EASTER GLORY

The next few days of this week will be very rich spiritually. They will bring us the great central truths of the faith – Jesus’ death on the cross and Jesus’ resurrection. We can never meditate on them enough. Take time for that this week!



Last week’s column highlighted Jesus’ proclamation of judgement on Jerusalem. This week’s column highlights Jesus taking judgement on himself. Not because he in any way deserved it. Quite the contrary! It fell on him because he voluntarily offered himself as a "guilt offering" for all humanity (Isaiah 53). But, as Isaiah reminds us, the reality underlying such a sacrifice is that whoever becomes such a guilt offering has to bear the guilt and punishment of humanity upon himself. This is what the cross of Jesus was all about.He came under judgement, judgement for sin.


There is, therefore, no more stark a place to see the meaning, reality and horror of judgement than the in the death of Jesus. Indeed, if we do not see judgement clearly in that death, we can never see clearly how much we owe to him and how deeply he loves us. Salvation is meaningful only when we understand what we have been saved from. Many have tried to soften the blow of Calvary, because talk of judgement is offensive to modern ears. But to refuse to acknowledge that "he became sin for us – he who knew no sin" is to rob both the Father and Jesus of their glory.
Every judgement that God sends on a wayward humanity, be it plague, famine war or earthquake, is devastating and horrific. But those expressions of judgement in this world are but warnings of a greater and final judgement - the judgement of being cut off from the very source of life, peace and joy and well being, and entering an eternal desolation, cut off from the presence of God. There may be a way back from famine, plague and war; there is no way back from the ultimate judgement.



It is precisely this cup of judgement that Jesus drank as he died on the cross. This is revealed in one great cry, shouted out at the end of the three hours of physical darkness that gripped the world and the three hours of spiritual desolation that tormented Jesus. The cry was, "My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?" Jesus knew he was forsaken; God’s presence was gone. He could not reach it and the sense of loss and desolation was total. Neither could he understand why it had gone; he was blinded during that time to the fact that he was dying for sin, blinded to what he had previously known that "he would see of the travail of his would and be satisfied" (Isaiah 53:). In other words he was blinded to the truth that the dereliction would end simply because there was no revelation from God during those awful three hours. In a sense the three hours were an eternity of indescribable suffering of utter abandonment. It had been the contemplation at Gethsemane of this absolute forsakenness that made him sweat drops of blood and feel deep agony, but at Gethsemane he had at least known it would have an end. There on the cross for him there seemed no end, and no explanation. But we know now that He bore our judgement.



It is for this that that the praises of heaven will rings out eternally for Jesus. It is on account of this that we shall be involved in those praises in resurrection bodies. Doubtless coming to terms with the deeply challenging truth of the judgement of God will stretch many a person’s innermost thinking. But it is a vital truth to face up to and to accept.



Bob



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JESUS – PROPHET TO THE NATION

This coming Sunday is Palm Sunday, the Sunday before the crucifixion. Palm Sunday was the start of four days intensive of prophetic warning by Jesus to the Jewish nation and to Jerusalem.

Jesus began that Sunday by riding a donkey down the hill from Olivet into Jerusalem, declaring himself prophetically the King of Peace. However, he stopped half way down, with Jerusalem spread out before him, and, seemingly incongruously, prophesied the destruction of the city. It was a prophetic lament, spoken with tears. It was detailed; the city would be besieged and taken; not one stone would be left on another; the people, including children, would likewise be destroyed. For even as he rode the donkey it was rejecting his offer of peace.

The next day, Monday, Jesus cursed a fig tree that bore no fruit. It withered and died. The fig tree was the historic symbol of the nation, and Jesus was clearly enacting in stark parabolic manner what was to happen to a nation in which he could find no fruit. He followed this up by going on to cleanse the Temple, and with violence, saying it had become “a den of robbers”. In so doing, he was giving a foretaste of what was to come.

In the two or three days that followed Jesus would not allow this strong prophetic theme of judgement to rest. Using parables he spoke directly and at length with the rulers of the nation about their fate. In the parable of the tenants he told them about the tenants of a vineyard who refused to give the owner the fruit due to him, and who successively ill treated the owner’s servants and finally killed his son in order to get the vineyard for themselves. Consequently their end was to be destruction. It was abundantly clear to the rulers that the parable was directed at them. Jesus went on to pronounce seven lengthy and severe woes on the teachers of the law and the Pharisees, concluding with another lament for Jerusalem, “O Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets, how often have I longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks but you were not willing. Look your house is left to you desolate”. Finally, in his “Apocalyptic Discourse” Jesus, gazing at the majestic Temple, the wonder of Jerusalem, prophesied that not one stone would be left standing on another.

All this should not be seen simply as a hard act of condemnation by Jesus, but rather as a persistent attempt to get the leaders to see the predicament that faced them and to repent. It was a last attempt to save the nation, an act of grace. The destruction had to come if the nation continued to reject him and the things that belonged to its peace. Jesus did not want that. Sadly the national leaders not merely rejected him, but crucified him. The destruction therefore came, exactly as Jesus prophesied, It came in AD 70 with a Roman siege and appalling destruction and loss of life. That is what judgement meant.

Thus Jesus towered over the nation as prophet to the nation in the last week of his earthly life. He was the Amos of his day, the Jeremiah of his own generation, and had the same message. There was reluctance and heartbreak in the message because judgement is an utterly devastating matter and not something God seeks. This truth of judgement seems almost obscured from our own generation – the reality and appalling nature of judgement. The awfulness of sin, the appalling consequences of rejecting God and his Christ, and the consequences of disdaining the peace-giving commandments of God are not registered very deeply by a self indulgent generation, even a consumer Christian generation. This message of the horror of judgement, however, was going to be brought to humanity even more deeply in the death of Jesus on the Friday of that same week.

For our generation the cross this Easter will be more important a meditation than ever. We cannot treat the things of God lightly, nor the awful fact of judgement – that is the message our own nation finds difficult to read.

Bob

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"THEY WILL PERSECUTE YOU'

When Jesus looked down the course of history and prophesied earthquakes, famines, plagues and nations at war with each other, he also added a further major characteristic; the persecution of his followers. His accuracy with regard to such persecution through the ages is on a par with his accuracy on the other characteristics. Like them persecution does not in itself constitute a mark of the end of world history, but as with them we may anticipate a marked increase in the incidence of persecution as history reaches a conclusion.

In the book of Revelation there is a very graphic explanation of the dynamic behind this persecution (Rev. 12). John, the author, saw a Dragon ready to pounce on a child about to be born, a child who was to rule the nations (quite evidently Jesus). The child, however, was snatched away from the Dragon to the throne of God. The woman who gave birth to the child fled to the wilderness and was protected. The Dragon, however, made continuous war against her, and against the followers of her child. This is an astonishing prophetic vision of the historic persecution of the Jewish nation (the woman) and the Christian church. It is a persecution rooted in the struggle between Satanic forces and the Kingdom of God and his Christ. It would last throughout the ages, and could be expected to climax as the ages came to a close.

This prophecy explains a number of features evident in the persecution of Christians. It explains first why such persecution comes from every conceivable human “power base” on the earth. The “Prince of this World”, (as in effect Jesus described the Dragon), exerts his rule by force, fear and oppression from any religious, ideological, political base under his control, wherever that may be in the world. That control is widespread and where he exercises it persecution will come. The prophecy explains the dogged persistence of persecution throughout the ages. It explains the viciousness of it and the hatred that so often accompanies it. It explains why, as the gospel reaches more and more to the end of the earth, persecution is likely to escalate in extent and intensity. It explains why the church suffers so much persecution where it grows the fastest.

So, historically, we find that persecution attacked the Christian church from the very first, and from such diverse sources as the Jewish religious leadership and pagan Roman rulers. Even when Christianity became the religion of the Roman Empire persecution raised its head in bitter in-fighting among Christians. The mediaeval Catholic Church degenerated into an appallingly oppressive political power base and became the perpetrator of unbelievably inhuman persecution against genuine spiritual Christianity. In modern times it is not simply other religions like Islam, Hinduism or Buddhism that have been the persecution centres, but, perhaps even more so, the secular ideological totalitarian dictatorships such as Russia and China.

The appalling widespread persecution of Christians across the world today is, therefore a remarkable endorsement of the prophetic scenario sketched out by Jesus for world history up to the end times. What has happened and what is happening is precisely as he foretold. However, despite the certainty it gives us of the ultimate triumph of the Kingdom and of the church of Christ, persecution remains very much part of the “beginnings of sorrows”, and it calls for much prayer for those most exposed to it.

There has never been a time of greater need for intercession for those suffering for the sake of the gospel. Thank God this is reflected in the fact that there are more agencies getting involved in such intercession than ever before. The church needs to take it to heart.

As a postscript, one might add that the prophetic vision from Revelation, pointing as it does at the constant attempt of the dragon to destroy the mother of the child born to rule has much to teach us concerning the nature of the vicious and persistent anti-Semitism that the world has witnessed down the ages, since that mother clearly personifies Israel.

Bob

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