“It is only the fear of God that can deliver us from the fear of man.”
John Witherspoon (1723-1794)
Hope Offered
Fearing that we would be dashed against the rocks, they dropped four anchors from the stern and prayed for daylight.
Acts 27:29
Because God wanted to make the unchanging nature of his purpose
very clear to the heirs of what was promised, he confirmed it
with an oath. God did this so that, by two unchangeable things
in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled to
take hold of the hope offered to us maybe greatly encouraged.
We have this hope as an anchor for the soul, firm and secure.
Hebrews 6: 17-19a
To Think Of Safety
These have come so that your faith – of greater worth than gold,
which perishes even though refined by fire – may be proved genuine
and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.
1 Peter 1:7
“You ask me what I shall do if I am called by the emperor. I will
go even if I am too sick to stand on my feet. If Caesar calls me,
God calls me. If violence is used, as well it may be, I commend my
cause to God. He lives and reigns who saved the three youths from
the fiery furnace of the king of Babylon, and if He will not save me,
my head is worth nothing compared with Christ.
This is no time to think of safety.
I must take care that the gospel is not brought into contempt
by our fear to confess and seal our teaching with our blood.”
(Source: Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (1950)(Hendrickson, p. 167).
The Crowd
Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said:
“If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross
and follow me.
For whoever wants to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it.
What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?
Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?”
Mark 8:34-37
The Sound of Certain Victory
“In that day,” declares the Sovereign Lord,
“I will make the sun go down at noon
and darken the earth in broad daylight.”
Amos 8:9
The darkness shrouded our Lord, and at the moment when He suffered
the most extreme agony, His suffering was hidden from all human eyes.
The impenetrable secrecy of those last hours is what enables us to
imagine and appreciate the inconceivable suffering He endured. In
His previous hours of suffering, He had been exposed to view. But
human eyes were never intended to see Him in His supreme anguish.
There is no way we could ever do justice in describing that horrible
time, so God hid it from us.
If Jesus’ experience as the Sinbearer revealed itself on His face,
as Isaiah seems to indicate in his fifty-third chapter, and if it
affected His appearance that men should take no notice of Him, then
those last hours in which His sufferings climaxed must have impressed
themselves on Him in unequaled severity.
Gethsemane is described for us in Scripture, but we read nothing about
the last half of Calvary. Peter,James, and John were given an audience
to His private suffering in Gethsemane, but at Calvary, God drew the
drapes of darkness around Him to hide Him from human eyes.
Oh, the mysteries of that suffering! No man’s eyes should ever see them.
All that man was permitted to know of His suffering was to hear the terrible
cry of incomprehensible pain and torment. Yet in that cry was the sound of
certain victory, for the mournful cry, “Why have you forsaken me?” follows
only upon the heels of the confident shout, “My God,my God.”
from The Six Miracles of Calvary by William R. Nicholson. Pages 24,25