Sunday, March 22, 2015
Day 33: Isaiah 50:6,7
Isaiah 50: 6, 7 (KJB): “I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting. For the Lord God will help me; therefore shall I not be confounded: therefore have I set my face like a flint, and I know that I shall not be ashamed…”
Lent will always remind us of the terrible suffering and gruesome physical torture and death that our sweet and gentle Redeemer had to endure in order to save us. I for one did not summon the necessary courage to watch Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, I even had to politely return the DVD of this movie to a retired Lutheran pastor who presented it to Gloria and me as a Christmas gift. “Why wouldn’t you want to see the suffering that our Lord had to go through? You might end up loving Him more.” But I thought: you don’t have to be particularly enlightened to understand the description in the Holy Gospel of Mark, where we are told a whole Roman company (600 soldiers) took turns at lashing his back, setting a crown of thorns around his head, pulled out his beard, which made him bleed profusely, hitting him on the head with a long stick and repeatedly spitting on him. Besides mocking him, stripping him, and forcing him to carry a heavy wooden cross to Golgotha, they impaled his hands and feet with huge sharp nails. I don’t think I need more audiovisual materials to end up wailing for my dear Master and Savior.
Stephen Mansfield, an emeritus reporter and writer with The New York Times wrote a column saying that we Christians must not forget that the cross was a Roman tool of torture before it was a tool of death and state terror, a perfect tool of vengeance, a public spectacle of subjugation. The rebellion of the slave Spartacus in the year 71 B.C. is said to have cost 6000 crucifixions, and during the siege of Jerusalem in A.D. 70 by Titus Vespasian, the Romans crucified 500 Jews a day until the Temple of Solomon and the fortress of Meggido was utterly destroyed. The last Jewish Diaspora was carried out fulfilling the prophecy of Jesus in the Holy Gospel of Luke, Chapter 21. Mansfield’s message to Christians: be extremely sensitive and oppose by all means torture, cruel death and genocide.
I wanted to dwell on this subject this year because I have been very troubled, much less at ease, seeing the recent resurgence of Islamic-inspired atrocities around the world.
After losing nearly 4500 lives of our soldiers, with 20,000 more wounded in Iraq, many of them from Fort Hood, plus 2500 more in Afghanistan, and ironically, even losing 13 more of our people on post to a fanatic Muslim and traitor psychiatrist in our midst, I ask myself…was such a steep price in American blood worth paying, as we witness the surge of ISIS in the Middle East, 100,000 dead in Syria, 7 million refugees living in squalor in Jordan and Turkey, the bombing of Christian churches, the kidnapping of 200 elementary schoolgirls in Nigeria by Boko Haram, forced to convert and marry old Muslims, and their latest tactic, using 10 year old girls as suicide bombers to attack crowded markets. The brutal beheadings of innocent American reporters and aid volunteers, the expulsion of the Coptic Christians from Iraq, with reported torture and crucifixions, the massacres of Yashidi young men in Mosul and the cowardly killing of the Charlie Magazine workers and Jewish customers of a kosher store in Paris…When will this end?
Yet Jesus, fulfilling the old prophecy of Isaiah chapter 50, narrated verbatim again in the Holy Gospels, said that he “set his face like a flint” on the cross; in others words, nothing, neither suffering, torture and a cruel death would prevent Him from accomplishing the mission His Father gave him: to redeem humanity, completely satisfying the moral law of the universe, established by an Almighty and Holy God, bringing grace, salvation and peace to a broken, fallen world. And accomplished, He did, and triumphed, He did. Coming alive victorious over sin and death, working through His disciples to heal the world today, and sometime in the future, we know through Holy Scripture, we will see Him in His majestic full Glory…Lord of lords, King of kings, the Lamb of God…Glory to God!
Dear Father: make us more sensitive to cruelty, torture and death. Help us make a difference in this violent world; help our armed forces working to curtail the designs of an evil religion. Help us support the refugee aid effort of the Christian churches and the Red Cross. Come promptly, Lord Jesus. Amen.
Contributed by Victor
