Devotions - Read Online
Friday | 18 January 2019
By the time Jesus prayed to the Father in the garden of Gethsemane, He was fully acquainted with our sick condition, which was a result of sin. Isaiah prophesied that Jesus was ‘a man of sorrows and acquainted with [our] grief’. Isa 53:3. He was the embodiment of all our sin – with all our rebellion, anger, contentions, jealousy, depression, desires and waywardness. Gal 5:19‑21. Furthermore, God the Father made the soul of Jesus an offering for our sin. Isa 53:10. Mat 26:38.
As He prayed to the Father, Jesus drank the cup of God’s wrath and judgement upon our sin. Jesus, by the grace of God, tasted death for every person. Heb 2:9. The death that resulted from our sin was not physical death but, rather, was separation from God. Isaiah prophesied, concerning the hour of Jesus’ prayer, that Jesus was cut off from the land of the living. Isa 53:8. He was dead to God. However, He had entrusted Himself to the One who could save Him from death. Heb 5:7. Furthermore, with every drop of blood that He shed, He was then coming back from this death and separation from God. Heb 13:20.
In spiritual terms, sin is ‘a terminal illness’ that causes us to become ‘deformed’, and it eventually ‘kills’ us. The apostle Paul explained, ‘For the wages of sin is death.’ Rom 6:23. The fruit of this death is separation from God and the inability to have relationship with Him and with others. Our sin, with the resulting death and separation that it causes, is much worse than we perceive or are willing to confess. We cannot deal with our sin through self‑condemning, or self‑justifying, activity. To deny Christ’s offering for our sin, and to endeavour to recover ourselves, is a delusion. Through our participation in the offering of Christ, we are being delivered from believing in our own capacity to bring ourselves back from the death caused by our sin.
Further Study:
Romans 7
Daily Proverb:
References:
Isa 53:3
He is despised and rejected by men, a Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.
Gal 5:19-21
Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelries, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.
Isa 53:10
Yet it pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. When You make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, And the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand.
Mat 26:38
Then He said to them, ‘My soul is exceedingly sorrowful, even to death. Stay here and watch with Me.’
Heb 2:9
But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death crowned with glory and honor, that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone.
Isa 53:8
He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people He was stricken.
Heb 5:7
Who, in the days of His flesh, when He had offered up prayers and supplications, with vehement cries and tears to Him who was able to save Him from death, and was heard because of His godly fear.
Heb 13:20
Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant.
Rom 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.