Week 16—Tuesday Philippians 2:5-8
Philippians 2:5-8
“THE CHRISTIAN FAITH IS GOD TAKING
HIS OWN MEDICINE”
We have seen that the cross is the highest thing in God and the deepest thing in us, for it is the highest manifestation of the highest thing in God—love—and the deepest thing in us—love. The cross is not therefore an afterthought of God—it is inherent in the nature of things. God being what God is—love—and we being what we are—sin—the cross was inevitable. The cross is the price God pays to get to us in spite of our sins. Dorothy Sayre says: “The Christian faith is God taking His own medicine.” If the medicine we take as a result of our sins is bitter, and God made it so, then at the cross God does take God’s own medicine. And it was bitter, for “the sin and sorrow of the world was forced through the channel of a single heart.” And that heart broke—on the cross.
But someone objects, “If God suffers then God is unhappy, if God is unhappy God is imperfect, and God imperfect isn’t God.” But this is based on a misunderstanding. The law of happiness in this universe seems to be this: The happiest people in the world are the people who deliberately take on themselves sorrow and pain in behalf of others. Their hearts sing in the midst of the suffering—sing with a strange, quiet joy. On the other hand the most miserable people of the world are the people who think of nothing and do nothing except for themselves. They are the center of misery—automatically. A God who would sit in awful isolation, apart from the tragedy of pain and sin in the world, and contemplate God’s own perfection would be a miserable, unhappy God. But the God of the cross—the God who deliberately takes on our sin and sorrow at deep cost—would be a God of infinite joy, the joy of saving others at God’s cost—the deepest joy this universe knows.
O God, my Father, you drank the poison of my sin that I might ambrosia taste. Let me put to my lips the cup of others this day that I may taste their sorrow and at the same moment taste your Joy—the Joy of redemption. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My joys will be not what happens to me, but what happens through me.