He Said to me Child I am afraid for your Soul.
These Things that You’re after They can’t be Controlled.
This Beast that You’re after will eat You Alive,
And Spit out Your Bones.
– Eat You Alive the Oh Hello’s
There is something to the idea that we all hate pain. Like Everybody. Our universal natural reflex is to do anything, anything at all, to get rid of pain.
There is also something to the fact that every single time the Holy Spirit is mentioned in the Bible, it is always in the feminine form. That is not a coincidence. We can try to explain that part away, but I think then we miss the whole point. Jesus said that God would send a comforter, the Holy Spirit, so this makes a lot of sense. It is that way because, like an outstanding pastor friend of mine said last week, “God is a God of pictures.” The reason that the Holy Spirit is in the feminine form just might be…because it is true. And we need it.
In our city, the water department wisely puts a small amount of fluoride in the water to help with oral health and things like that. It’s a good additive that my water filter apparently does not like. When I put water in it, the filter removes the fluoride leaving me with incredibly clean and nice water. Which is good, but I am missing something that would keep me a little healthier.
I often look at God as this list of facts because that is how we think. We as Americans look at God and hear the messages He proclaims, but then put our cultural filters into the whole thing. It is not a terrible thing, but is something we need to be aware of. We put Him in our context so that He makes more sense. It is like a spiritual Brita (You owe me a sponsorship for this endorsement Brita!) filter that takes out the less understandables and leaves us a basic view. We culturally remove the things that don’t make sense to us.
It is like the ‘crop’ tool with pictures. You get the exact part that you want and not much else. Which is great, but you kinda sense in this picture that there is more than meets your eye…
It is a bride and groom kissing, but there has to be more than just this right?
I think we get this way with pain and sorrow. Our God makes sense when it is sunny, but when clouds form, the picture I cropped of my god makes less sense because it is not really God. It’s a slice of God, but there is more.
In my life I have read a lot about God and pain and suffering. I knew He did help people, but wondered a lot where He went when I needed Him. I mean, where did He go when I needed Him most? I felt more alone than my Bible and the terribly designed Christian inspirational posters would lead me to believe was normal. It all led me to wonder at times, “Do you even know what we go through down here?”
But then I read this…
“From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. 46 About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).
47 When some of those standing there heard this, they said, “He’s calling Elijah.”
48 Immediately one of them ran and got a sponge. He filled it with wine vinegar, put it on a staff, and offered it to Jesus to drink.”
-Mathew 27:45-48
Now, at first glance, this ends weird. It is definitely not the vanilla.
I was reading a book recently though, and this verse came up and the author talked about how this was the most humanizing of verses to him. That the truth of Jesus was there the whole time and I had missed it all my life.
Jesus is screaming from the cross the Death Psalm.
In Bible times, and still today, it was the desire of every Rabbi to live out the Bible, to be an example of what it meant to live out the ways of God on earth. The highest desire, when they felt death approaching, was to recite Psalm 22 and then breathe their last.
Rabbi Akiba, who was tortured by the Romans while his disciples watched, cried out with his last breaths the words of Psalm 22.
Jesus did the same thing.
As He hangs from a cross, He realizes that this is it. The game is up. It is His time and so in His immense pain, He screams out for all to hear the words of Psalm 22, which starts like this…
“1 My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” – Psalm 22:1
And then later on, as He is suffocating on the cross, in His wheezing, they think Jesus is thirsty. So they give Him a drink, but why? The answer is halfway through the Psalm.
“My heart has turned to wax;
it has melted within me.
15 My mouth is dried up like a potsherd,
and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth;
you lay me in the dust of death.”
-Psalm 22:14-15
Then, as death approached, Jesus with one final scream of anguish proclaims over all the earth the final line of Psalm 22…
“He has done it!” – Psalm 22
That is the same Hebrew phrase Jesus shouted on the cross in the other gospels, but Matthew wrote his gospel exclusively for the Jews, so the words are not given, what instead is given is a picture, a distinctly eastern writing style.
“50 And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit.
51 At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split 52 and the tombs broke open.” -Matthew 27:50-52
I love that our Jesus screams that He has done it, dies and the very next line is…
AND THE TOMBS BROKE OPEN!
The words are there because the message is true, it did not just happen, it still happens.
God is unlike any other. He feels what we have felt. Even at death’s door, He prays to His Father and in the greatest act of love the world has ever seen…He stays. He keeps going and is faithful to the end. It is why Jesus, knowing He would be killed in just a few days time, encourages us to do the same saying…
33 “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world.” – John 16:33
Because there is more to the story. He is still there in the midst of pain and sorrow.
When we look at the mirror and can’t recognize the face because of puffy cheeks and tears.
When we have to walk that Road.
When the fear outweighs what we can see.
When the demon is actually ourselves.
When the relationship breaks in half.
When the tears are so very heavy.
When we whisper in the dark,
“Nothing
good
can
come
from
this.
But in those times, when we see the waves are going to crash on us and we don’t think we can swim over them. In those times we can raise a fist and whisper back in defiance, “but be of good cheer…
He…has…Overcome.”
Because in the end, there is more to the picture. There is a wedding. We are the bride, and we will then see that God, our Great Groom, has always loved us just like this…
Chasing The Wild Beast 