FROM the Old Testament we learn what the New withholds, to wit: the inward condition of Jesus’ mind and heart during the increase of anguish in His death struggle.
The Evangelists truly tell us what Jesus cried out from the cross; but not what lay back of that cry; not from where that call, that anxious cry was born.
This they could not do. Nothing was seen of this; this could not be overheard; and to add anything fanciful to it, they had too much reverence for the suffering of their Lord.
But there was no need of this, for it had already been recorded.
The Messiah Himself by the Holy Ghost already had described most touchingly, with bold outline, in striking language, the inner enervation of His strength of soul. He was not like one of us. He had not taken that suffering upon Himself, without knowing what it implied. He had not faced the cross, half ignorant of what it really would be, so that, when He came to it, He was half confused by the dreadfulness of this anguish. No, that would have been unworthy of His Divine Majesty. He, the Son, took nothing upon Himself, save what He had beforehand fathomed in all its depth, had measured in all its compass, yea, had beforehand lived through and suffered through in every particular.
And from that living-through and suffering-through in the spirit flowed the soul-stirring complaint, which in Psalm twenty-two the Holy Spirit had drawn from David’s lips, when on the mountains of Judah he began the heart-rending lamentation of: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me, being so far distant from helping me, from the voice of my roaring!”
Thus, would you know, what Jesus inwardly, has lived through beforehand, and has finally endured on the cross, then do not rest content with the Gospels, but turn back to Isaiah fifty-three and to Psalm twenty-two. Why, oh, why is there no place given to those deep passion-songs in passion-preaching?
ONE of the features, which we catch from the passion-psalm is Jesus’ inward faintness, prostration and exhaustion. The Holy Spirit portrays it as before our eyes in vss. 15 and 16, and He does it in a number of images, in an overwhelming abundance of thoughts, as though to make you realize, how incapable language is, to describe the utmost inward succumbency of the Messiah.
While alive the Lord feels as though He were already buried, for He moans: “Thou layest me in the dust of death”; His soul can not voice its sorrows in complaint, for “His tongue cleaveth to His jaws”; His tears refuse to flow, for He feels Himself “dried up as a potsherd”; His heart can offer no more resistance, because “His heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of His bowels”; His body is completely powerless and to His feeling it is as though fallen apart, for “all His bones are separated one from the other”; yea, in brief, our Savior feels His whole existence inwardly succumb and collapse, for He mourns: “I AM POURED OUT LIKE WATER!”
Where now are the people, who say that Jesus died like a martyr?
How dies a martyr?
Is it not by grace! By in-poured strength which fills his fainting heart with heroic courage! By the energy of faith, which till the latest death-sob keeps him strong and unmovable within, though everything without is consumed!
And what of this do you find with Jesus?
Of this everything the contrary!
No grace; for He is forsaken of God. No in-poured strength, for all the strength that was in Him, is as it were sucked out of Him and drop by drop drawn from Him. No heroism, for it was all one succumbency within, before it came to the succumbency without.
Jesus was inwardly not strengthened but broken down.
With respect to the rapidity and the awfulness of that inward exhaustion, “broken down” is still too weak a term. So the Holy Spirit employs the yet bolder figure, and does not say “broken down” but “poured out”; “poured out” not as oil slowly flows from a jug, but quickly as water rushes down the mountain-side; and this is couched in strong, impetuous language, as though to make you sense in your inmost self the inward exhaustion of Jesus: “Outpoured like water”!
Outpoured like water! That is, even as one drop falling down draws the other after it, and after that again a drop and ever more drops, by irresistible pressure, rush after one another, yea, all the water, as in a single gush, comes along, and rushes down into the deep, so it was with your Savior. A beginning of the flowing off of His strength, that immediately increased, swelled in volume, became ever stronger, till it was, as though like a vat He was turned over, and suddenly all His strength of life and all the courage of His soul and all the energy of His will, as a waterstream was poured out into the abyss.
It is nameless POWERLESSNESS, that this image portrays. To be disabled utterly! No lip able to open; no eye able to turn upward; no courage able to put heart into the will; that sinking of the pulses; that faintness of the soul that would yet pray; that namelessness of anxious and oppressive impotency; so powerless, that even the sense of the same is too great an exertion for the heart that is altogether melted away.
And this is what the Holy Spirit wills, that you should carefully observe with Jesus! The cross by itself is not the bitterest death. It is not in that. Such a cross innumerable others have suffered. But no one save Jesus alone, while hanging on the cross, descended into hell, has on it carried the burden of God’s wrath against the sin of our whole race; no one save He, while dying on the cross, in an unseen way, was crucified in His soul with an anguish of powerlessness as of dying a thousand deaths!
O, to be Jesus! Son of God! To possess a power, like the Lion of Judah’s tribe even in the roaring of His death-cry still betrayed! And then … . from pure obedience, from tender compassion, to be willing to descend into that terrible distress and oppression of so complete a powerlessness of inward impotency, do you not feel, all ye, that are so impotent in yourselves, what that struggle, that indescribable torture of soul has cost Jesus?
And yet … if once He had not done this! If once He had withheld His heart, from melting away as wax in the midst of His bowels, what think ye, could He ever have been your Savior? Is not your powerlessness absolute and terrible? And does it not then become you to have such an High priest, Who came down so wonderfully to where you were lying, that in the arms of His compassion He might bear you up on high?
O, wondrous mystery of grace!
You thought yourself powerless. But no, you have not confessed yourself yet powerless enough. Become absolutely powerless … … for then is Jesus with you.
And again, however powerless, and near to utter collapse, never despair, my brother! Never cast aside the staff of hope. He, Who was once the most powerless of all, is now seated at the right hand of the Power of the Throne of God.
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