1 John 4:10, “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
My dad passed away a year ago at the age of 92. My mother proceeded him by just a few months. Dad and Mom had been married 72 years. My father didn’t die of illness or accident; he just stopped eating. Without my mom at his side, there was no reason to go on.
This isn’t a new story. We hear it quite often. Love is such a powerful force that it can cause one to die from a broken heart. By the will of God that, I should go the same way.
Dane Ortlund, in his book Gentle and Lowly, describes the death of Christ on the cross as not physical death but one of a broken heart. He talks about Christ taking on the sum-total penalty for every lustful thought and deed coming from the heart of God’s people over eternity. He asks what physical torture is compared to the total weight of centuries of cumulative wrath absorbed? He goes on to talk about how it was the withdrawal of God’s love from His heart, not the withdrawal of oxygen from His lungs, that killed Him.
1 John 4:16, “We have come to know and have believed the love which God has for us. God is love, and the one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.”
This is a thought that is hard for me to comprehend. I know the anxiety and fear that follows every sin. It is either the remorse of my doing or fear of being found out. No sin goes unpunished or unnoticed. Every sin carries its price. We, as mere humans, begin to rationalize that it is the cost of being alive. No person is without sin or escapes their sin’s consequences.
“No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” – C.S. Lewis
What if I had to carry the weight and consequences of not only my sin but the sin of my family; or my town. What if it was only my country? If I lose sleep over my actions, how much more sleep do I lose if I know and accept the burden of the sins of others.
I have often thought of Christ’s death for me as a transaction. My sin sat upon a table; God, through Christ, dished out currency and took my sin away. The currency was Christ’s death on the cross. When I read about the horrors of Christ’s suffering before the crucifixion, I thought it described how high that price was. My focus was on physical death. That was an enormous price for someone to pay for an undeserving soul like me.
John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. “
Dane Ortlund painted a different picture. It was a picture not of physical pain but emotional pain. When I think of losing someone dear to me, it is a deep throbbing pain that no prescription will erase. People turn to medication, drugs, and alcohol to deaden it. Like my dad, we can lose our desire to live.
Christ did that not just for you but for all of His people for all time.
John 13:1, “Having loved His own who were in the world, He loved them to the end.”
Doing it for just one person takes more emotional strength than I can imagine. What was it like to feel all the fear and anxiety for everyone who lived? To do this freely because of His enormous love for those people. Every anguished cry across the millennia was being recapitulated and fulfilled through Christ. The voices in His head, the cries, the wailing, and their remorse all descending on Him to snuff out His light.
Christ did this without wavering. He looked directly into the very depths of Hell and did not wince. He saw the horde of evil descending on Him, and He marched on. My heart cries out for that level of love.
Today, we look within ourselves to see if Christ’s sacrifice was in vain. He died of a broken heart because of us. Can we say that the lives we are living are worth it?
1 John 4:11, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another?”