Donald Wickham’s Blog

I have been reading (actually for the 3rd time) Wayne Jacobsen’s “He Loves Me!” It has been a huge help to me and, I hope, would be for you. Here is an excerpt.

What if you had a young child who was diagnosed with a rare blood disease? The doctors tell you that the disease is almost unheard of in children. Though they have a form of chemotherapy that would cleanse your child’s blood and restore him to health, the drug is too strong for the child’s undeveloped body to withstand the dose necessary to cure him. In other words, the cure would kill him before it healed him.

But there is a way around that, they say. They could transplant his blood into your own. You would then contract the disease and they could administer the chemotherapy into your blood. Though it would make you excruciatingly ill and eventually kill you, the therapy would produce antigens in your blood that could then be transplanted to your child’s body and cleanse him of his disease. Would you do it? Most parents wouldn’t hesitate for a second.

Neither did God. This was his opportunity to destroy the power of sin and liberate those who had been captives to it all their lives. The onlookers at Golgotha that day saw only a man experiencing the agonizing death of crucifixion. They did not know that the Sinless One had been made into sin for them and that the physical pains of the cross only reflected in human terms what transpired in God’s eternity.

It seems that the cup of wrath was lifted to his lips and Jesus drank of it fully, letting it eat away at sin itself. He drank it to the end, letting wrath war against sin until sin succumbed to the power of God and was consumed in him.

How can we even imagine the battle that ravaged his soul during those hours? We have glimpses of it certainly, bout only that. Jesus not only entered the utter depths. Of the pain, darkness, shame and anguish to which sin can drive humanity, but he also endured the full weight of God’s being warring against that sin to its utter destruction.

The first we can relate to in part because we all have tasted of sin and its painful and destructive consequences. The latter we will never have to experience if we accept his death as our own. For he has already borne in himself what we could never have borne and survived. He endured such hostility against himself because he was committed to our freedom from the power of sin.

When I consider just how unfair it might have been for God to have created that tree in Eden that causes so much grief and pain, I have only to look at the cross. How could he put that tree there? Because he had already determined that he would pay the greatest price for the stumbling block it would be for Adam and Eve. Even in giving us the freedom to trust him or trust ourselves, God already knew that he would suffer most for our choice. Somehow to him, the glory of fellowship with his created ones outweighed the price he would pay to set things right.

By enduring to the end, Jesus allowed sin to be fully conquered in him. Its spell over humanity was broken, and no longer does anyone have to be consumed by sin itself or God’s wrath against it. The antidote not only worked in him, but it produced in his blood a fountain of life as well. Transfused into any person who desire it, his blood can cleanse us of sin and reunite us with God himself—fulfilling the dream that he had when he first decided to create man and woman and place them in the center of his creation. (pages 121-123)

Tags:   anitdote · cleanse us of sin · conquered sin · cup of wrath · disease · Drinking the cup · fellowship · glory of fellowship · God · He loves me · health · Jesus · sin · Wayne JacobsenNo Comments