At the cross, His enemies unwittingly spoke the truth. Intent on a mocking “Physician, heal Thyself,” they stumbled on the truth. He was bound to the cross by nails, but infinitely more, by love, by obedience, by prophetic utterances and by the carefully nurtured expectations of God’s people. There was a needs-be, an imperative in the divine counsels.
The Hebrew Servant
For an Old Testament figure, consider Exodus 21. There the devoted servant, content to serve a loving master, deliberately willed to surrender his own will. Suppose a young man, walking past a Marine Corps recruiting sign, stops, turns back, signs up and then takes that fateful single step forward.
The point is not the merits of joining, but the conscious submission-merging of one’s own will into and with a will and a cause that transcends one’s own little desires and conveniences one’s own life. And so the newly recruited Marine will learn the meaning of the corps slogan, “Semper Fi” (“Always Faithful”). “If the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free” (Ex. 21:55And if the servant shall plainly say, I love my master, my wife, and my children; I will not go out free: (Exodus 21:5)).
The Perfect Servant
In Mark 1, the Servant gospel, Christ, the Perfect Servant, is driven not led into the wilderness, there being tempted by and defeating Satan, in forty days. (Our word “quarantine” is from the same root, meaning “forty days.”)
Thus He shows, as Ambassador from heaven, His divine credentials. But “driven”? How so? It is those divine imperatives again: “He must needs go through Samaria” (John 4:44And he must needs go through Samaria. (John 4:4)). “Ought not Christ to have suffered... and to enter into His glory?” (Luke 24:2626Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory? (Luke 24:26)). “I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” (Luke 12:5050But I have a baptism to be baptized with; and how am I straitened till it be accomplished! (Luke 12:50)).
This Same Jesus
In Acts 1 we encounter the 40-day time of testing again, but this time it is to show it was really the “same Jesus,” not an apparition, not some ghost of popular superstition, not mass hysteria of twentieth-century psychologists, but the same Person who touched lepers, who called little children, and who broke bread with His beloved disciples. This time it is not credentials; it is credibility.
The floodgates of divine blessing and joy were held closed (straitened) until that awesome scene at Calvary. What cords! Cords of steel for Him! Cords of love for us.
O God, what cords of love are Thine,
How gentle, yet how strong.
(Little Flock Hymnbook, #197)
D. Lunden