I believe the Cross of Jesus Christ is the apex of human history. In this one event, the old age ended and the new age began. Every human being who lived before it was moving toward it; every human being born after it is moving from it, in light of it. It remains central and ultimate in human history. By history here, I mean the human story, past, present, and future.
It is a stunning, horrendous, horrible, unjust, disgusting, unbelievable, beautiful, and precious event. I am blown over by it. I truly am. And I am praying now each day that I be blown over by it. Because my definition of “blown over” and the Almighty’s are, I gather, quite different.
In John Murray’s book, Redemption: Accomplished and Applied, he makes this statement about Jesus at the moment preceding His crucifixion: “In the exercise of self-conscious sovereign volition, knowing that all things had been accomplished and that the very moment of time for the accomplishment of this event had arrived, he effected the separation of body and spirit and committed the latter to the Father."
I heard John Piper say he didn’t think anyone could overstate how awful the cross was. So, if anything I’m about to say offends you, just stop for a minute and realize I’m doing it absolutely no justice. Whatever I say here is tame. Our knowledge of what crucifixions were like is purely academic. I heard a sermon by Mark Driscoll on it one day at work and I had to go to the restroom and cry it was so disgusting. I just wept. And he wasn’t being funny or trying to be lewd. He was describing historical facts on crucifixion. John Stott in The Cross of Christ mentions one Roman emperor who said he didn't want to see another one and wished they would all cease. And it happened to Jesus. He touched lepers and let children sit on his lap. It’s one thing to talk about it. It’s another thing to see someone butchered and have their blood spray everywhere to the cheers of a bunch of bloodthirsty idiots. I assure you. I’m not even close. He died. Do you understand this? He was killed. God in the flesh was butchered to death.
Imagine knowing exactly what is going to happen to you. You’ve known it for thousands of human years and long before that in eternity, when your Father decreed that you would be slain from the foundation of this world. And the hour has finally come. The actual period in time…the six hour ordeal is about to happen. In just a few hours, your back will be flayed; literal thorns will be shoved into your skull; iron will be pounded through your hands and your feet and they’ll drop you into the ground where your bare meatless back, muscles and nerves exposed, will rub against rough wood for six hours until you die and they jam a spear in your side. It’s about to happen. You’re around 33 now and you’ve experienced pain. You know that pain is unpleasant. You know that the worse it is, the more unpleasant it is. And you’re about to hang for a billion crimes you didn’t commit. And these people have no idea what they’re doing, in essence. You are God. You are God. And you’re going to subject yourself to that. When that first violent strike drives that nail into your flesh, your bowels are going to explode it’s going to hurt so badly. They’re going to beat you. They’re going to spit on you. They’re going to mock you. You’ll be naked, hoisted up for all to see with blood and everything else running down your body. And you could obliterate them in a microsecond. You could make them claw their own eyes out with agony and terror. You could explode in white holy fire and consume them, shut their arrogant little mouths and pound them into the ground, straight through to the open cosmos you flicked into existence before their great, great, great, great grandfathers knew where their thumbs were.
But you won’t. You won’t. You’ll just be quiet. And you’ll just hang there. Dying for scum. Yes, you'll make her beautiful. But she was ugly when you died for her.
Oh Lord my God, why would you do this for me? Jesus, when you prayed in the garden, how did you stay the course? How did you swear to that much hurt and not change, to buy your wife?
I want the cross to make me a different man.
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?
No.
2 comments:
He stayed the course for the Father's will in the garden. I think his main concern in the garden when asking that the cup pass, was not the torture that was to come, but the seperation from the Father. I gather this, because he cried out after the Father turned from him when all the sin was placed on him. I find this to be the most convicting thing in the bible to me. If Christ was greived to the point of sweating blood just to know that he was going to be seperated from the Father by sin, why do I jump into sin without a second thought knowing that I will be seperated from the Father?
Nomad
Thanks for stopping by, Nomad. I would agree that the bulk of Jesus' suffering would have been in anticipation, or the lack thereof, of being separated from the Father. In this post, however, I wanted to hone in on the fact of the physical pain and suffering. As I read Murray's book and, in particular, the statement I quoted, I was just struck by how horrible it would have been knowing what was coming...and going nonentheless. Jesus' resolution to his own hurt without changing is very moving to me and it was what I was going after here. As you pointed out, the depth of His grief is so convicting given the ease with which we will stray from the Father.
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