Tag Archives: save Him from death

ROUND ONE – JESUS WINS

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ROUND ONE – JESUS WINS

“During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverent submission. Although He was a son, He learned obedience from what He suffered…” Hebrews 5:7, 8a.

There is a thread running through this whole episode. Satan was gunning for the unity between Jesus and the Father. He was trying to break the oneness between them so that he could create a new alliance, just as he did with Adam. If he could get Jesus on his side by manipulating Him into submission to his will, he would secure man’s position as lost and hell-bound forever. He would one-up God and be declared the winner, taking mankind into alienation from God forever.

God’s experiment with a free creature made in His image to be one with Him and to be the objects and recipients of His love, would have failed and, once again, God would have been left alone with no-one outside Himself to share His wealth and His life.

What an enormous responsibility rested on Jesus’ shoulders and what a prize for the winner! What was the pivot on which it all turned? Jesus was so steeped in God’s Word that it was not an experiment for Him to trust God. What He had to deal with was the subtlety of Satan’s lies. To Jesus, obedience to God’s Word was non-negotiable but He had to apply it to His situation with wisdom and truth. The ultimate choice was, “For me?” or “For God? Is this about me or is this about God?”

The same self-giving relationship that flowed in the Trinity before Jesus came to earth, flowed between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit during His earthly life. Jesus was a vulnerable human being but, by trusting the Father’s Word, He was learning to be righteous in situations just like this. This was the first of many tests that qualified Him to be the perfect sacrifice by earning a righteousness that He could give to all who follow Him.

We often think that the verse I have quoted above refers to Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and that His desire to be saved from death refers to His death on the cross. I think it is far more than that. He risked everything by becoming a man. He was born innocent but not righteous. Like Adam, He had to learn to be righteous through obedience to His Father. Adam lost his innocence early in his life because he chose his own will over God’s will. Jesus learned obedience and earned His righteousness by obeying and trusting the Father. Had He only once acted on His own initiative, He would have been as lost as Adam was. He was saved from eternal death by His submission to the Father and qualified to be our Saviour. We have a great Saviour!

PRAYER AND OBEDIENCE

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PRAYER AND OBEDIENCE

This leads to our fourth important attitude towards God as we engage with Him in prayer – obedience. God rates obedience above everything else because obedience encompasses all the other right attitudes we need to have towards Him. Obedience is the ultimate evidence of our holy fear of the Lord. Again Jesus is our model.

During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverent submission. Although He was a son, He learned obedience from what He suffered and, once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him. (Heb. 5: 7-9)

I think this is the one we struggle with the most. Why? Is it because we connect obedience with understanding? Before we act in response to God’s instructions, we demand to know why. We will trust God and do what He requires of us if we know that it makes sense and will turn out right in the end.

Abraham was known as the friend of God. He did not respond to God’s command in that way. What God asked him to do made no sense to him at all, but he obeyed anyway. “Go and burn you son on an altar to me!” How crazy was that, especially when the son he was to sacrifice was the one who was born to an elderly and barren couple after twenty-five years of waiting! “God, do you know what you are asking? Do you know what you are doing?”

Obedience is the mark of one who truly fears God. Abraham obeyed and went without hesitation, willing to obey God to the last drop of Isaac’s blood because he knew what it meant to fear God, a holy fear because he knew God and he trusted Him because he knew that God knew what He was doing and why.

God told Jesus to give Himself over to the religious leaders to torture and crucify. Really? “God, this is your Messiah, your Son. Do you know what you are asking of Him? Do you know what you are doing? This surely has no good in it for Him. What is the point of having Him killed? A dead Son will be of no use to you.” That’s how we humans reason. God is not under any obligation to explain. The reasons may only become clear later when we have done what He asked us to do.

There is one man in the Bible who was given the honour of the title “A man after my own heart.” Imagine that! Despite the many theories preachers put forward about the reason for this honour, the Bible gives us God’s take on it.

He testified concerning him: ‘I have found David, son of Jesse a man after my own heart; he will do everything I want him to do.’ (Acts 13: 22b)

Was David a perfect man? Far from it! He messed up on more than one occasion, but at those times when “he enquired of the Lord,” as he so often did when he needed help from God, he did what God told him to do and he prevailed. He became the greatest of all the kings of Israel and the model of a godly king for both the southern and northern kingdoms.

Despite his failures, David adored God. He longed after Him. He gazed on His beauty in the creation around him and in the tabernacle where he went to worship. God filled David’s horizon; He was his rock; his shelter, his source and his everything. He sang about Him; he worshipped Him; he danced before Him; he celebrated Him; he even complained and mourned over Him when God seemed far away and non-responsive to him, but he never gave up on Him or put Him out of his mind for any longer than a moment.

“A man after my own heart!” That surely fitted David as the one Old Covenant, ordinary, sinful human being who was “stuck” on God, and God loved it! With his limited vision and experience before the cross event, David was just like Jesus. He could not get enough of God.

How much more should we, who have the mercy of God right in our faces, and every opportunity with the Holy Spirit within us, to become like our rabbi, be stuck on God. What greater privilege is there than to do His will and to see Him kingdom come, to deliver people from bondage to sin and to give them brand new lives under His rule?

What if we really feared the Lord because we knew Him and trusted Him? Would we, like the great men of the Bible, be willing to obey Him promptly and without question because we are sure that He would ask nothing of us that were not for our good or His glory?

Scripture is taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

A PERFECT SON

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 A PERFECT SON

During the days of Jesus’s life of earth, He offered up prayers and petitions with fervent cries and tears to the one who could save Him from death, and He was heard because of His reverent submission. Son though He was, He learned obedience from what He suffered and, once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him, and was designated by God to be high priest in the order of Melchizedek. (Heb. 5: 7-10)

What a holy moment! The writer allows us a glimpse into the anguish of the son of God. Isaiah called Him ‘a man of sorrows and familiar with grief’ and yet He was also described as a man of joy, anointed with the oil of joy above His companions. Jesus experienced the intensity of sorrow more than any other person because, firstly, He felt the pain of His people who were cut off from the Father and, secondly, He felt the power of temptation that threatened to cut Him off from the Father.

What is this writer implying? That Jesus was threatened with death but He escaped it because God heard His prayers? But that did not happen. We know that He was crucified, so that cannot be what the writer meant. In what way was Jesus saved from death? The threat of death hung over Him from the moment of His birth. He was ‘the last Adam’, born of a human mother, but born with the nature of Adam before the fall. Unlike us who are born with nature of fallen man, He was able to sin but also able not to sin.

Jesus’ entire human life was a test of His submission and obedience to the Father. Where Adam failed, He dared not fail. To qualify as a perfect high priest and sacrifice, He had to be the perfect Son. If He were to be an acceptable sacrifice, He has to be without sin so that, like the Levitical high priest on the Day of Atonement, He had to emerge from the Holy of Holies alive as a sign that His sacrifice was accepted.

Jesus knew the intensity of sin’s power to lure Him away from perfect trust in the Father and perfect obedience to the Father’s will. His entire life was a test of obedience, the battle in Gethsemane being the zenith of that struggle against sin. In spite of the spectre of the horrible experience that lay before Him, and the bloody sweat that poured from His pores like the precious oil pressed from the olives, He submitted to the Father’s will.

Jesus was God’s Son. He was God. He was the exact replica of God in human form. He has all the power, all the knowledge, and all the attributes of God but He chose to live as a man, never once employing His divine power as God during His earthly life. His power came from the Holy Spirit, God’s equipment who came upon Him at His baptism. He lived in perfect union with the Father, entrusting Himself to Him for every need and every situation.

This was the only way in which He could qualify to be the Saviour of humankind. He knew what it was to be weak and to have to trust His Father instead of acting as God. He had many great battles with the enemy. We know nothing of His childhood when, as a young, vulnerable and impressionable boy, He had to call the devil’s bluff and trust His Abba. We have just one example of this warfare when He was tempted to act as God and to act independently of His Father in the wilderness. He passed with flying colours.

How did He overcome? Through His constant fellowship with the Father in prayer. He stayed in touch with the Father so that He would know and do His will. He listened to the voice of the Spirit. He drew strength from the Holy Spirit. He learned obedience from what He suffered. He learned the meaning of obedience by being obedient through every test. He felt the strength of Satan’s pressure on Him but He resisted and overcame every time. He could challenge His accusers with the words, ‘Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?’  What a challenge! What a testimony!

Yes, Jesus was amply qualified to be both our king and our high priest. His perfect submission and obedience to the Father set Him apart as the perfect Son and gave Him the right to be the source of eternal salvation for everyone who believes. He is now and forever the eternal high priest in the order of Melchizedek, the power of an endless life.

Scripture taken from THE HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.