Fly me to the moon
God's sacrificial love makes Himself suffers.
Isn't it trivial?
No. I do not understand God's love in Calvary, and I do not understand how He suffers fully.
It's not only the whip and the nails that hurt Jesus, nor the humiliation. Those are only what we can see. It hurts God when we love Him less than He does. It also hurts Him when we do not undertand His love for us.
I can never understand the love on the cross completely. Not a chance. Not even close.
I can understand His love in a certain tiny magnitude, but never be able to understand His passion in full.. Like a 5 years old son has no way to understand how his parents loves him. I can only imagine a bit in the difference between the magnitudes of God's love and human love. We human may sometime understand this difference a bit when we have loved someone more than us in our lives, like becoming a parent. Then, we experience the longing for the return of love that makes us suffer, namely, the root word for "passion". We can only love others, stop hurting others, but we cannot make others loves us or stop them hurting us.
And why God has to suffer? There is no reason and no need for Him to suffer. Plus, suffer for the stupid human race who ruined themselves?! That is the propitiation (Romans 3:25, Heb 9:5) He displayed publicly. "ilasthrion" (Greek, hilasterion) means "the seat of mercy". God does not give us what we deserve by His sovereign power and His will.
The gap between God's love and human love is never filled. Human love is like the distance you travel to work... maybe 1 hour of drive? Then think about the distance of taking a plane to travel to another city, maybe 20 hours of flight? That already makes me very impatience. How about travelling to the moon, I don't know how many days does it take. To the end of our solar system? To the belt of Orion? To the edge of the universe? How many light years do we take to go there. God's love displayed in Calvary is far more than that... Makes me remember my favourite hymn based on the Jewish poem Haddamut :
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade,
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry.
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
In the mist of loving sacrificially in our human relationships, we may understand and experience a tiny bit of how God love us. Also, we have chances to exercise hope, kindness, gentleness, patience, self-control, humility, consideration, and understanding, forgiveness.
Categories:
Christian,
Personal
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