“Even on the cross He did not hide Himself from sight; rather, He made all creation witness to the presence of its Maker.”
The disciples being now convinced that Jesus was the Messiah, the Son of God, and having made confession of him as such, they were prepared to receive this further and equally important discovery, which they could not have borne before, without being so offended as to forsake him; and which, perhaps, they could hardly have borne now.
“Now they had arrived at the conviction that He was none other than the ever-living God. What inducement led to, and what instruction may be gathered from, the recorded fact, that when Jesus had drawn from His disciples the acknowledgment of His Divinity, then, and not before, “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things, and be rejected of the elders, and of the chief priests, and scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” Now the apostles could have had none but the most indistinct apprehensions of the office and mission of our Lord, so long as they were ignorant of the death which He had undertaken to die. This made it appear remarkable, that our Lord should so long have withheld the express mention of His sufferings.
To discover a Divine person is to discover what death cannot touch; and yet Christ waited till this discovery in regard of Himself, that He might then expressly mention His approaching dissolution.” But do you not observe, my brethren, what a testimony our Lord hereby gives to the fact, that the truth of His Godhead alone explains, alone gives meaning or worth to, His having died on the cross? He will say nothing of His death whilst only believed to be man; He speaks continually of His death, when once acknowledged as God. Are we not taught by this, that they only who believe Christ Divine, can put the right construction on the mystery of His death, or so survey it as to draw from it what it was intended to teach? Then we perceive, that He must have died as a sacrifice; then we understand that He must have died as an atonement to be the propitiation for our sins, to reconcile the world unto God. He could not have died for such ends had He been only man; but being also God, such ends could be answered and effected by His death, though nothing less, so far as we can tell, could have sufficed.”
When Jesus climbed on that cross, he had the world in mind. When he uttered those words that would soon be his time, he had the world in mind. He did it for every living being that was and is to come. This thought should remind us of the fact that we are all one under the cross and let this be the driving force as we go through life among all this hatred and disunity. Let us show the world that we’re loved by the same Jesus who died for all of us on that cross.
“Mount Calvary is the academy of love”