Saturday, February 23, 2008
Psalm 22:19-21 But You, O LORD, do not be far from Me; O My Strength, hasten to help Me! Deliver Me from the sword, My precious life from the power of the dog. Save Me from the lion's mouth And from the horns of the wild oxen! You have answered Me.
CRY OF SALVATION
Surrounded and on the point of death He cries to the Father to save His soul. He is not worried about His physical life, which He knows is coming to a close but that the Lord might save His soul. And so He cried on Calvary, "Father into Your hands I commit My spirit." And having said this, He breathed His last.
Right here where we would think, "This is the end. The dogs and lions, His enemies, have conquered and torn His life from Him." Here we find not the end nor a sentence of defeat, but a single sentence (in Hebrew only a single word) declaring victory, salvation, deliverance. And that victory is declared as what the Father has done, "You have answered Me."
The Son has thus experienced what He knew to be true all along. Earlier He proclaimed, "Those who trust in You, those who cry to You, You will deliver." But here now He tastes that deliverance first hand. He has cried to God the Father and the Father has in His own time delivered the Son from the hands of those who hate Him, delivered Him through death into life.
This is the way it always works out in the movies. The hero or heroine is inches or seconds away from death and at the moment when it seems all is lost, help flies in and carries them off. The Father is always near us to help and aid us and be our strength, thanks to what Christ did. We are far from Him and can not by any means draw closer but He draws near to us and comes close to us to give us aid. And when things are their bleakest, when we come face to face with death, when we are surrounded by thoughts of our own sinfulness and Satan howls for our perverse and wretched soul, then the Father delivers us, not by saving us from death, but by drawing us through it into life.
