It was a dark day. My world was about to be turned upside down. As I sat down with my fiancée (we had been dating for two years through high school and college) she told me her reason for breaking up with me. At first I believed her but then I doubted. Finally she confessed that she had met someone else and didn’t love me anymore.
The pain that she caused felt unbearable. The following three months were chaotic. I couldn’t concentrate on my classes, my friends didn’t want to be around me because I was so angry and I was depressed. One night I went for a walk and cried out to God as I lay on the ground in agony, "Why God"?
God was using my rejection and pain to bring me closer to Him. Two thousand years before this He used His son’s rejection and pain to make it possible for all to know Him. As Jesus hung on the cross he cried out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me"?
He was alone. His closest friends and followers had turned away from him. The crowds that had only a few days before given him a king’s welcome, now mocked and insulted him. Even His Heavenly Father had rejected him.
Yet this was why he had come. Everything that he had done before this, lead up to this. Healing the sick, feeding the five thousand, teaching his followers and touching the unclean were only means to an end. Not the end of his life, but the beginning – the beginning of forgiveness and being in intimate fellowship with the God of creation.
Why did Jesus go through all of the pain and suffering even to the point of declining to drink the wine and gall which would deaden the pain? Hebrews 12:2 says, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God".
There was joy before him. The joy of one day being able to sit down at the right hand of the throne of God, his Father. Not only that, but the joy of knowing that he made it possible for you and for me to sit at the throne of God and call Him Abba, Father.
Read the lesson here.
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