“That I may know Him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death, if by any means, I may attain to the resurrection from the dead.”
Often when I have suffered in the past, I have wondered why the Lord would permit such things to happen to me in my life. I know that He loves me and He has forever proven the truth of His love by His incredible death upon the Cross. Even so, I think that very often when we are in a trial, it seems that we forget everything else around us and are directed in our heart to only one place, our suffering and how we feel at that particular moment.
When I endured the loss of my home by a wildfire, the sudden death of my wife in a single day, and the betrayal of two close friends in my recent history, I wondered “Why Lord” and I heard each time a quiet reply from Him “Why not?”
The suffering that Jesus endured is really beyond the realm of any human understanding. He was not merely suffering as a man, but inside the body of this humble servant dwelt the eternal God. How can we who are constrained by time understand Him who has no boundaries or limitation? What did Jesus feel in the garden when He contemplated drinking from the cup that contained the sins of every person who would ever live upon the earth?
Think about your own sin for a moment. How many have there been? How grievous have these been to you? Now magnify the thoughts of these by everyone in your own household, the ugliness and selfishness, the lies, deception, lusts and flaming anger, all mixed into a cup for Jesus to drink from.
Expand now your thoughts to your entire city where ever soul that lives there also has all of their ugliness poured into a cup for Jesus to drink.
Finally, as you are getting the picture of where this exercise is going, take the sins of every person in your state, your country and this world, and flow them into the cup that Jesus will drink from full strength. All of the horrors of the holocaust, every war, murder, rape, and abuse since time began. Combine all the filthiness and perverted things that men have done since the first day Adam was here on the earth, all placed into a cup for Jesus to drink from.
For the Bible says that Jesus was “made sin for us”. That is, He was without sin as a man and as God He had never experienced sin for Himself personally. Now as Jesus lifts the cup to his mouth, He is about to “Become sin for all of us”. Not just those who will believe in Him and accept His sacrifice for the payment for all their wrong, but also and including, all those who have hated Him, despised Him, and those who have trampled underfoot His sacrifice and have counted the blood of His sacrifice as nothing. Jesus died for those who would love Him, as well as those who would hate Him.
I cannot imagine the horror that the Lord must have felt as He lifted the cup to his mouth and drank from it. As the Father turned away His face from His Son and Jesus cried out “My God, why have you forsaken me?”
As Jesus is made sin, and takes the horror upon Himself, the Father who cannot dwell in the presence of sin, can no longer have fellowship with the Son as they had once enjoyed together for all of eternity.
Alone, abandoned, filled to overflowing with our sin, Jesus is left alone hanging there on a tree, becoming a curse for all of us.
You may read these words and say, “But I do not believe in Jesus nor His sacrifice on the Cross…” Do you think that it makes any difference whatsoever, whether you believe it? The facts of history do not lie, Jesus died on a Cross and some things are true whether you believe them or not.
The Love of God as displayed on a Roman Cross where the Son of God bore the shame and guilt of every person that would be born on this planet. Offering a complete pardon from every guilty stain by the simple acceptance of this great sacrifice made by the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.
On the day that Jesus took the body of a man, He became One perfect sacrifice that could forever take away the shame of every human being, if they were only willing to believe it.
So on some particular day, when our heart has been broken. When someone that we love with all of our heart is gone. When something material vanishes from our grasp. When trusted friends no longer love us, there is a partial understanding of the suffering that this Great God endured for each one of us.
How else can we really know this God who was not willing to withhold anything from us so that we could know His love for us? There is a special place of fellowship in the moments of our suffering that we cannot gain in any other way. As our hearts break, our soul escapes into an awareness of that great mystery of suffering that Jesus endured so that we would never taste judgment for ourselves.
Oh Jesus, how grateful we are that your loved us with such a fervent passion that you would allow us to taste a morsel of the pain that you felt for us. Only when we have suffered can we really understand what you meant when you cried out to the Father. ”Please take this cup from me, but never the less, not what I will, but Your will be done”
Despising the shame, laying down your life you left us with the clearest example of what it means to follow you and take up for ourselves our own Cross and to bear it with gladness, knowing the glory that it will bring to you in ages unending.
Rob Robinson
