(Good Friday)
ON THE WAY to Emmaus Luke and Cleopas have received an instruction from the Lord, which is still the pious envy of God’s children.
How we would have been entranced, if we ourselves might have heard Him, as He went through all the books of the Old Testament, to show from Moses and the prophets, “that it behooved the Christ to suffer these things, that thereby He might enter into His glory.”
How each of us feels, that the Lord would have shown us His holy Messiah-name in passages and images and facts of Old Testament Scripture, where we in reading would scarcely have looked for it.
When they who make too freely a use of symbolism, undertake to fill in this gap, by giving us their insights into Old Testament contents and teachings, it does not satisfy us. What they present is not alive. There is no pulsation there. No holy enthusiasm is athrill in it. We do not see in this the Messiah-life of our Lord.
Thoughtful reading of the Old Testament affords the soul better guidance than this, and when in Lamentations (1, 12) you hear God’s prophet of Jerusalem complain: “All ye, that pass by, behold, and see if there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow!” each child of God overhears in this a prophecy of the cry that was heard on Golgotha, and it is to him, as though his dying Savior calls out to him from Gethsemane and from the cross: “All ye that pass by, behold, and see whether there ever was a suffering suffered, as I suffer; a wrong such as is done unto me?”
And therefore when Jerusalem declined, and came down and its people went into exile, those stones have not felt this and the veil in the temple has not felt this, but the Holy Spirit has made the prophet prophesy of this, that the lamentations and mortal complaints of dying Zion were but the prelude to the dreadful spoliation, that would once overtake the Messiah in His suffering.
The fall, the coming down, the collapse and the sinking away was so dreadful.
A place chosen of God. The place where He had caused His glory to dwell. His lovely habitation from whence the savor of sacrifice rose up before His holy presence. And then such a city trodden down by the deniers of God, and by the godless spewed upon and destroyed by fire. And at length brutal heathen standing on the top of the mountain of the Lord, to proclaim abroad with shrill voices and crying: “Jehovah is defeated, His house is laid low!”
For this the prophet had lamented: “How wonderfully Zion has come down.”
Reduced, no, that is not the word; but come down must express the depth of the humiliation; and even that does not say it all, and therefore he laments: “How wonderfully is Zion come down.”
Once it was sung in that Zion: “Ye high hill of Bashan, why exalt yourself against Zion? God Himself has desired this hill and shall dwell in it forever!” (Ps. 68:16). And now, Bashan rejoiced and climbed the high mountain of pride, while from Zion’s hill nothing but smoke from ruins ascended on high.
And yet, even this was but prophecy of the indescribable, unspeakable humiliation into which Jesus would sink away.
He, at whose manger God’s angels sang of glory; on Whose lips hung thousands; Who had healed every one’s diseases; Who on the mount of Transfiguration had glistened in Majesty; and of Whom it had been said at His Baptism: “This is He in whom I am well pleased.” He, God manifest in the flesh, the express Image of His Substance, Who bore the reflection of His glory. And that glorious Person laid hold on by rough officers of justice, the wrists bound with cords, jostled along and maltreated, scorned and spit in the face, scourged with scourges, and cursed at, and presently with nails driven through the palms of His hands nakedly exposed on the shamewood; O, confess, is it not also here, even still far more so than at Jerusalem’s ruin: “How wonderfully come down!”
NO, the depth into which your Savior sank away, your eye does not fathom.
You cannot reach it.
Of this you could only obtain some perception, if you yourself had sunk into that abyss of eternal doom.
That depth Satan fathoms. That depth fathom the eternally lost. That depth is as deep, as where the bottom lies of eternal separation from God.
Therein every child of God should have had to be lost. Into that depth every one who is saved should have had to go down. So low and wonderfully low would you have had to sink away eternally.
To this depth He, your Savior, has come down for the sake of the people of God.
Himself to drink all, that for you would have been eternally the bitter drink of doom.
To be plunged into that stream of curse and death, in which you would have been swallowed up for ever.
To come down to that deepest, that wonderfully deep humiliation, which would have been eternally your lot, had there been no help appointed by this Hero!
And therefore the Scripture exhorts you: Look at that cross, behold the dreadfulness of that secret and hidden suffering. Hear the cry: “All ye that pass by behold, and see, whether there be any sorrow like unto my sorrow,” and then with the prophet in amazement and with astonishment of soul, exclaim, with respect to your Savior: “How wonderfully come down!”
He Who commands angels and Seraphs, writhing in the dust and in home-sickness of heart, so that an angel must comfort Him!
He Who shall once be judge of all, as malefactor set before the judge on earth.
He, Whom all flesh shall once call upon for salvation, as scum and scrapings, not worthy of a spot and place on earth, hung upon the accursed wood and in His dying still reviled.
Prey of death, He, the Lord of Life, Who once shall destroy all death by his power.
Who called Lazarus from the tomb, is now Himself carried into the tomb.
O, thou, godless one, who are saved, is it not wonderful, that your great and glorious Savior could come down so low in that fathomless depth of humiliation!
And this He did because of you. He did this for you. To prepare for you in your dying, instead of this eternal sinking away, an eternal promotion in glory.
Let your soul then be entreated, not to pass by the way where the cross stands; but to stop, and look on that cross; and with all your heart and soul to go down into the depth of that humiliation.
Who of us has ever commensurably sensed what Immanual did for us, and suffered for us.
Now we have become accustomed to it. Such is the corruption of our nature.
You hear of the cross so continually, that almost it no more interests you.
But for this very reason Good Friday is of use.
For it points you to it; it draws you towards it; it induces you to think and to meditate on that cross.
And if you may do this, and look upon it, and enter into it with your soul, Who He is, and what He suffered there, and how the wrath of God was upon the Son of God, O, then it shall no longer be common to you, but it shall arouse also your amazement, and the soul within your innermost self also shall exclaim: “How wonderfully low has He come down!”
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