In considering the
material and physical realms of the universe-the
subject of our last two studies-we have not yet
raised the issue of the nature of time and eternity.
Let's touch on this as we meditate on the meaning of
Easter and the death of Jesus on the cross.
In the
Garden
The night Jesus
was betrayed closed a long, full day after his final
Passover meal with his disciples. In the Garden of
Gethsemane that same night, Jesus endured a terrible
emotional and spiritual ordeal in prayer before His
Father. The writer of Hebrews records this: "In the
days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and
supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who
was able to save him from death, and he was heard
for his godly fear. Although he was a Son, he
learned obedience through what he suffered...."
(Hebrews 5:7,8)
"There-with only
Peter, James and John nearby-Jesus experienced a
protracted period of excruciating torment of spirit
which found expression in groanings... and streaming
tears, and ended in a terrible sweat, almost like
blood. There is a great mystery here. Jesus seems to
face the experience with puzzlement and deep unrest
of heart. For the first time in his ministry, he
appeals to his own disciples for help, asking them
to watch and pray for him. He confesses being deeply
troubled in his spirit. Each of his three prayers
questions the necessity for this experience and each
is addressed to the one who could save him from
death.
"Luke tells us
that before the third prayer, an angel was sent to
strengthen him... His cry to the Father was one of
such desperate need that the Father answered by
strengthening him through an angel. But when the
angel had finished, the third and most terrible
experience began. The author implies that Jesus
faced the emotional misery which sin produces: its
shame, guilt and despair. He felt the iron bands of
sin's enslaving power. He was oppressed by a sense
of hopelessness, total discouragement and utter
defeat. He is anticipating the moment on the cross
when he would be forsaken of the Father, since he
would then be bearing the sin of the world as though
it were his own.
"The very thought
of it crushed his heart as in a winepress. No sinner
on earth has ever felt the stain and shame of sin as
he did. He understood exactly the same feeling we
have (in much lesser degree) when we are angry with
ourselves and so filled with shame and self-loathing
that we cannot believe that God can do anything but
hate us for our evil. Jesus knows what that is like.
He went the whole way and took the full brunt. We
will never pass through a Gethsemane as torturous as
he did. He saw our sins as his own, and thus
fulfilled beyond any other priest's experience the
ability to deal gently with others' sins since he
was so fully aware of the sense of personal
defilement sin leaves." (Ray C. Stedman, Commentary
on Hebrews,
http://www.pbc.org/dp/stedman/hebrews2/)
The
Crucifixion
After the prayer
in the Garden, Jesus was up the rest of that night,
without sleep, enduring cross-examination,
scourging, beating, cruel mockery and unspeakable
brutality. He was already greatly weakened when he
carried his cross, stumbling, early the next morning
to the place of crucifixion alongside the main
public highway-probably just outside the Damascus
Gate.
Medical doctors
and forensic experts have written books about the
common Roman form of execution-death by crucifixion.
Often the dying process took several days. The
nailing of hands and feet forced the victim to push
up against the weight of his own body to take a
single breath.
In the hot
sun, terrible thirst ensued and death came, in most
cases, from suffocation amidst great pain. The
victim was also naked and humiliated-death on the
cross was reserved for the most wretched of all
criminals.1
A superficial
reading of the gospel narratives concerning the
death of Jesus will show that He was nailed to the
cross at 9 o'clock in the morning, and was dead by 3
in the afternoon. It would seem off hand that his
ordeal, terrible as it was, was completed in a mere
six hours. This, however, is not the full story. We
must look behind the scenes.
What
Happened on the Cross?
Paul in his letter
to the Colossians tells us about invisible events
taking place, beyond the physical realm and outside
of our ordinary space-time continuum, during the
dying of Jesus on the cross: "...in Christ all the
fulness of God was pleased to dwell, and through
him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on
earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood
of his cross. And you, who once were estranged and
hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now
reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in
order to present you holy and blameless and
irreproachable before him." (Col 1:19-22)
When He died for
us on the cross, Jesus met fully the onslaught of
demons, fallen angels, and all the power of evil
forces in the heavens, disarming all of them
completely-because "in Christ God was reconciling
all things to Himself." Jesus' victory over
man's greatest enemy - death - is boldly announced
in the letter to the Hebrews: "Since therefore the
children share in flesh and blood, he himself
likewise partook of the same nature, that through
death he might destroy him who has the power of
death, that is, the devil, and deliver all those who
through fear of death were subject to lifelong
bondage." (Heb 2:14,15)
It is for the
final outworking in history
of Satan's defeat at the cross that we now eagerly
await. What is the completed work of Christ on the
cross in the eternal time frame will come
to pass in human history at God's appointed time on
our earthly calendars. Time, you see, does not
"flow" at the same rate nor has the same "content"
in heaven as it does on earth.
The
Lamb of God
The greatest
mystery of Christ's passion concerns the transaction
in eternity that took place between the sinless Son
of God and His heavenly Father. Jesus was, for the
first three hours on the cross, our Great High
Priest. From noon till 3 P.M. (during which time a
strange and terrible darkness came over the
earth-Luke 23:44), the High Priest became the
Sacrifice. In being made sin for us, in literally
taking the sins of the world upon Himself, Jesus
became a vile and loathsome thing, cut off from God
and man-not just in time but also in eternity.2
The work of Jesus
on the cross, as far as we are concerned, is
completely finished. Jesus is not now hanging on a
cross. He has been raised from the dead, and sits in
heaven, fully in charge of the universe as a
resurrected man. One man, one son of Adam, Jesus the
Lord is now living in glory and He is presentlyin
charge of the universe. But in another sense, if we
could step into eternity and view an eternal being
such as the Son of God experiencing all things - if
we could see things from the vantage point of
heaven-we would perceive that a part of the eternal
God must suffer forever, outside of time, because of
human sin.
All the obvious
physical pain of Jesus, recorded by observers who
wrote the Bible, was but the prelude to His real
outside-of-time suffering, which involved being cut
off forever from the Father's love and presence.
Jesus was consigned to carry our sins out of the
universe; He had to go to hell on our behalf, as it
were. Jesus was banished forever like the scapegoat
of the Old Covenant Law (Lev 16:10).
We live in fallen
and mortal bodies, able to die. Jesus was not like
us-He had known no sin, his body was sinless and He
need not die. Yet, by His own choice, He became sin
by absorbing evil into his own person. It was no
mere mortal who bore our sins, but the Son of God
Himself, He whose basic existence is and always was
to live in eternity. Jesus carried our sins out of
time and into eternity.
A paradox
concerning the nature of time and eternity is the
possibility that neither heaven nor hell are yet
populated-all believers reach heaven at the same
"time." The dying thief, Stephen the first martyr,
the Apostle John-and all the rest of us-may arrive
in heaven at precisely the same "instant." When a
person in our time frame dies, he or she leaves time
and enters eternity and "in a moment, in the
twinkling of an eye," that person "time travels"
instantly ahead to the event called the Rapture. By
the way, if heaven is still empty, except for Jesus,
as seen from our vantage point in time, prayers to
Mary or St. Jude or any of the saints are pointless.
As far as eternity is concerned, we may all get to
heaven at the same "time."
To confuse you
even further I might add that in another sense all
believers are already in heaven in
spirit and soul, though not in body (see Eph 2
and Heb 12:18-29). Without our new resurrection
bodies, however, we cannot experience
heaven in all its fullness. Yet, since heaven
surrounds us on all sides, we are really already
there in spirit. All that is lacking is the
transformation of our perishing outer bodies!
The
Eternal Aspects of the Cross
Paul the Apostle
wrote in his Corinthian letters about the
"fellowship of Christ's sufferings" and of making up
in his own body what is lacking in the sufferings of
Christ for the sake of his body; that is, the
church. He spoke of "always bearing about in the
body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus
might be revealed in us...."
Paul said these
things long after Jesus had risen from the dead and
ascended into heaven where He now rules, His work on
the cross having been completed and finished. The
Apostle understood that there is an aspect of the
cross that is, indeed, eternal. The crucifixion was
one of those important points in our one-dimensional
time frame when eternity broke through the normal
flow of history and changed everything forever,
sending ripples backwards and forwards in time.
There are other
hints about Jesus in eternity. He is spoken of in
the book of Revelation as the "Lamb slain before the
foundation of the world." Peter writes, "You know
that you were ransomed from the futile ways
inherited from your fathers, not with perishable
things such as silver or gold, but with the precious
blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without blemish
or spot. He was destined before the foundation of
the world but was made manifest at the end of the
times for your sake." (1 Pet 1:18-20)
Without in any way
diminishing the work of Christ on the cross as
finished, completed, and accomplished in space-time
and in history, it is possible to say that a part of
God suffers eternally for man's sins. From Scripture
we learn that a holy God must ultimately be just. He
must ultimately remove evil in all its forms from
His presence. Those persons who have permanently
rebelled against His gracious mercy cannot cease to
exist after death, but remain eternally conscious in
a place of everlasting, endless punishment. And the
loving God who created us surely suffers infinitely
more than any human parent when a beloved child
refuses the good and chooses a path leading to hurt,
harm and self-destruction. Surely it must be
grievously painful for God (who is love) to be
denied the opportunity to give of Himself to the
objects of His love.
And no man
can suffer more than Christ has already suffered;
nor are our sufferings, however great, something
Christ has not already experienced.3
"God's kindness is meant to lead us to repentance,"
says Paul (Rom 2:4). "Therefore let us be grateful
for receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, and
thus let us offer to God acceptable worship with
reverence and awe, for our God is a consuming fire."
(Heb 12:28, 29) The same fires which heal, purify
and warm the righteous are the consuming,
everlasting burnings of Gehenna-where beings who
refused to become the human persons they were
designed to be must finally endure the "backside" of
God's love-which is hell. C.S. Lewis gathers all
this up very well in these words from Mere
Christianity:
"God is going to
invade this earth in force. But what is the good of
saying you are on his side then, when you see the
whole natural universe melting away like a dream and
something else-something it never entered your head
to conceive-comes crashing in; something so
beautiful to some of us, and so terrible to others,
that none of us will have any choice left? For this
time it will be God without disguise; something so
overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible
love or irresistible horror into every creature. It
will be too late then to choose your side. There is
no use saying you choose to lie down when it has
become impossible to stand up. That will not be the
time for choosing; it will be the time when we
discover which side we really have chosen, whether
we realized it before or not. Now, today, this
moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God
is holding back, to give us that chance. It will not
last forever; we must take it or leave it."
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