"When your children shall say to you, What do you mean by this service? You shall say, It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover, for He passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when He slew the Egyptians but spared our houses. And the people bowed their heads and worshiped." (Exodus 12:26, 27 Amplified Bible)
"What do you mean by this....?" The Bible is quite clear-- "It is the sacrifice of the Lord's Passover....Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us." The Passover lamb that night was but a foreshadow, a type of the coming One, "the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"
Yet what occurred in those few hours, from the suffering in Gethsemane, to the Cross, the Tomb, would seem like the ultimate miscarriage of justice---- His the pain and suffering, ours' the guilt, His the, "outer darkness," ours' the wretched sin. As Bernard of Clairvaux would write many centuries later, "Mine, mine, the transgression, but Thine the deadly pain. Lo, here I fall, my Savior!" 'Tis I deserve Thy place."
The Hebrew writer says something which too often escapes us. "During the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death." Why the, "loud cries and tears"? As Jesus looked into the "cup," He saw my sin, the deserved, awful torment in the fires of Hell, the deserved judgment pronounced. It was now His to bear-- "all for sinners slain."
Some people may argue this, but I embrace the Creed, "He descended into Hell." What else could Jesus do? That was our end. And in order to redeem us, "from the curse of the law," and the fires of Hell, Jesus had to go to the prison of the accursed to set us free. His was no shout of deliverance from Heaven's precipice, the safety and ease of "The Ivory Palaces." His was the sacrifice sprinkled, "on the mercy seat and before the mercy seat," and that of the goat driven into the wilderness, alone to suffer the agony of starvation or to be torn apart by beasts. This was what awaited Jesus that night, and, "It is a night to be much observed unto the LORD for bringing them out [of sin, suffering, and death]: this is that night of the LORD to be observed of all the children of Israel in their generations."
I have sent a complete version of, "Oh, Sacred Head Now Wounded," to our Devotional Blog Site. I know not what more to pray. Amen.
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Devotional Blog: www.apfdevotionals.blogspot.com
When an 18 year old Norwegian "heard the call to evangelize China, he not only emptied his wallet into the collection plate, but included a small note with the words, 'and my life.'"
"Looking Unto Jesus"
Hebrews 12:2
