Archives for March 2014

Friday of Jesus’ Last Week

It is now early into the new day and Jesus is approaching the denouement or final outcome of His career. He will soon come face to face with what are at once the focal point and the most dreaded hour of His earthly ministry. Jesus, being human, had a will of His own, but it coincided perfectly with the Father’s.

Text Ref. 33

For example, as a human who could physically suffer, Jesus naturally had an aversion to suffering, but in no way did He seek to avoid it because He knew it was the Father’s will that He should endure the distress. Rather, because it was the Father’s will that He should endure the particular pain that lay ahead of Him, Jesus pressed toward the full accomplishment of His hour of agony.

“I have a baptism to be baptized with [His time of suffering]” He said in one instance, “and how am I straitened [pressured] till it be accomplished!” (Luke 12:50) In His own mind Jesus was compelled to endure whatever the Father willed for Him to endure simply because of that fact — it was the Father’s will. The inescapable corollary, of course, is that one who is a child of God and who partakes of the nature of Christ, must be driven to do as Christ did. The child of God should want to fellowship with Christ in His sufferings regardless of the natural aversion to it. This is not to say that if he fully perceives the terrible agony, which no human can possibly envision, the human will still be as Jesus, and virtually impale himself on the barbarous cross and throw himself into torment of hell, but the Father’s will should always be paramount to the Christian just as it was to Jesus.

We must take our time now in detailing Jesus’ hour of Passion. The Bible seems at times to be deliberately sparse and pithy in its descriptions of events of great significance. The death of Jesus was a mind?boggling anomaly that one would think should have wrung volumes of descriptive words and phrases from the Gospel writers. It is, after all, the core of the Scriptures. But it is left up to us, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, to see the wondrous implications for, and the tremendous impact on the believer that are contained in Christ’s humiliation and death. The more intimate the believer’s communion with the Spirit of God, the greater he can sense Jesus’ sufferings. He then has to stand in awe before the incomprehensible love that brought about such an unthinkable sacrifice for man who is insufferably wretched and depraved.

Jesus would soon die, having gone from the infinite heights of glory to the unplumbed depths of hell. Yet it would be a victory. Even before He arose it would be a victory; although without His resurrection there could only have been complete defeat. But His road up, or rather down, to this crisis had been planned by a merging of love and wisdom and power (yes, there was a power in His very dying!) that is infinite in all its aspects. With this Man’s coming death He would have triumphed right at that point before ever He broke the bonds of death, so that His later resurrection would then become doubly triumphant and twice glorious.

Mat. 26:36?56; Mark 14:32?52; Luke 22:39?54; John 8:1?12

“Then cometh Jesus with them unto a place called Gethsemane, and saith unto the disciples, Sit ye here while I go and pray yonder.”

It was now around twelve o’clock early Friday morning. The rising waters of what was soon to become an overwhelming flood of anguish were even now swirling in troubled eddies around the feet of Jesus. Leaving the main body of disciples near the entrance, He took Peter, James and John with Him into the garden.

“Then saith he unto them, ‘My soul is exceeding sorrowful, even unto death. Stay here and watch with me.'” His whole being was racked with a grief that was both mental and physical, the weight of the world’s sins, past, present and future, beginning to press heavily upon Him. Each sin, mounting awesomely through the years, added to the crushing burden that Jesus was assuming there in the garden of pain. These were our sins; and not one of them was as insignificant as we thought it was when we committed it. These thoughtless sins added just as much to His grief as Cain’s slaying his brother, David’s adultery and murder, and Herod’s flagrant incest and cruelties. Jesus, flesh and blood and vulnerability, had to go to the Father.

Text Ref. 34

Leaving the three disciples, Jesus went deeper into the garden and fell on His face in pain and entreaty. “O my Father,” He cried, “if it be possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”There was a natural horror of what was engulfing Him and of what was yet to come. We must remember that Jesus was human, and if He was not, all men are lost without hope. Just as He could not save man if He Himself were not divine, so He could not save man if He were not human.

“If it be possible,” Jesus pleaded, revealing His human frailty and at the same time yielding to the divine will, “Let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

He prayed earnestly three separate times, each time returning to the three who should have been one with Him in His distress. Three separate times they slept through His suffering. After the third time the Father answered Jesus by sending an angel to Him, not to deliver Him, but to strengthen the physical body that He might endure even more agony. His physical strength needed to be bolstered because it was not time for Jesus to die; not yet. His will was not flagging, only His frail human body that was weighted down under the moral obscenities of all time. It was an insufferable weight, an impossible and staggering burden that would have snuffed out the life of any mortal not sustained by the Father. In mercy God has created the physical being so that it cannot continue functioning under such extreme anguish; but Jesus did not experience that mercy. And there would be no mercy extended to Him later on the cross and afterwards in the hell into which He would plunge.

Jesus was in such agony that blood oozed out of His pores as He prayed. Mingling with the sweat of the extreme stress He was experiencing, the blood appeared in blotches through His robe. Sweat and blood gathered together in droplets on His forehead and fell profusely to the ground. All around Jesus was the darkness of the night, but it was not nearly so formidable as the blackness of soul within Him. This was suffering in the extreme… with Calvary yet to come.

As we have noted, Peter, James and John slept through it all.  Three times they missed the fearsome agonizing that was so vital to them and all mankind. In the garden that night were stark drama, poignant grief, transcendent love; and Jesus’ closest friends were as oblivious to it all as though it were not happening.

There was neither family nor friends with the Savior in His most trying hour, and the Father had already answered Jesus’ cry for help – by dispatching an angel to Him to strengthen His physical body that He might endure more suffering before dying. There would be no help coming from heaven or earth. Jesus was totally alone. And He was not yet escaped from the awesome vortex of suffering brought on Him… by our sins.

Does God Have the Power to Heal Us?

We humans have difficulty in accepting that God has ALL power in His hands. This is despite the unthinkable alternative, that God would have NO power at all. That one item – a weak, ineffective God – would of itself cause total shipwreck to God’s grand designs for man and the universe He created for man.

A God without power is no God at all. Any power that is apparently outside such a God’s purview or control has only been temporarily delegated to the recipient by the omnipotent Creator God. When Jesus was standing before Pilate (a governor of Judea for the mighty Roman Empire), Jesus had to remind Pilate – if Pilate had ever known it – that he could have no power against Jesus if the one original all-powerful God had not given it to him to accomplish God’s inscrutable purpose. In this instance the “inscrutable purpose” was the redemption of all mankind. And He gave mankind the power to do this terrible act that would strip Jesus of His dignity, His divinity (as the human Son of God) and His life!

Does God Want to Heal Us?

“Ay, there’s the rub!” (Shakespeare) Yes, there is a bit of a problem if we have a God with the ability to uproot mountains, but who apparently doesn’t want to lift a finger to remove the afflictions towering over our prostrate bodies and pressing them into the ground. Life can play rough at times; and it hurts! But if that is what life is about – if it is really not a game, but a deadly serious contest of strength and will power – we stand our ground and say stoutly, Bring it on! We have divine Power and Will on our side.

Let’s do a little practical thinking and dispense with all the starry-eyed talk about “name it and claim it.” But at the same time we will not forget that God is still the God of miracles – small miracles, medium sized ones and stupendous miracles. No, the previous statement is rather misleading: all miracles are the same to God. There is no gradation of miracles where God’s power is concerned.

A miracle is simply an act that seems to fly in the face of natural laws and that to which we are accustomed. For example, if God so wished, He could make the universe disappear in a second; but that will never happen because it is definitely not what God wants. I can think of a number of reasons that God will not disintegrate the cosmos in a flash; some of the reasons are a trifle abstruse (that is, they are to me, but then, I have the intelligence of a snail) while others are easy to see.

The abstruse reasons are on the fringes of my mind; they are not anything I can easily grasp or articulate. But the simpler reasons are more easily handled. One is that God has a purpose for everything we see and perceive all around us stretching out to infinity: the planets, the unimaginable number of galaxies, the stars – and we cannot overlook man who was made for a little while lower than the angels and who is destined to be next to God in the consummation of all things.

The Scripture tells us that, if we believe, all things are possible.

(Mat 17:20)  “…verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.”

(Mar 9:23)  “Jesus said unto him, If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth.”

All right; I cannot say Scripture is untrue; and I firmly believe the passages above. But what about the incident that is included in Mark 9.17-29 in which Jesus had previously sent twelve disciples on a junket throughout the region and they had healed many and cast out the devils that possessed them? They had faith then and they had faith in the present instance also, or so they thought, and their prayers had come flying back in their faces – unanswered.

According to some versions of the Scripture Jesus told them that kind of demon could be handled only by prayer and fasting. I tend to believe these versions. But then what will we do with Jesus’ statement about removing mountains? Of course Jesus was only using the idiom of the Jews of that day in speaking of any insurmountable task, but, fasting aside, the incident in Mark 9.17-29 was merely another very difficult task and one which they had heretofore done easily.

What about the mountains in your life that you have often petitioned God to remove: Why are they not yet removed? Every child of God wants God to work wondrously in his or her life; it’s a normal desire woven into the spiritual fabric of all who belong to God. But the fulfillment of this normal desire is by no means automatic. The person who mines for gold does not expect the gold to jump out of the ground into his lap. Looking for gold is a long arduous task. By the same token, we have to seek earnestly and persistently for God to work His wonders in our individual lives. God has a plan for each of us, but the task of implementing the full will of God in our lives requires much prayer and sacrifice, sweat and tears.

Certainly we have all prayed for God to do a special work in and through us. If you have not yet sought God for this special blessing, you are not following Him closely. It’s axiomatic that drawing close to God brings with it a yearning to fulfill something – anything – that goes beyond the norm. Love will do that to a person. That is why the young suitor of “the girl of my dreams” will swear to her that he would swim the widest river, climb the highest mountain and even die for her. Then he concludes this moving spiel by saying something like, “I’ll see you tonight if it doesn’t rain”!

Such ringing expressions of love of course are belied by our feeble actions. Ringing words will never get us anywhere with God if we do not back them up with action. Rain indeed! Nothing should deter us from our quest for the power of God to work mightily in us and then, through us to reach out to others. We have to persevere in our search for the precious gold lying hidden from our sight and possession beneath the tons of obstructing rock and earth.

It is the power of God that will uproot mountains and quiet the fury of a storm with a single command, “Peace, be still!” When God flexes His muscles, extraordinary things happen: kingdoms fall, brave men become fearful, the earth rocks to and fro and the sun hides its face.  But the power of God is no more important than another facet of God with which we have to reckon. Along with the power of God comes the will of God. The two items are twins: there cannot be one without the other. The will of God is like a circular wall that restricts the power of God in a specific instance; divine power cannot operate outside divine will. At the same time the power of God, contained within the wall of His will, fulfills all that God’s will demands in the particular setting.

The power of God does not surge forth with abandon, indiscriminately creating new worlds here and there and uprooting mountains and casting them into the sea to no purpose. The power to work in such haphazard fashion is certainly there, but the will of God is also there, in its direction of the power. There can be no working of the power of God without the will of God to actuate it and determine its course and objective.

If it should seem that this awesome power at any time breaks through the restraint of God’s will, then we have to conclude that what had seemed to be God’s will was not His will because clearly the power cannot operate independently, and outside, of the will of God. Only God’s will can turn on the engine of God’s mighty power and it then directs the power to specific places at specific times. It is only in the Master’s own way and time that we can ever accomplish anything profitable.

So while you are pressuring God to show His power by using you in a mighty way, seek earnestly for the will of God concerning you. Exert every effort to be in perfect accord with what God wants. Then, as God shows you progressively what He wants, strive just as earnestly to do what He wants as you do in seeking for His power. The power of God will not work exclusive of the will of God.

Then, after you have done all to conform to the will of God, stand and see the power of God work in your life!