I invite you dear reader to read Luke 13:1-4 before reading this article.
Now...Imagine spending 33 years preparing for 1 day. Imagine spending your entire life in intense training and mental, spiritual, emotional and physical conditioning for one moment. Imagine even beyond that, existing as an immortal God, transcendent and residing in eternity. Imagine that you have to sit with the sorrow of losing your greatest and most treasured creation. Now think for a second, God is perfect. This means that he loves with a perfect love, free of vice or flaws or imperfections, and he also feels perfect emotions. This means that God experiences something a human mind can never comprehend, perfect pain...perfect grief.
Grief has been known to claim the soul of many a good person. I’m certain that you dear reader have experienced the sadness and sorrow that comes with losing someone you love to sickness, drugs or death. Sometimes the person hasn’t even died, yet we mourn a divorce tearing apart a marriage or love lost in a failed relationship. It could be a child who left home with strained relations or a relative that migrated, the point remains, we lose friendships, jobs, money, things and we mourn. These losses don’t even remotely come close to how God’s heart bleeds for humanity.
He made us. His prime jewel, his best work, his masterpiece. He was so vested in this art that He put himself in it; making us in HIS image and likeness. The first and only beings ever to be made like Him. Such beauty. He then went and took things a step further, pouring himself into human flesh, the omniscient one, all knowing, all powerful, magnificent Lord, creator God and maker of all things poured Himself into that which was made in order to save what He made. He saw the threats that Satan presented and decided to die to save his creation.
Jesus lived to Die. Not just suffer a while, not just undergo moderate to mild discomfort, DIE. How many times have you died? How many things would you die for? What or who, if anyone or anything, could compel you to give your life up permanently and plunge headlong into the void of cessation? We were His reason. His humans. He had to save us, and came he did, live he did and die he did. 33 years of life on earth all with one singular purpose- save ALL humanity. NOT SOME, NOT MOST, ALL.
Isn’t it incredible that when he scanned the timeline of all time from his throne in eternity, he saw not one single life that wasn’t worth saving. So, he came, he lived, he died to save humanity. Now what Crushed his heart was having to do all this knowing full well many if not most would still perish without Him. Recent events have opened my eyes, ears and heart anew to how much we matter to God and how much he loves us. The fact that ANYONE dies without Him actually has the effect of making God feel like he’s failed…he cannot fail…he never fails…. but imagine spending 33 years preparing for one task:
Save every human being
...And having to witness time after sad time when your sacrifice goes in vain…it is like experiencing the excruciating crucifixion again and again. So, you’ve now died millions of times, passion of the Christ on replay mode kind of death, great. Sigh.
Yet what adds grief to his already sorrow-laden heart is this, imagine your own children, redeemed by your death and resurrection, gloat, laugh and celebrate a fallen human. Why? Because they did horrible things. By human reasoning that is satisfactory, by God wisdom that is beyond reprehensible.
How does a fallen being exult in the demise of another fallen being? You taught us about these things with parables such as the one about the wicked servant who forgot how much he was forgiven and went to strangle his colleague because His colleague owed him.
It’s fine to rejoice that tyranny has ended and I endorse and encourage the celebration of God terminating evil. The balance is that we do not celebrate the death of any human made by God in His image.
Prayer
Lord.
We are sorry.
We repent for breaking your heart again with our callousness and merciless behavior.
Visit us with your heart Lord.
Won’t you show us how you feel?
We need to know how you feel. Won’t you break our stubborn, dead hearts of stone and replace it with your living, feeling, sensitive one? ...
The chilling truth is that hell rejoices when anyone dies without salvation…
Heaven rejoices when ONE soul is saved…
Hell rejoices in those lost…heaven rejoices in those saved.
So, when God’s children laugh at the death of a human without salvation…. who are we laughing with?