The wonder of love can only be tied to the extreme suffering of Jesus on the cross. His sacrifice, the ultimate escape from death, pierced His Father.
Back on March 2019, as the preacher spoke about the death of Christ and said, “and darkness filled the earth… at that moment as Jesus exclaims, Father, Father, why have you forsaken me? … is when His Father was the closest to His son.” He continued to explain, “there was complete darkness, and when the lighting from the sky broke the curtains in the temple, life spread through the earth.” This is actually biblical and can be found in Matthew 27, people resurrected after Jesus died. What was most revealing was quoting Psalm 18:8-12:
Smoke rose from his nostrils; consuming fire came from his mouth, burning coals blazed out of it. He parted the heavens and came down; dark clouds were under his feet. He mounted the cherubim and flew; he soared on the wings of the wind. He made darkness his covering, his canopy around him— the dark rain clouds of the sky. Out of the brightness of his presence clouds advanced, with hailstones and bolts of lightning.
The Father leaves heaven during the darkest day of earth’s history to be by the cross next to His son. This darkness camouflages the holiest and most high, Our Father.
Often, when life gets rough is when we may be the closest to the Father, because the battle between good and evil is literally playing in our minds over and over, and over.
Whenever a human being is under attack, Michael – the warrior name for Jesus – is fighting for each of His father’s children. Supreme love is beyond our understanding, and yet it is present and expressed to and for each one of us.
Evil continues attacking the image of a loving father because by doing so a detachment from understanding the minimal portion of His pure love is under attack. The essence of God’s love is sufficient for a human being to fight to live, and Satan, the chief of evil, knows that. So he attacks the image of the Father by lying about His character. From the moment Lucifer desires to be equal to God, His character is altered and deficient of love, His desire for equality is turned into slavery, rebellion, and extreme hate towards the human race. This has been the most complex yet simple revelations of biblical awakenings in my life. From a young age, I believed and trusted that Our Father loved me – but the understanding of ultimate love has been revealed and will continue to be reveal in adulthood. This understanding is the glue to Christianity. What holds each person together is knowing that He or She is loved – not through merit, but through grace and the purest and only love. And this grace relationship could have only be attained by giving the most precious, Jesus ‘the Son,’ as a ransom for the human race.
Our Father and Social Thought
Satan has continuously glued his character in the minds of influential people that more may suffer the consequences of his defeat. Satan cannot attack God so he attacks what is most precious to Him, His children. While Jesus was on this earth, Satan attempts to destroy Jesus through persecution and temptations from His birth. As the child Jesus is protected by his earthly parents, so God wants His children ‘the stewards of the earth’ to protect His children, nevertheless, as the Father did with his son Jesus, He never left Him alone, and neither did Jesus separate himself from Our Father. Our society presents life as a cycle of events, God presents life as continuous and eternal. God’s intend for His children was never to be governed by us as leaders of human thought and love. We are very incapable to lead unselfishly. God’s intent for us was to endure life and conquer love with Him and through Him.
While Satan fights for our attention to deviate us from the love of Our Father, Jesus intercedes for our lives and conquers death, conquers time and re-assures our adoption as His Father’s children. The act of love in its purest form is the death of the Son of God. “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). One of the most beautiful words that I’ve taken to heart through my childhood and adulthood is the word “friend.” A friendship is developed without any interest but once it is established there is no obligation to remain in it. Why did Jesus call us friends? As John 15:15 reads: I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.
I’m thrilled to continue writing on this topic for the next post. Be encouraged that Our Father, not only wants you to be entitled His child, but He wants you to remember that He is your friend through your personal decision in the quest for true love.
Tapia 