The Love of God #4

God's love is a HURTING love. It hurt God to love us redemptively. "God...loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins" 1 John 4:10.

God did not just send the eternal Son to become also man. He sent Him to become also man that He might live a perfect life under the law and so be qualified to be our propitiation. Propitiation means the "sacrifice that turns away wrath." The animal's blood that was sprinkled on the mercy seat in the Temple's holy of holies was obtained at the cost of the animal's life. When that blood was sprinkled on the lid of the ark of the covenant, it was a sacrifice that then stood between the Holy God above the ark and the broken law within the ark. How could this infinitely Holy One who dwelt between the cherubim not bring wrath down upon the head of His people who had continuously rebelled against His law? The answer, bring that wrath down on the head of someone else, upon someone who deserved no wrath, who was unblemished.

Jesus was the final lamb, the spotless One who perfectly obeyed the law of God and therefore was qualified to be the sacrifice who's blood would be sprinkled once and for all forever in the Holy of Holies in Heaven (Hebrews 9:11-14). He qualified to have the wrath WE deserve brought down on His head. And it was. God the Father's white-hot holy wrath was brought down, full-measure, on the head of His perfect Son. He watched His Son writhe and gasp and shake with horror as He was treated like the sin-scum of all sinners since Adam. My sin...my unkindness, my lust, my food-idolatry, my dishonoring and critical spirit, my laziness, my meritless pride, my tight grasp on things, my rush to the morning paper with a passion that my Bible reading lacks...this and so much more, multiplied by a number with so many zeroes that only the Infinite Mind can call the number, multiplied again by the sin of billions of other sinners...ALL of this was brought down on the head of Jesus on the cross.

And the Father not only watched...His will HELD Jesus there to suffer the entire torment, to drink to the dregs the cup of God's wrath until ALL my sin and your sin and the sin of millions yet to come was paid for in full. Until "It is finished!" could truly and agonizingly be screamed.

THAT...is a hurting love. And that is the kind of love the Father has loved us with and its shadow is the kind of love with which we are to love one another.