After a conversation I had on Friday, I reflected and asked myself this question,
“If we are all made in God’s image, why are some more well liked than others?”
Today during the church’s worship today, the answer came to me.
Jesus was rejected too..by the people He made in His image.
Before I typed this post, part of the song lyrics of “Above All” came to mind: rejected and alone.
So I went to google and found a video of the song sang by a little girl! what a child-like faith. =)
*Crucified.. laid behind the stone
You lived to die.. rejected and alone
Like a Rose.. trampled on the ground
You took the fall.. and thought of me
Above all*
I read the following excerpt from Tim Keller’s book “The Reason For God” and was deeply impacted. It highlighted the great work Jesus done on the cross..and how lightly I have viewed it in the past. Jesus had to undergo such unfathomably painful separation from God..the one Jesus enjoys a relationship with, even before the beginning of man.
“There may be no greater inner agony than the loss of a relationship that we desperately want. If a mild acquaintance turns on you, condemns and criticizes you, and says she never wants to see you again, it is painful. If someone you’re dating does the same thing, it is qualitatively more painful…
We cannot fathom, however, what it would be like to lose not just spousal love or parental love that has lasted several years, but the infinite love of the Father that Jesus had from all eternity. Jesus’s sufferings would have been eternally unbearable. Christian theology has always recognized that Jesus bore, as the substitute in our place, the endless exclusion from God that the human race has merited.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, even the beginning and foretaste of this experience began to put Jesus into a state of shock. New Testament scholar, Bill Lane writes: “Jesus came to be with the Father for an interlude before his betrayal, but found hell rather than heaven opened before him and he staggered.” On the cross, Jesus’ cry of dereliction – “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” – is a deeply relational statement. Lane writes: “The cry has a ruthless authenticity…Jesus did not die renouncing God. Even in the inferno of abandonment he did not surrender his faith in God but expressed his anguished prayer in a cry of affirmation. “My God, my God.’” Jesus still uses the language of intimacy – “my God” – even as he experiences infinite separation from the Father.”
“From noon until three in the afternoon darkness came over all the land. 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?”).” — Matthew 27:45–46
