Week 13—Saturday Hebrews 9:26-28
Week 13—SATURDAY
GOD NEVER INTENDED JESUS TO BE CRUCIFIED?
The cross is not an afterthought, an expedient to turn a tragedy into supposed triumph. One prominent minister thinks it was: “God never intended Jesus to be crucified. He intended that He should be followed.” Or as Dr. Albert Schweitzer puts it, in essence: “Jesus expected the Kingdom to come at Jerusalem. And when it didn’t He died on the cross of a broken heart, crying ‘My God, my God why hast thou forsaken me?’ But in dying He left an ethic of love.” And that’s all. And it would have been all, if that were all there were to it. The movement would have died with his death. A life movement cannot live upon a dead Christ.
Instead of the cross being an afterthought, something read back into the account by loving hearts to save it, I am persuaded that the cross is written into the texture of our own beings. It is, as someone has said, “the ground plan of the universe.” Life is built upon it—the sacrifice of the one for the other.
Not long ago I was at the place in Japan where they showed me a mirror used during the persecution of the Christians. Since Christian worship was forbidden, the Christians would sit in a room and let the sun shine upon this mirror, and it would throw the outline of Jesus hanging on the cross upon the ceiling or wall. The cross was wrought into the structure of the mirror. If a strange person came in they simply turned the mirror over. As we throw the light of investigation upon the facts of nature, do we find the cross coming out as the very ground plan of the universe? Yes! The cross is in our blood. The white corpuscles circulate through the blood looking for infection. When they find it they absorb it, if possible. If not, they throw themselves against the infection and die that the rest of the body might live. The pus that comes off is the corpses of the white corpuscles which have died that the rest might live. The principle and practice of the cross is in our blood.
O Son of the Most High, you are revealing the Most High through the most low—revealing God through the cross. We look up through the cross and see what you are like and see through you what our Father is like. And what we see sends us to our knees. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: If the cross is in my blood, it will be in my will.