EASTER LOVE

 

Love is a word that we sometimes over work in our everyday language. We love this or that or we love a friend or acquaintance.  I guess love can be dished out by the ounce or by degrees, parcelled up in packages depending on the degree you think is deserving to be offered. But what would you consider to be the highest amount of love that was ever given and to who and by who?  Anyone reading this and observing the title would find this a pretty easy question.  Why the answer would be God’s love, poured out for the human race. Yes, but this love has come to us with some conditions and why not.  God has only one son and that son is loved as all fathers love a son. Our God loves his son Jesus in a special way that few of us understand or even think about.

In this wild world we live in, we seldom think about the vastness there is beyond our relatively safe existence called earth. The vastness of the heavens that are expanding into oblivion as if we were in the midst of a huge explosion, our minds can’t grasp the fact that there is no end to God’s works. And yet he looks upon we mere mortals as his greatest accomplishment. We are, as God tells us, made in his image. We apart from all that, are able to decide between good and evil, we have a mind that can’t by any human be explained, and we are given the choice to follow our creator or reject him.  We, all of us were born sinners and no matter how we interpret it we need to ask for forgiveness so as to be with our maker for eternity.  God asks only one thing from us and that is to accept his son Jesus as his son and believe that he gave us Jesus , his one and only son to die on the cross of Calvary for our sins. God is a forgiving God. He will forgive us for all sins against God and man, except one. We cannot reject Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross for us.  The following is what our father saw for his son, to save us from eternal damnation.

THE (SCIENTIFIC) DEATH OF JESUS

At the age of 33, Jesus was condemned to the death penalty.  At the time crucifixion was the "worst" death. Only the worst criminals were condemned to be crucified. Jesus was to be nailed to the cross by His hands and feet.  Each nail was 6 to 8 inches long.  The nails were driven into His wrist.  Not into His palms as is commonly portrayed.  There's a tendon in the wrist that extends to the shoulder. The Roman guards knew that when the nails were being hammered into the wrist, that tendon would tear and break, forcing Jesus to use His back muscles to support himself so that He could breathe.

Both of His feet were nailed together. Thus He was forced to support Himself on the single nail that impaled His feet to the cross. Jesus could not support himself with His legs because of the pain, so He was forced to alternate between arching His back then using his legs just to continue to breathe. Imagine the struggle, the pain, the suffering, the courage.

 Jesus endured this reality for over 3 hours.  Yes, over 3 hours!  Can you imagine this kind of suffering? A few minutes before He died, Jesus stopped bleeding. He was simply pouring water from his wounds.

From common images, we see wounds to His hands and feet and even the spear wound to His side... But do we realize His wounds were actually made in his body. A hammer driving large nails through the wrist, the feet overlapped and an even larger nail hammered through the arches, then a Roman guard piercing His side with a spear. But before the nails and the spear, Jesus was whipped and beaten. The whipping was so severe that it tore the flesh from His body. The beating so horrific that His face was torn and his beard ripped from His face. The crown of thorns cut deeply into His scalp. Most men would not have survived this torture.  He had no more blood to bleed out, only water poured from His wounds. The human adult body contains about 3.5 liters (just less than a gallon) of blood.

 Jesus poured all 3.5 liters of his blood; He had three nails hammered into His members; a crown of thorns on His headband, beyond that, a Roman soldier who stabbed a spear into His chest.  All these without mentioning the humiliation He passed after carrying His own cross for almost 2 kilometers, while the crowd spat in his face and threw stones (the cross was almost 30 kg of weight, only for its higher part, where His hands were nailed).

 Jesus had to endure this experience, so that we can have free access to God.  So that our sins could be "washed" away. All of them, with no exception!

 JESUS CHRIST DIED FOR US! 

After reading this. If you are not brought to tears for the suffering man  put on to his fellow traveller, and that God our father knew what his son was to endure, I ask the question, how can we see our God as a loving father and ask his son to endure this terrible death? The answer is simple, Jesus Christ died for us.  God’s love for us is endless and untiring and enduring. God sacrificed his son for us. What greater love than that?  Some say Easter comes from pagan times and others only think of Easter as cute bunny rabbits and Easter eggs and candy.

Remember the story has just begun, Jesus, on the third day rose from the dead to be with his followers in Heaven.