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“…this high and holy Christ does not cringe at reaching out and touching dirty sinners and numbed sufferers.
Such embrace is precisely what he loves to do. He cannot bear to hold back. We naturally think of Jesus touching us the way a little boy reaches out to touch a slug for the first time face screwed up, cautiously extending an arm, giving a yelp of disgust upon contact, and instantly withdrawing. We picture the risen Christ approaching us with “a severe and sour disposition,” as Goodwin says.
This is why we need a Bible. Our natural intuition can only give us a God like us. The God revealed in the Scripture deconstructs our intuitive predilections and startles us with one whose infinitude of perfections is matched by his infinitude of gentleness. Indeed, his perfections include his perfect gentleness.
It is who he is. It is his very heart. Jesus himself said so.
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
“Gentle & Lowly”, chapter 1
“The same Christ who wept at the tomb of Lazarus weeps with us in our lonely despair. The same one who reached out and touched lepers puts his arm around us today when we feel misunderstood and sidelined. The Jesus who reached out and cleansed messy sinners reaches into our souls and answers our halfhearted plea for mercy with the mighty invincible cleansing of one who cannot bear to do otherwise.”
“Gentle & Lowly”, chapter 2
“When we today partake of that atoning work, coming to Christ for forgiveness, communing with him despite our sinfulness, we are laying hold of Christ’s own deepest longing and joy.
This connects with other texts in the New Testament, such as the joy in heaven over a sinner repenting (Luke 15:7) or Christ’s longing that his own joy would overlap with his disciples’ joy as they abide in his love John 15:11; 17:13). He wants us to draw strength from his love, but the only ones qualified to do that are sinners in need of undeserved love. And he doesn’t just want us to be forgiven. He wants us. How does Jesus speak of his own deepest desires? Like this: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me” John 17:24).”
“Gentle & Lowly”, chapter 3
“The burden of this anchor verse [Heb. 4:14-16] is Jesus Christ’s sheer solidarity with his people. All our natural intuitions tell us that Jesus is with us, on our side, present and helping, when life is going well. This text says the opposite. It is in “our weaknesses” that Jesus sympathizes with us. The word for “sympathize” here is a compound word formed from the prefix meaning “with” (like our English prefix co-) joined with the verb to suffer. “Sympathize” here is not cool and detached pity. It is a depth of felt solidarity such as is echoed in our own lives most closely only as parents to children. Indeed, it is deeper even than that. In our pain, Jesus is pained; in our suffering, he feels the suffering as his own even though it isn’t- not that his invincible divinity is threatened, but in the sense that his heart is feelingly drawn into our distress. His human nature engages our troubles comprehensively. His is a love that cannot be held back when he sees his people in pain.”
“Gentle & Lowly”, chapter 4
“In other words, when Hebrews 5:2 says that Jesus “can deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward,” the point is that Jesus deals gently and only gently with all sinners who come to him, irrespective of their particular offense and just how heinous it is.!
What elicits tenderness from Jesus is not the severity of the sin but whether the sinner comes to him. Whatever our offense, he deals gently with us. If we never come to him, we will experience a judgment so fierce it will be like a double-edged sword coming out of his mouth at us (Rev. 1:16; 2:12; 19:15, 21). If we do come to him, as fierce as his lion-like judgment would have been against us, so deep will be his lamb-like tenderness for us (cf. Rev. 5:5-6;
Isa. 40:10-11). We will be enveloped in one or the other. To no one will Jesus be neutral.
Consider what all this means. When we sin, we are encouraged to bring our mess to Jesus because he will know just how to receive us.
He doesn’t handle us roughly. He doesn’t scowl and scold. He doesn’t lash out, the way many of our parents did. And all this restraint on his part is not because he has a diluted view of our sinfulness. He knows our sinfulness far more deeply than we do. Indeed, we are aware of just the tip of the iceberg of our depravity, even in our most searching moments of self-knowledge. His restraint simply flows from his tender heart for his people…
Look to Christ. He deals gently with you. It’s the only way he knows how to be. He is the high priest to end all high priests. As long as you fix your attention on your sin, you will fail to see how you can be safe. But as long as you look to this high priest, you will fail to see how you can be in danger. Looking inside ourselves, we can anticipate only harshness from heaven. Looking out to Christ, we can anticipate only gentleness.”
“Gentle & Lowly”, chapter 5
“But I am a great sinner, say you.
“I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ.
But I am an old sinner, say you.
“I will in no wise cast out, says Christ.
But I am a hard-hearted sinner, say you.
“I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ.
But I am a backsliding sinner, say you.
“I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ.
But I have served Satan all my days, say you.
“I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ.
But I have sinned against light, say you.
“I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ.
But I have sinned against mercy, say you.
“I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ.
But I have no good thing to bring with me, say you.
“I will in no wise cast out,” says Christ.
This promise was provided to answer all objections, and does
answer them.”
John Bunyan, “Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ”, quoted in “Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 6
“If you are part of Christ’s own body, your sins evoke his deepest heart, his compassion and pity. He “takes part with you” that is, he’s on your side. He sides with you against your sin, not against you because of your sin. He hates sin. But he loves you.
We understand this, says Goodwin, when we consider the hatred a father has against a terrible disease afflicting his child- the father hates the disease while loving the child. Indeed, at some level the presence of the disease draws out his heart to his child all the more.
This is not to ignore the disciplinary side of Christ’s care for his people. The Bible clearly teaches that our sins draw forth the discipline of Christ (e.g., Heb. 12:1-11). He would not truly love us if that were not true. But even this is a reflection of his great heart for us. When a body part has been injured, it requires the pain and labor of physical therapy. But that physical therapy is not punitive; it is intended to bring healing. It is out of care for that limb that the physical therapy is assigned…
What father could bring himself to put up for adoption his beloved son, just because his son messed up big time?”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 7
“It is the most counterintuitive aspect of Christianity, that we are declared right with God not once we begin to get our act together but once we collapse into honest acknowledgment that we never will…
We all tend to have some small pocket of our life where we have dificulty believing the forgiveness of God reaches. We say we are totally forgiven. And we sincerely believe our sins are forgiven. Pretty much, anyway. But there’s that one deep, dark part of our lives, even our present lives, that seems so intractable, so ugly, so beyond recovery. “To the uttermost” in Hebrews 7:25 means: God’s forgiving, redeeming, restoring touch reaches down into the darkest crevices of our souls, those places where we are most ashamed, most defeated. More than this: those crevices of sin are themselves the places where Christ loves us the most. His heart willingly goes there. His heart is most strongly drawn there. He knows us to the uttermost, and he saves us to the uttermost, because his heart is drawn out to us to the uttermost. We cannot sin our way out of his tender care.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 8
“We are indeed called to forsake our sins, and no healthy Christian would suggest otherwise. When we choose to sin, we forsake our true identity as a child of God, we invite misery into our lives, and we displease our heavenly Father. We are called to mature into deeper levels of personal holiness as we walk with the Lord, truer consecration, new vistas of obedience. But when we don’t-when we choose to sin–though we forsake our true identity, our Savior does not forsake us. These are the very moments when his heart erupts on our behalf in renewed advocacy in heaven with a resounding defense that silences all accusations, astonishes the angels, and celebrates the Father’s embrace of us in spite of all our messiness.
What kind of Christian does this doctrine create?
Fallen humans are natural self-advocates. It flows out of us.
Self-exonerating, self-defending. We do not need to teach young children to make excuses when they are caught misbehaving.
There is a natural built-in mechanism that immediately kicks into gear to explain why it wasn’t really their fault. Our fallen hearts intuitively manufacture reasons that our case is not really that bad. The fall is manifested not only in our sinning but in our response to our sinning. We minimize, we excuse, we explain away. In short, we speak, even if only in our hearts, in our defense.
We advocate for ourselves.
What if we never needed to advocate for ourselves because another had undertaken to do so? What if that advocate knew exhaustively just how fallen we are, and yet at the same time was able to make a better defense for us than we ever could? No blame shifting or excuses, the way our self-advocacies tend to operate, but perfectly just, pointing to his all-sufficient sacrifice and sufferings on the cross in our place? We would be free. Free of the need to defend ourselves, to bolster our sense of worth through self-contribution, to quietly parade before others our virtues in painful subconscious awareness of our inferiorities and weaknesses. We can leave our case to be made by Christ, the only righteous one.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 9
“There is no love so great and so wonderful as that which is in the heart of Christ. He is one that delights in mercy; he is ready to pity those that are in suffering and sorrowful circumstances; one that delights in the happiness of his creatures. The love and grace that Christ has manifested does as much exceed all that which is in this world as the sun is brighter than a candle. Parents are often full of kindness towards their children, but that is no kindness like Jesus Christ’s. (Jonathan Edwards)
What is it that the children whom we greet in the hallways of our church need? Most deeply? Yes, they need friends, and encouragement, and academic support, and good square meals.
But might it be that the truest need, the thing that will sustain and oxygenate them when all these other vital needs go unmet, is a sense of the attractiveness of who Jesus is for them? How he actually feels about them?
With our own kids, if we are parents, what’s our job? That question could be answered with a hundred valid responses. But at the center, our job is to show our kids that even our best love is a shadow of a greater love. To put a sharper edge on it: to make the tender heart of Christ irresistible and unforgettable. Our goal is that our kids would leave the house at eighteen and be unable to live the rest of their lives believing that their sins and sufferings repel Christ.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 10
“Are you angry today? Let us not be too quick to assume our anger is sinful. After all, the Bible positively orders us to be angry when occasion calls for it (Ps. 4:4; Eph. 4:26). Perhaps you have reason to be angry. Perhaps you have been sinned against, and the only appropriate response is anger. Be comforted by this: Jesus is angry alongside you. He joins you in your anger. Indeed, he is angrier than you could ever be about the wrong done to you. Your just anger is a shadow of his. And his anger, unlike yours, has zero taint of sin in it. As you consider those who have wronged you, let Jesus be angry on your behalf. His anger can be trusted. For it is an anger that springs from his compassion for you. The indignation he felt when he came upon mistreatment of others in the Gospels is the same indignation he feels now in heaven upon mistreatments of you.
In that knowledge, release your debtor and breathe again. Let Christ’s heart for you not only wash you in his compassion but also assure you of his solidarity in rage against all that distresses you, most centrally death and hell.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 11
“Some of us are forced to acknowledge that we do not have one true friend, someone we could go to with any problem knowing we would not be turned away. Who in our lives do we feel safe with really safe, safe enough to open up about everything?
Here is the promise of the gospel and the message of the whole Bible: In Jesus Christ, we are given a friend who will always enjoy rather than refuse our presence. This is a companion whose embrace of us does not strengthen or weaken depending on how clean or unclean, how attractive or revolting, how faithful or fickle, we presently are.
The friendliness of his heart for us subjectively is as fixed and stable as is the declaration of his justification of us objectively…
It would be cruel to suggest that human friendship is irrelevant once one has been befriended by Christ. God made us for fellowship, for union of heart, with other people. Everyone gets lonely-including introverts.
But Christ’s heart for us means that he will be our never-failing friend no matter what friends we do or do not enjoy on earth. He offers us a friendship that gets underneath the pain of our loneliness.
While that pain does not go away, its sting is made fully bearable by the far deeper friendship of Jesus. He walks with us through every moment. He knows the pain of being betrayed by a friend, but he will never betray us. He will not even so much as coolly welcome us. That is not who he is. That is not his heart.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 12
“It is one thing, as a child, to be told your father loves you. You believe him. You take him at his word. But it is another thing, unutterably more real, to be swept up in his embrace, to feel the warmth, to hear his beating heart within his chest, to instantly know the protective grip of his arms. It’s one thing to hear he loves you; it’s another thing to feel his love. This is the glorious work of the Spirit…
‘Christ’s promise in John 14-16: “So that you shall have my heart as surely and as speedily as if I were with you; and he will be continually breaking your hearts, either with my love to you, or yours to me, or both. … He will tell you, when I am in heaven, that there is as true a conjunction between me and you, and as true a dearness of affection in me towards you, as is between my Father and me, and that it is as impossible to break this knot, and to take off my heart from you, as my Father’s from me.”’ (Thomas Goodwin)
The Spirit’s role, in summary, is to turn our postcard apprehensions of Christ’s great heart of longing affection for us into an experience of sitting on the beach, in a lawn chair, drink in hand, enjoying the actual experience. The Spirit does this decisively, once and for all, at regeneration. But he does it ten thousand times thereafter, as we continue through sin, folly, or boredom to drift from the felt experience of his heart.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 13
2 Corinthians 1:3
“To speak of God the Father as “the Father of mercies” is to say that he is the one who multiplies compassionate mercies to his needful, wayward, messy, fallen, wandering people…
Beyond what we are conscious of at any given moment, the Father’s tender care envelopes us with pursuing gentleness, sweetly governing every last detail of our lives. He sovereignly ordains the particular angle of the flutter of the leaf that falls from the tree and the breeze that knocked it free (Matt. 10:29-31), and he sovereignly ordains the bomb that evil minds detonate (Amos 3:6; Luke 13:1-5).
But through and underneath and fueling all that washes into our lives, great and small, is the heart of a Father.
Who is God the Father? Just that: our Father. Some of us had great dads growing up. Others of us were horribly mistreated or abandoned by them. Whatever the case, the good in our earthly dads is a faint pointer to the true goodness of our heavenly Father, and the bad in our earthly dads is the photo negative of who our heavenly Father is. He is the Father of whom every human father is a shadow (Eph. 3:15).”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 14
Lamentation 3:33; Jeremiah 32:41; Isaiah 28:22; Hosea 11:1-9
“Here in Lamentations, the Bible is taking us deep into God him-self. The one who rules and ordains all things brings affliction into our lives with a certain divine reluctance. He is not reluctant about the ultimate good that is going to be brought about through that pain; that indeed is why he is doing it. But something recoils within him in sending that affliction. The pain itself does not reflect his heart. He is not a platonic force pulling heaven’s levers and pulleys in a way that is detached from the real pain and anguish we feel at his hand. He is-if I can put it this way without questioning his divine perfections- conflicted within himself when he sends affliction into our lives. God is indeed punishing Israel for their waywardness as the Babylonians sweep through the city. He is sending what they deserve. But his deepest heart is their merciful restoration…
This doctrine [Divine Providence] gives us unspeakable comfort since it teaches us that nothing can happen to us by chance but only by the arrangement of our gracious heavenly Father, who watches over us with facherly care, sustaining all creatures under his lordship, so that not one of the hairs on our heads (for they are all numbered) nor even a little bird can fall to the ground without the will of our Father. (Art. 13, Belgic Confession)
Left to our own natural intuitions about God, we will conclude that mercy is his strange work and judgment his natural work. Rewiring our vision of God as we study the Scripture, we see, helped by the great teachers of the past, that judgment is his strange work and mercy his natural work.
He does afflict and grieve the children of men. But not from
his heart.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 15
Exodus 34:6-7; Isaiah 54:7-8
“When we speak of God’s glory, we are speaking of who God is, what he is like, his distinctive resplendence, what makes God God. And when God himself sets the terms on what his glory is, he surprises us into wonder. Our deepest instincts expect him to be thundering, gavel swinging, judgment relishing. We expect the bent of God’s heart to be retribution to our waywardness. And then Exodus 34 taps us on the shoulder and stops us in our tracks. The bent of God’s heart is mercy. His glory is his goodness. His glory is his lowliness.
“Great is the glory of the LORD. For though the LORD
is high, he regards the lowly’ (Ps. 138:5-6).
The Christian life, from one angle, is the long journey of letting our natural assumption about who God is, over many decades, fall away, being slowly replaced with God’s own insistence on who he is. This is hard work. It takes a lot of sermons and a lot of suffering to believe that God’s deepest heart is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger.” The fall in Genesis 3 not only sent us into condemnation and exile. The fall also entrenched in our minds dark thoughts of God, thoughts that are only dug out over multiple exposures to the gospel over many years. Perhaps Satan’s greatest victory in your life today is not the sin in which you regularly indulge but the dark thoughts of God’s heart that cause you to go there in the first place and keep you cool toward him in the wake of it.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 16
Isaiah 55:6-13; 57:15
“God calls us to seek him, to call on him, and invites even the wicked to return to the Lord. What will happen when we do this?
God will “have compassion on” us (v. 7). The parallelism of Hebrew poetry then gives us another way of saying that God will exercise compassion toward us: “He will abundantly pardon” (v. 7). This is profound consolation for us as we find ourselves time and again wandering away from the Father, looking for soul calm anywhere but in his embrace and instruction. Returning to God in fresh contrition, however ashamed and disgusted with ourselves, he will not tepidly pardon. He will abundantly pardon. He does not merely accept us. He sweeps us up in his arms again.
He [God] isn’t like you. Even the most intense of human love is but the faintest echo of heaven’s cascading abundance. His heartful thoughts for you outstrip what you can conceive. He intends to restore you into the radiant resplendence for which you were created. And that is dependent not on you keeping yourself clean but on you taking your mess to him. He doesn’t limit himself to working with the unspoiled parts of us that remain after a lifetime of sinning. His power runs so deep that he is able to redeem the very worst parts of our past into the most radiant parts of our future. But we need to take those dark miseries to him.
Where is the heart of God, the unspeakably exalted one, naturally drawn, according to Isaiah 57:15? To the lowly. When Jesus showed up seven hundred years after Isaiah prophesied and revealed his deepest heart as “gentle and lowly,’ he was proving once and for all that gentle lowliness is indeed where God loves to dwell. It is what he does. It is who he is. His ways are not our ways.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 17
Jeremiah 31:20
“We need to understand that however long we have been walking with the Lord, whether we have never read the whole Bible or have a PhD in it, we have a perverse resistance to this. Out of his heart flows mercy; out of ours, reluctance to receive it. We are the cool and calculating ones, not he. He is open-armed. We stiff-arm. Our naturally decaffeinated views of God’s heart might feel right because we’re being stern with ourselves, not letting ourselves off the hook too easily. Such sternness feels appropriately morally serious. But this deflecting of God’s yearning heart does not reflect Scripture’s testimony about how God feels toward his own. God is of course morally serious, far more than we are. But the Bible takes us by the hand and leads us out from under the feeling that his heart for us wavers according to our loveliness. God’s heart confounds our intuitions of who he is.
But at the height of human history, justice was fully satisfied and mercy was fully poured out at the same time, when the Father sent his eternally “dear Son” and “darling child” to a Roman cross, where God truly did “speak against him,” where Jesus Christ poured out his blood, the innocent for the guilty, so that God could say of us,
“I remember him still.” Even as he forsook Jesus himself.
Repent of your small thoughts of God’s heart. Repent and let him love you.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 18
Ephesians 2:4
“Nowhere else in the Bible is God described as rich in anything.
The only thing he is called rich in is: mercy. What does this mean? It means that God is something other than what we naturally believe him to be. It means the Christian life is a lifelong shedding of tepid thoughts of the goodness of God. In his justice, God is exacting; in his mercy, God is overflowing. “He is rich unto all; that is, he is infinite, overflowing in goodness, he is good to a profuseness, he is good to the pouring forth of riches, he is good to an abundance.” Just as the Old Testament doubles up the verb “to have mercy” in Jeremiah 31:20, the New Testament calls God “rich in mercy.”
How can that be? Because mercy is who he is. If mercy was something he simply had, while his deepest nature was something different, there would be a limit on how much mercy he could dole out. But if he is essentially merciful, then for him to pour out mercy is for him to act in accord with who he is. It is simply for him to be God. When God shows mercy, he is acting in a way that is true to himself. Once again, this does not mean he is only merciful. He is also perfectly just and holy. He is rightly wrathful against sin and sinners. Following Scripture’s lead in how it talks about God, however, these attributes of moral standards do not reflect his deepest heart.
The mercy of God reaches down and rinses clean not only obviously bad people but fraudulently good people, both of whom equally stand in need of resurrection.
God is rich in mercy. He doesn’t withhold mercy from some kinds of sinners while extending it to others. Because mercy is who he is “being rich in mercy” his heart gushes forth mercy to sinners one and all. His mercy overcomes even the deadness of our souls and the hollowed-out, zombie-like existence that we are all naturally born into.
…the evidence of Christ’s mercy toward you is not your life. The evidence of his mercy toward you is his mistreated, misunderstood, betrayed, abandoned. Eternally. In your place.
If God sent his own Son to walk through the valley of condem-nation, rejection, and hell, you can trust him as you walk through your own valleys on your way to heaven.
Perhaps you have difficulty receiving the rich mercy of God in Christ not because of what others have done to you but because of what you’ve done to torpedo your life, maybe through one big, stupid decision or maybe through ten thousand little ones. You have squandered his mercy, and you know it.
To you I say, do you know what Jesus does with those who squander his mercy? He pours out more mercy. God is rich in mercy. That’s the whole point.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 19
Galatians 2:20
“And what does the gospel say? It puts the following words in each of our mouths: “the Son of God . . . loved me and gave himself for me.” His heart for me could not sit still in heaven. Our sins darken our feelings of his gracious heart, but his heart cannot be diminished for his own people due to their sins any more than the sun’s existence can be threatened due to the passing of a few wispy clouds or even an extended thunderstorm. The sun is shining. It cannot stop. Clouds, no clouds- sin, no sin- the tender heart of the Son of God is shining on me. This is an unflappable affection.
We are sinners. We sin- not just in the past but in the present, and not only by our disobedience but by our “of-works” obedience.
We are perversely resistant to letting Christ love us. But as Flavel says, ‘Why should you be such an enemy to your own peace? Why read over the evidences of God’s love to your soul . ..? Why do you study evasions, and turn off those comforts which are due to you’ (John Flavel)
In the gospel, we are free to receive the comforts that are due us. Don’t turn them off. Open the vent of your heart to the love of Christ, who loved you and gave himself for you.
Our law-ish hearts relax as his lavish heart comes home to us.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 20
Romans 5:8
“In Christ’s death, God is confronting our dark thoughts of him and our chronic insistence that divine love must have an endpoint, a limit, a point at which it finally runs dry. Christ died to confound our intuitive assumptions that divine love has an expiration date. He died to prove that God’s love is, as Jonathan Edwards put it, ‘an ocean without shores or bottom.’
God’s love is as boundless as God himself. This is why the apostle Paul speaks of divine love as a reality that stretches to an immeasurable “breadth and length and height and depth” (Eph. 3:18)-the only thing in the universe as immeasurable as that is God himself.
God’s love is as expansive as God himself.
For God to cease to love his own, God would need to cease to exist, because God does not simply have love; he is love (1 John
4:16). In the deach of Christ for us sinners, God intends to put his love for us beyond question.
‘As God did not at first choose you because you were high, he will not now forsake you because you are low.’ (John Flavel)
Nothing can now un-child you.
Not even you. Those in Christ are eternally imprisoned within the tender heart of God. We will be less sinful in the next life than we are now, but we will not be any more secure in the next life than we are now. If you are united to Christ, you are as good as in heaven already.
‘Christ loved you before all worlds; long ere the day star flung his ray across the darkness, before the wing of angel had flapped the unnavigated ether, before aught of creation had struggled from the womb of nothingness, God, even our God, had set his heart upon all his children.
Since that time, has he once swerved, has he once turned aside, once changed? No; ye who have tasted of his love and know his grace, will bear me witness, that he has been a certain friend in uncertain circumstances. . ..
You have often left him; has he ever left you? You have had many trials and troubles; has he ever deserted you? Has he ever turned away his heart, and shut up his bowels of compassion?
No, children of God, it is your solemn duty to say “No”, and bear witness to his faithfulness.’ (Spurgeon)
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 21
John 13:1
“Proportionally, John’s Gospel devotes more space to the final week of Jesus’s life than any other Gospel. And it is the first verse of chapter 13 that kicks off this final extended section to this Gospel.
John’s statement that Jesus loved his own to the end launches the passion narrative, and the arraignment and crucifixion of Christ is the historical demonstration of what is put in a nutshell in John
13:1. And John’s point in 13:1 is that in going to the cross, Jesus did not retain something for himself, the way we tend to do when we seek to love others sacrificially. He does not love like us.
We love until we are betrayed. Jesus continued to the cross despite betrayal. We love until we are forsaken. Jesus loved through forsakenness.
We love up to a limit. Jesus loves to the end.
…in venting that righteous wrath [on Jesus, on the cross] God was not striking a morally neutral tree. He was splintering the Lovely One. Beauty and Goodness himself was being uglified and vilified.
“Stricken, smitten
by God …” (Isa. 53:4).
So that we ugly ones could be freely beautified, pardoned, calmed.
Our heaven through his hell. Our entrance into Love through his loss of it.
This was what loving to the end meant. Passing through the horror of the cross and drinking down the flood of filth, the centuries of sin, all that is revolting even in our eyes.
But why would he go through with it? Why would he step down into the horror of hellish condemnation when he was the one person who didn’t deserve it?
The text tells us. “Having loved his own… he loved them to the end.””
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 22
Ephesians 2:7
“We are pieces of art, designed to be beautiful and thus draw attention to our artist. We are simply made for nothing else. When we live to glorify God, we step into the only truly humanizing way of living. We function properly, like a car running on gasoline rather than orange juice. And on top of that, what more enjoyable kind of life is there? How exhausting is the misery of self. How energizing are the joys of living for another.
The point of unending eternal life in the new heavens and the new earth is that God “might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.”
Here we are. Just ordinary people, anxiously making our way through life, sinning and suffering, wandering and returning, regretting and despairing, persistently drifting away from a heart sense of what we will enjoy forever if we are in Christ.
It means that our fallenness now is not an obstacle to enjoying heaven. It is the key ingredient to enjoying heaven. Whatever mess we have made of our life_-that’s part of our final glory and calm and radiance. That thing we’ve done that sent our life into meltdown-that is where God in Christ becomes more real than ever in this life and more wonderful to us in the next. (And those of us who have been pretty squeaky clean will get there one day and realize more than ever how deeply sin and self-righteousness and pride and all kinds of willful subconscious rebellions were way down deep inside us, and how all that sends God’s grace in kindness soaring, and we too will stand, astonished, at how great his heart is for us.)
The point of all human history and eternity itself is to show what cannot be fully shown. To demonstrate what cannot be adequately demonstrated. In the coming age we will descend ever deeper into God’s grace in kindness, into his very heart, and the more we understand of it, the more we will see it to be beyond understanding.
It is immeasurable.”
“Gentle and Lowly”, chapter 23 (last chapter)