If Only You Knew: An Easter DevotionalНамуна

You’ve probably watched a movie about an astronaut, sent alone into the void of space on an impossible mission.

All of humanity watches from earth on bleachers near the launch site, on screens or from New York’s Times Square. As the rocket gets smaller in the sky, the tail of white smoke is like one single thread by which the whole of humanity hangs.

If one thing goes wrong that thin thread will snap; life as we know it will be over.

Imagine, for a moment, that Jesus is that man on a mission. Jesus, alone. But He’s not in a rocket on the way to some extra-terrestrial adventure. He has left all the glory of heaven and the perfect presence of God the Father.

Weighed down by the law of gravity, subject to the powers of empire, His body is broken and His blood poured out on the cross. But God has asked Him to go even further and deeper than this suffering, to the darkest place imaginable.

The cross is merely the launch pad into His most dangerous and terrible assignment yet: the descent into hell and total separation from God so that sin, once for all can be defeated.

If one thing goes wrong, hope for humanity is over.

What Jesus accomplished on the cross is a miracle for so many reasons. It’s the greatest victory ever achieved for humanity!

And yet, at Easter, it’s easy to rush through a story we’re familiar with to get to the glory and the beauty of redemption. While it makes sense that we don’t want to look too closely at it, we must consider the emotional suffering Christ endured.

Heaven turned its face away from Jesus when He bore our sin—every crime, every evil thought, every act of violence and injustice. God the Father looked away from His beloved Son. Jesus was rejected by His Father.

That unknown, unwanted space Jesus entered, completely void of God’s presence, was hell.

As we exhale in relief on Easter Sunday and celebrate the joy of Christ’s return from the grave, let’s not rush by this suffering. His sure victory over sin came at the greatest cost. Christ alone, Christ rejected, tethered us to the unbreakable and eternal mercy of God.