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Day 39Between the Two Cries Friday, March 30, 2018
At the ninth hour Jesus CRIED out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” Mark 15:34
When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, “It is finished,” and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. John 19:30 And Jesus, CRYING OUT with a loud voice, said, "Father, INTO YOUR HANDS I COMMIT MY SPIRIT." Having said this, He breathed His last. Luke 23:46 |
Devotional:
The words, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” are from Psalm 22. At Jesus’ lowest ebb, his mind instinctively breathes the Psalter, and from it he borrows the words that express the anguish, not now of his body, but of his soul.
And the stark trembling reality of this moment in Jesus’s life is that it was a real forsaking. Jesus did not merely feel forsaken. He was forsaken; and not only by his disciples, but by God himself. It was the Father who had delivered him up to Judas, to the Jews, to Pilate, and finally to the Cross itself.
And now, when he had cried, God had closed his ears. The crowd had not stopped jeering, the demons had not stopped taunting, the pain had not abated. Instead, every circumstance bespoke the anger of God; and there was no countering voice. This time, no word came from heaven to remind him that he was God’s Son, and greatly loved. No dove came down to assure him of the Spirit’s presence and ministry. No angel came to strengthen him. No redeemed sinner bowed to thank him.
Who was God? He cries out in Aramaic, but he doesn’t use the greatest of all the Aramaic words, Abba. Even in the anguish of Gethsemane, distraught and overborne though he was, Jesus had been able to use it. But not here.
Like Abraham and Isaac going up to Mount Moriah, he and the Father had gone up to Calvary together. But now Abba is not there. Only El is there: God All-mighty, God All-holy. And he is before El, not now as his Beloved Son, but as the Sin of the World. That is his identity: the character in which he stands before Absolute Integrity.
It is not that he bears some vague relation to sinners. He is one of them, numbered with transgressors. Indeed, he is all of them. He is sin, condemned to bear its curse; and he has no cover. None can serve as his advocate. Nothing can be offered as his expiation. He must bear all, and El will not, cannot, spare him till the ransom is paid in full.
Scottish theologian, Donald Macleod writes, “The sufferings of his soul, as the old divines used to say, were the soul of his suffering, and into that soul we can see but dimly. Public though the cry was, it expressed the intensely private anguish of a tension between the sin-bearing Son and his heavenly Father: the whirlwind of sin at its most dreadful, God forsaken by God.”
But no less challenging than the torment in Jesus’s soul is his question, “Why?” Never before had anything come between him and his Father, but now the sin of the whole world has come between them, and he is caught in this dreadful vortex of the curse. It is not that Abba is not there, but that he is there, as the Judge of all the earth who could condone nothing and could not spare even his own Son.
This week, two dear friends of mine both experienced the early loss of their husbands, as each succumbed after long battles with lung disease and cancer, respectively. As I pray for these beautiful women of God in the midst of writing about Jesus’s journey to His own death, I am brought to contemplate the lovely and awful mystery of it. I remember the final hours of my father’s death, as my family and I sat together on his bed, holding his hands, holding each other, watching and waiting and praying, as his breaths shuddered and swelled and receded and struggled. His breaths becoming the tick tock to which our life counted time in that short eternity of waiting and sorrow and fear of the unknown. Would we be able to take it when at last the clock stopped, and that breath didn’t come? Would we die, somehow, too? Why is there such struggle in the breaths of a dying man? Why does it have to be this way? And, then, suddenly, quietly, so very humbly, the moment came. My Pops was gone. It was finished. Peace. Silence. God. Yes, even Beauty. Holiness.
Now, Jesus’s mind is near the limits of its endurance. We, sitting in the gallery of history, are sure of the outcome. He, suffering in human nature the fury of hell, is not. He is standing where none has stood before or since, enduring at one tiny point in space and in one tiny moment of time, all that sin deserved: the curse in unmitigated concentration.
That event was so sacred that, as it were, God took His coat off and hung it over the sun. And there was darkness for three hours. He would not let anybody see His Son become corruption.
And then, suddenly, it is over.
“Mercy and Truth met together, Righteousness and Peace kissed each other... and hell went into panic...the earth was shattered. The whole earth rocked on its axis. The earth trembled under the impact of the sin that He bore for us. Heaven trembled.” Leonard Ravenhill
The sacrifice is complete, the curtain torn, and the way into the Holiest opened once and for all; and now Jesus’ joy finds expression in the words of another psalm, Psalm 31:5. In the original, it had not contained the word Abba, but Jesus inserts it: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Dr. William Barclay writes, "That verse was the prayer every Jewish mother taught her child to say last thing at night. Just as we were taught, maybe, to say, `Now I lay me down to sleep,' so the Jewish mother taught her child to say, before the threatening dark came down, `Into your hands I commit my spirit.' Jesus made it even more intimate, for he began it with the word Father. Even on the cross Jesus died like a child falling asleep in his father's arms."
I remember growing up praying that prayer every night with my sister,...”I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” Such meaning it takes on for me now. My Jesus and I prayed the same prayer with the same trust to the same Father who loves us! All my life it was that way, and I never knew till now. How close I feel to my Savior. Tucked in. Safe.
We have no means of knowing what intervened between the two cries. We know only that the Cup is drained and the Curse exhausted, and that the Father now proudly holds out his hands to the spirit of his Beloved Son.
Max Lucado, sweetly capturing the moment, pens:
The voice that screamed at God, `My God, My God Why have you forsaken me,' now says, `Father.'
The two are again one... The abandoned is now found… The schism is now bridged.
`Father.' He smiles weakly. 'It's over.'
Satan's vultures have been scattered. Hell's demons have been jailed. Death has been damned.
The sun is out, The Son is out.
"It's over.”
And, as I pray, and meditate on Jesus’s dying moments, I can see now that in the unfolding of the overarching majestic completion of God’s sovereign eternal plan, therein also was the provision for Jesus to perfectly experience the full humanity of physical death and all the pain and waiting and anguish that is part of the journey between the two cries of “Why?” and “It is finished.” God making sure that truly there would not be one emotion or event in our human lives He could not personally know and, therefore, love us through with pure grace and compassion. And, in turn, that we, traveling between the two cries in the journey to death with our own loved ones, may know by faith that God is offering us a divine glimpse into His own suffering; He is allowing us to enter with peace in our pain the mystery of life moving to death, trusting that in our darkest, most lonely moments, He is with us and that, even in death, with Him holding us close, there is a great beauty and heavenly purpose.
And the stark trembling reality of this moment in Jesus’s life is that it was a real forsaking. Jesus did not merely feel forsaken. He was forsaken; and not only by his disciples, but by God himself. It was the Father who had delivered him up to Judas, to the Jews, to Pilate, and finally to the Cross itself.
And now, when he had cried, God had closed his ears. The crowd had not stopped jeering, the demons had not stopped taunting, the pain had not abated. Instead, every circumstance bespoke the anger of God; and there was no countering voice. This time, no word came from heaven to remind him that he was God’s Son, and greatly loved. No dove came down to assure him of the Spirit’s presence and ministry. No angel came to strengthen him. No redeemed sinner bowed to thank him.
Who was God? He cries out in Aramaic, but he doesn’t use the greatest of all the Aramaic words, Abba. Even in the anguish of Gethsemane, distraught and overborne though he was, Jesus had been able to use it. But not here.
Like Abraham and Isaac going up to Mount Moriah, he and the Father had gone up to Calvary together. But now Abba is not there. Only El is there: God All-mighty, God All-holy. And he is before El, not now as his Beloved Son, but as the Sin of the World. That is his identity: the character in which he stands before Absolute Integrity.
It is not that he bears some vague relation to sinners. He is one of them, numbered with transgressors. Indeed, he is all of them. He is sin, condemned to bear its curse; and he has no cover. None can serve as his advocate. Nothing can be offered as his expiation. He must bear all, and El will not, cannot, spare him till the ransom is paid in full.
Scottish theologian, Donald Macleod writes, “The sufferings of his soul, as the old divines used to say, were the soul of his suffering, and into that soul we can see but dimly. Public though the cry was, it expressed the intensely private anguish of a tension between the sin-bearing Son and his heavenly Father: the whirlwind of sin at its most dreadful, God forsaken by God.”
But no less challenging than the torment in Jesus’s soul is his question, “Why?” Never before had anything come between him and his Father, but now the sin of the whole world has come between them, and he is caught in this dreadful vortex of the curse. It is not that Abba is not there, but that he is there, as the Judge of all the earth who could condone nothing and could not spare even his own Son.
This week, two dear friends of mine both experienced the early loss of their husbands, as each succumbed after long battles with lung disease and cancer, respectively. As I pray for these beautiful women of God in the midst of writing about Jesus’s journey to His own death, I am brought to contemplate the lovely and awful mystery of it. I remember the final hours of my father’s death, as my family and I sat together on his bed, holding his hands, holding each other, watching and waiting and praying, as his breaths shuddered and swelled and receded and struggled. His breaths becoming the tick tock to which our life counted time in that short eternity of waiting and sorrow and fear of the unknown. Would we be able to take it when at last the clock stopped, and that breath didn’t come? Would we die, somehow, too? Why is there such struggle in the breaths of a dying man? Why does it have to be this way? And, then, suddenly, quietly, so very humbly, the moment came. My Pops was gone. It was finished. Peace. Silence. God. Yes, even Beauty. Holiness.
Now, Jesus’s mind is near the limits of its endurance. We, sitting in the gallery of history, are sure of the outcome. He, suffering in human nature the fury of hell, is not. He is standing where none has stood before or since, enduring at one tiny point in space and in one tiny moment of time, all that sin deserved: the curse in unmitigated concentration.
That event was so sacred that, as it were, God took His coat off and hung it over the sun. And there was darkness for three hours. He would not let anybody see His Son become corruption.
And then, suddenly, it is over.
“Mercy and Truth met together, Righteousness and Peace kissed each other... and hell went into panic...the earth was shattered. The whole earth rocked on its axis. The earth trembled under the impact of the sin that He bore for us. Heaven trembled.” Leonard Ravenhill
The sacrifice is complete, the curtain torn, and the way into the Holiest opened once and for all; and now Jesus’ joy finds expression in the words of another psalm, Psalm 31:5. In the original, it had not contained the word Abba, but Jesus inserts it: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). Dr. William Barclay writes, "That verse was the prayer every Jewish mother taught her child to say last thing at night. Just as we were taught, maybe, to say, `Now I lay me down to sleep,' so the Jewish mother taught her child to say, before the threatening dark came down, `Into your hands I commit my spirit.' Jesus made it even more intimate, for he began it with the word Father. Even on the cross Jesus died like a child falling asleep in his father's arms."
I remember growing up praying that prayer every night with my sister,...”I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” Such meaning it takes on for me now. My Jesus and I prayed the same prayer with the same trust to the same Father who loves us! All my life it was that way, and I never knew till now. How close I feel to my Savior. Tucked in. Safe.
We have no means of knowing what intervened between the two cries. We know only that the Cup is drained and the Curse exhausted, and that the Father now proudly holds out his hands to the spirit of his Beloved Son.
Max Lucado, sweetly capturing the moment, pens:
The voice that screamed at God, `My God, My God Why have you forsaken me,' now says, `Father.'
The two are again one... The abandoned is now found… The schism is now bridged.
`Father.' He smiles weakly. 'It's over.'
Satan's vultures have been scattered. Hell's demons have been jailed. Death has been damned.
The sun is out, The Son is out.
"It's over.”
And, as I pray, and meditate on Jesus’s dying moments, I can see now that in the unfolding of the overarching majestic completion of God’s sovereign eternal plan, therein also was the provision for Jesus to perfectly experience the full humanity of physical death and all the pain and waiting and anguish that is part of the journey between the two cries of “Why?” and “It is finished.” God making sure that truly there would not be one emotion or event in our human lives He could not personally know and, therefore, love us through with pure grace and compassion. And, in turn, that we, traveling between the two cries in the journey to death with our own loved ones, may know by faith that God is offering us a divine glimpse into His own suffering; He is allowing us to enter with peace in our pain the mystery of life moving to death, trusting that in our darkest, most lonely moments, He is with us and that, even in death, with Him holding us close, there is a great beauty and heavenly purpose.
Prayer: |
Lord Jesus, I pray that I see with new eyes the depth of your suffering and the desperation that you must have felt, just like I have felt at times. Now I see anew that you completely understand any suffering I could ever face or have faced, because you experienced the ultimate pain and humiliation on the cross….all for me. Help me to demonstrate my gratitude through a renewed devotion to you.
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Song/Hymn: |
Amazing Grace “…twas grace that taught my heart to fear, and grace my fears relieved..”
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