RESURRECTION SUNDAY!!!
What a glorious day it is!! Each year I ask the Lord to give me a deeper revelation of the cross and His resurrection. I know what I have been told since I was a little girl and it was a truth and part of the death, burial and resurrection. I also know it is so much deeper than any of us can really imagine. I’ve been on a journey of really knowing His love. KNOWING. To know in an intimate way. I didn’t grow up with the concept of a Daddy’s love so this has been a journey to get to experience with my heavenly Father because I cannot even perceive it from natural experience.
God’s love for us was the reason He sent His Son to die on the cross. To understand the depth and evilness of sin helps us to grasp the truth that something had to be done if man was to have a deep and intimate relationship with the Father. That is what we were created for – communion, relationship, fellowship, a friend with God, the Father, Jesus and the Holy Spirit. I am going to share tidbit of what I have been putting in my heart. Jesus didn’t just die to forgive us of our sins so we can escape hell. That is a very valuable benefit of the cross. For years that is all I knew. I did not realize the deepest desire of our Father’s heart was a relationship with Him. His love is truly beyond what I can image but it is my desire to know. Philippians 3:10 in the Amplified Bible is one of my greatest desires. “For my determined purpose is that I may know Him that I may progressively become more deeply and intimately acquainted with Him, perceiving and recognizing and understanding the wonders of His Person more strongly and more clearly, and that I may in that same way come to know the power outflowing from His resurrection which it exerts over believers, and that I may so share His sufferings as to be continually transformed in spirit into His likeness even to His death, in the hope”
No amount of torture could kill Jesus. Only the soul that sins dies. Jesus knew no sin so death could not overpower Him. He submitted to death, not the events of the cross, but Jesus consciencely yielded His spirit, gave Himself over to death and into His Father’s hands. He could have stopped at anytime and called a legion of angels.
“Therefore My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father.”
John 10:17-18
The Father wasn’t at a distance letting Jesus go through this on his own. “Namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their wrongdoings against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation.” 2 Corinthians 5:19 NASB God wasn’t a distant observer but a part of the crucifixion. God didn’t send His Son to do what He would not do but He acted through Jesus to bring our redemption. The Godhead was still the Godhead even on the cross and it is sometimes hard to perceive with our limited minds. It’s important to see them working together doing what was necessary to destroy sin and set free those they loved. The Father, Son and Holy Spirit had a made a plan in the beginning and paid the price together because their desire was a relationship with man – with us- and it was lost to the choice Adam and Eve made. “For God made the only one who did not know sin to become sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God through out union with him.” 2 Corinthians 5:21 TPT
“In this act we see what real love is: it is not our love for God but his love for us when he sent his Son to satisfy God’s anger against our sins.” 1 John 4:10 TLB
“For God achieved what the law was unable to accomplish, because the law was limited by the weakness of human nature.” Romans 8:3 TPT
Our Father’s perspective does not focus on our personal sins but He focuses on the power of sin itself. It is not sinful people who were condemned but the entity of sin. Condemnation could not win over the Father’s power. In the physical body of Jesus, sin came face to face with the power of God and through His power, God has won over sin completely. He sees the evil that destroys His creation, the people He loves. “But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress the truth by their wickedness.” Romans 1:18 TLB
God is about destroying sin that destroys His people. When Jesus became sin for us, he entered into the full shame, darkness, and bondage of that sin. What if Jesus couldn’t see the Father when He on the cross and God’s wrath was consuming the sin he had become? Could that sin have blinded him and he felt forsaken by the Father? “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Romans 5:7-8 NKJV
“For God so loved the world He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16
“And this is eternal life, that they may know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” John 17:3 God, the Father, loved so much He gave His Son so that we may know Him, the Father, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom He sent to die for us.
“And when Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, “Father, ‘into Your hands I commit My spirit.’ ” Having said this, He breathed His last.” Luke 23:46 NKJV
Jesus committed his entire being into the Father’s hands and breathed his last breath. The horror of the cross had ended. Sin had been consumed. He trusted his father and committed himself to Him. In Paul’s writings in the Bible he tells us over and over that God’s work at the cross is the undeniable truth of how much He loves us. God loves us so much He gave His Son to devour the sin Adam and Eve’s choice brought into the world - the sin that separates us from our Father’s love and having a relationship. God went to great lengths to rescue us from our own, misdirected, self-absorbed and untrusting ways, so that we could be so close to Him that He would call us friend. “Greater love has no one than this, than to lay down one’s life for his friends.” John 15:13 NKJV
He wants us to trust Him, to trust His love. When we really grasp in our hearts the reality of the cross, the wedge of the enemy will be gone. When we truly KNOW in our hearts what our heavenly Father did for us we will trust Him and know deep within that His intentions are always love and relationship. Can we trust Him enough to say, “Into Your hands I commit my spirit?”
“I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith of the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.” Galatians 2:20 NKJV Paul, who wrote the book of Galatians, saw his life had ended when Jesus’ ended at the cross. He lived off Jesus’ faith, not his own faith. He let Jesus live in him and let Jesus’ trust in the Father stand for his. That is for us too!
On this Resurrection Day may we see His love is such a passionate way that we can say, “Into your hands I commit my spirit”. Can we know that sin was destroyed and we can now live our lives knowing how much He loves us and He lives in us? He died and rose again so we could fasten our faith and hope in Him alone. May we have a revelation from this day we celebrate His resurrection and learn to live loved.