THE MOST SENSELESS MURDER IN HISTORY?
JESUS’ BRUTAL MURDER ON THE CROSS WAS THE GREATEST TRAVESTY OF JUSTICE IN HISTORY … or was it?
I pray the following excerpt from my family story will help you to understand that Jesus’ death was God’s greatest gift to Mankind … a gift that results in the forgiveness of our sins, enabling us to walk with God through valleys that are so deep and so dark its hard to believe we can ever make it through.
Excerpt from Chapter 30 – When Fig Trees Don’t Blossom
“Most of you have been glad for my transparency throughout this book, and it is a particular comfort to you that I have remained honest about my agonizing experience as I complete it. Not that you’re happy to see another human being suffer in a pitiful, “misery loves company” way. Rather, your heart yearns for honesty as you attempt to keep standing amidst the sorrows and frightening loose ends dangling in your own life. You’re relieved that this hasn’t turned out to be yet another “Christian” self-help book from an author with the temerity to toss out a few high sounding platitudes, techniques that promise joy, success and satisfaction.
If you’ve learned anything from those books, you’ve come to understand that the behavioral and attitudinal modifications they prescribe, replete with their endless humanistic methods, could never have caused you to stand against the waves of brutal reality that kept sweeping into your life, threatening to drag you back out to sea. Your experience is far too daily, far too real for empty platitudes. In short, your life is too much like mine …
SECTION OMITTED …
For most babies, traces of perfection linger a while. My precious son had only the briefest dance with it, and then suddenly, he was gone. After he was taken the music in our home stopped, and there was only pin-drop silence for a very long time. Tears, wailings and pleadings with God sometimes broke the stillness, on our side, as Heaven remained silent. We scoured the earth, travelling on every yellow brick road, pounding on the door of every Emerald Palace, yet that picture-perfect baby boy was never to be found again.
A day finally arrived when the music began to play once more, and we accepted the new child Heaven sent us to take that perfect baby’s place. The child looked identical, every bit as perfect as the child who had been taken. But the music was different now, and only as each chapter of our family story unfolded did I truly begin to understand how dissonant and cacophonous the music really was, and how flawed and awkward his dance with life, and ours as a family, would be …
SECTION OMITTED …
… After reading the chapters of this book and seeing these most recent snapshots from my family album, now you know the rest of the story, as revered American storyteller Paul Harvey used to say. Now you know that this author’s life is a train-wreck by the standards of this world, even as God’s love continues to seem absent. But I’ve written this book to tell you God’s love seems absent in everyone’s story, for those who lack eyes to see.
My earthly eyes tell me God owes me more, and owes more to my precious, broken son. But if God’s love ever seemed absent it was as His firstborn Son was tortured and broken by cruel men, and as His body was nailed to a tree. His brutal murder was the most tragic injustice in history; a victory for evil and a permanent defeat for all that is holy and righteous and good. Or so it seemed …
Yet the rest of this Son’s story was not yet written, was it dear reader? A pot was stirring in Heaven precisely in accord with the Father’s will, and astonishingly, Jesus rose from the grave. Because His story continues on, my story continues on, even as your story continues on if you are numbered among those who have entrusted your life to Him. How will God choose to deliver me this time? How will He deliver you? God only knows.
But I’ve heard it said it is more important how a man or a woman finishes their race of faith than how they begin. The race can take unexpected turns, bringing us into dark valleys where fig trees do not blossom, and where there is no fruit on any of the vines. When we find ourselves in so dark a valley, we must refuse the world’s self-focused methods of striving to reach the high places on our own without God. To charge up that hill by charting a path of our own is folly. There is only one road to those coveted high places, a narrow road on which we must trustingly, sometimes tearfully, follow a King.
This King can transform even the weakest, most crippled lamb in His fold into a majestic being, giving them hinds’ feet with the strength and dexterity to reach those high places after all. And the King will teach us a secret as we walk with Him way up there. He will cause us to exult, no matter what life may ever bring to us, or cruelly take away, as we realize that the high places we’ve been seeking have been with us all along, in Him.”
“Though the fig tree should not blossom, and there be no fruit on the vines, Though the yield of the olive should fail, and the fields produce no food, Though the flock should be cut off from the fold, and there be no cattle in the stalls, Yet I will exult in the Lord, I will rejoice in the God of my salvation. The Lord God is my strength, and He has made my feet like hinds’ feet, and makes me walk on my high places.” Habakkuk 3: 17-19
I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” Phil 4:11-13
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