Newsletter March 19, 2008
From the Senior Pastor . . .
Our English word “passion” comes from the Latin word for suffering. This is why we call the eight days between Palm Sunday and Easter the week of our Lord’s passion.
I know some of you have seen Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ. I know for many its graphic display of the brutal torture and horrible death suffered by our Lord is too gruesome to watch. I can’t recommend that you see this movie. But those who have know the powerful visceral impact it has upon the viewer.
But physical pain was not the greatest cause of our Lord’s suffering.
Tim Keller points out in his new book, The Reason for God, that there have been others who have suffered physically more than Jesus suffered. There have been others who endured torture and deaths far more horrible than what Jesus endured.
The passion of our Lord was not simply physical. As He prays in the garden, He wrestled with the horrible reality that He soon must drink from the cup of God’s wrath. What troubles Jesus most deeply is knowing that as He drinks from this cup He will find Himself cut off from the Father.
He who had no sin became sin for us. As the Bearer of our sin, He finds Himself forsaken by the Father, as He dies the death of the damned.
But then, as He dies, this is His cry: “It is finished.”
The penalty has been paid. By grace through faith we are forgiven, pardoned, redeemed, and justified. We were once separated from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel, foreigners to the covenant, without hope and without God. But now, we are God’s dearly beloved, recipients of a sure and certain hope, members of the covenant community, citizens of Israel, for by His blood Christ has purchased us for Himself, and nothing will ever separate us from His love.
How special it is that he was born while Linda’s parents were visiting with us. Malachi is Jon and Heather’s fifth son. In baseball lingo they are five for five.
My mother-in-law is the sixth child of eleven children born to Linda’s Grandma and Grandpa Cross. Malachi is approximately their 305th descendant. Now that’s what I call being fruitful and multiplying.
I also like to point out that at this moment more than one-tenth of the Cross clan are Caineses, while more than one-fourth are Jacksons. I share that information with you just in case anyone was asking.
Malachi is also our twentieth grandchild, my mother’s twenty-second great-grandchild, and Mom and Pa Jackson’s fortieth great-grandchild.
Around 2:30 Monday afternoon, Malachi Edward Harris was born. He weighed in at eight pounds and six ounces and was twenty-one and a half inches long. As I write this article we haven’t yet been to the hospital to see him, but we’ll be leaving soon.
What an unthinkable moment. What an unimaginable horror. God the Father turns His back upon the God the Son. For some theologians, this is what we are speaking of when we confess to believe that He descended into hell, for whatever else hell may be, it is most certainly separation from God.
And when that moment comes, it will provoke from Him these horrible words: “My God, my God, why have you forsake me?”
Pastor Caines