would be getting from it.

This is why the exchange between us and God is so divinely perfect. I mean, what would you call an exchange, where one party (us) has nothing to give but the other party (God) gives (us) an overload of invaluable and precious gifts? Because while we were still in the business of sin to receive the full salary of death, Jesus came and took our death payment by dying in our place, and in a perfect exchange gave us His life that cannot die, and made us the righteousness of God.

As if He had not already done plenty, He proceeded to give us extra gifts (jara): good health in the place of sickness; riches in the place of poverty; companionship in the place of loneliness; forgiveness in the place of guilt. Now, can you guess our only role in this exchange? — believe & receive! Tell me, what could be more perfect than that?!

..and from the overflow of His fullness we received grace heaped upon more grace.

Reference verses: 2Corinthians 5:21; 2Corinthians 8:9; John 1:16; Romans3;23; 5:6; 6:23; Isaiah 53:4-6