“Who loved me and gave Himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
Picture Jesus in your mind right now, with His hands outstretched. Imagine the cruel, rusty, blunted nails
driven through His tender flesh. Imagine the nerves and tendons stretched out tightly on the cross. Imagine the fiery pain that shoots up His arms and the back of His legs as He is suspended between heaven and earth. Imagine the crown of thorns jammed upon His head and the thick blood spurting from His temples and running down His beard. Look into His eyes filled with agony. Listen to His cry of woe. Hear His statements of grief. Feel the pain that shoots through His whole body.
Yet His physical suffering, painful as it was, constitutes only a fraction of His real suffering. The world’s guilt, which He bears, shuts Him out from His loving Father. He is judged as a sinner-forsaken, condemned, and accused. On the cross, He is alone. He feels His very soul being torn apart. Separated from His father, He hangs in agony. Why does He suffer so?
He experiences the pain that sinners will feel at the end of time when totally separated from God. He feels what it would be like to be lost. In those agonizing hours on the cross, He absorbs in Himself all of sin’s shame, all of sin’s degradation.
At this dark moment Jesus does not see Himself coming through the portals of the tomb. He sees only the blackness of the grave and the horrors of death. But He is willing to experience it all for you and me. Calvary shouts to us. “You are valuable! You are Mine by creation. I have made you. I have fashioned you. You are Mine by redemption. You are more than skin covering bones.”
Calvary reveals the immensity of God’s love…. His warm heart of love breaks the cold heart of stone, and I kneel before Him in praise.
Mark Finley,
Solid Ground, p. 259.
