cries from the Cross

My God my God why have you forsaken me?

Mark 15:34

It was the loneliest cry of distress the world had ever heard, He was denied, betrayed with a kiss, mocked and tortured, and as Jesus hung on the Cross with nails piercing through his flesh and bone, bloody, his skin ripped to shreds, he cried out to God.  

We can learn a lot from the Cross.  It was the plan, it was reason God chose to come in flesh and blood in the form of a sinless man and became sin. No one could stop the inevitability of what was to happen on the Cross. We can ask did it have to be so bloody, so brutal, so torturous, so long, but it tells us a lot about God, He is thorough and complete and He doesn’t like to do things twice. The Cross, the cries of distress on the Cross, the brutality of the Cross, the blood of Jesus was shed on the Cross as payment for our sins, and it was done in such a way that it will never be forgotten.

We live in a fallen world where sin undeniably exists, bad things happen, but also, as we learn in the story of Job and Jonah and a multitude of other characters throughout the Bible, nothing touches us without being filtered through God first and that is a tough pill to swallow, a necessary pill but a tough one. Because as we learn from the Cross when we are in distress, when we find there is nothing left of us but the dust beneath the steal toed boot that seemed to so violently stomp us into the ground, when we are backed into a corner and there is no way out, when we find ourselves nailed to our own crosses, we cry out to God.  We don’t cry out to our posessions, the pleasures we seek, the power we hold, the person we chased after or anything else we pursued while forfeiting our relationship with God, because we know that we know that we know that none of those things can calm the chaos. I don’t care who you are, and atheist, agnostic, a pagan when everything is quiet around you and you are left alone with nothing but you and your thoughts, you know that something isn’t right, you can feel the tension in that deep dark cavernous place of your soul, that place that you have been able to keep so well hidden even from your own consciousness where you can feel the life being squeezed from you, you know that something just isn’t right that is God wanting to bring you into a relationship with Him.

He is thorough and complete, He will keep those storms whipping around you for as long as it takes to keep you, He wants you to remember that pain to ensure that you will never stray from Him again, so He doesn't have to repeat Himself. When those waves kick up so high that they threaten to drown you, the first place you go is on your knees to Him and you keep your eyes on Him and no where else, because His ultimate goal, the plan if you will, is to have a relationship with you, it takes priority over everything else.  It takes priority over your comfort and happiness, he has no problem taking everything away from you if it means it is going to get you to come to Him, and it is usually when we are free falling off a cliff, drowning in a Tsunami or buried under an avalanche that we come to the realization that our lives and everything in it are absolutely meaningless if we forfeit our relationship with God to get it.