“All of heaven is interested in the cross of Christ, hell afraid of it, while men are the only ones to ignore its meaning.”
Jesus when he was on earth as he spend time with his disciples told them about the suffering that he would go through. His friends didn’t understand what he was saying as they could not grasp the intensity of the words Jesus spoke and they couldn’t comprehend the fact that a human being could go through with this level of torture and sacrifice.
Now Jesus had spoken about the suffering he would go through in multiple occasions, but there are three places where Jesus spoke about it that is known as the Passion Prediction. The first time Jesus told about that is in a little book called Mark where he said “He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again” (8:31)
It was a unique and marvellous prediction. It is a clear, consistent, even symmetrical scheme. A person who could ideally mark out such a future for himself could not have been mere man. The gospel challenges investigation because of the originality and Divine moral elevation of its conception. And by such statements as this it proves how closely the Old and New Testaments are interwoven, and sympathetically and ideally correspondent. This also shows us that Jesus spoke about his death in a fashion that it was very evident that it was in the highest sense voluntary. Jesus was still at a point where the future was in great degree within his own power. That he clearly knew what lay before him in the event of his continuing steadfast proved that his will was absolutely, divinely free. Only the divine one could speak in such a manner, the one where as he was speaking, he fully knew what he would go through, the toughest situation any person ever had to go through, and this was in his knowledge but he still said it and more importantly he did it. Now that’s love like no other. Christ is, therefore, through all time, the type of noble self-sacrifice. “But it is only spiritual motives and principles that can so inspire, but the fulfilment of the great end of our being, and its highest blessedness” This sacrifice is the reason we have a hope, the reason our beings are living, not in fear but in eternal peace, not in pain, but in power. It took Christ everything and more to give us that. And it’s the season where we remember this great sacrifice, but let us not limit it to the season.
“The cross is a one-time visual representation of God’s grief over sin.”