Waiting in the Darkness

Psalm 130: 5-6

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in His word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord
more than those who watch for the morning,
more than those who watch for the morning. (NRSV)

Sometimes waiting doesn’t seem like waiting. It seems, instead, like loss.

The disciples knew that Jesus had been crucified, that He had died. For them, death was an end. Mark 16:10 tells us that they were mourning and weeping. Their understanding of what had happened was ruled by the immediate and the physical. Death had come. Death was final. Everything they had lived and believed for the past three years was over.

Or so they thought.

The fact was that God was not done! And that’s what we need to remember in each seeming loss in our lives. God is not done! Rather than giving up, rather than trying to regroup, rather than believing there is no hope, we need to learn how to wait and how to hope in the Lord.

The Psalm says, "more than those who watch for the morning." Have you ever stayed up all night, wishing for the sun to come up? The waiting seems interminable, but eventually the sun does come up. In our lives, the rising sun is a constant. No matter how long the night seems, the sun eventually rises. Even in the northern lands, where night lasts for months, eventually the sun rises and light appears.

It is the same with the Lord’s plans, plans that He has for our good. Jeremiah 29:11 says:

"‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ says the Lord. ‘They are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’" (NLT)

And again, Romans 8:28:

"We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to His purpose." (NRSV)

God Himself is working out the plans He has for our lives. Sometimes those plans include times of darkness, times of loss, but that loss isn’t the end. It isn’t even a break in the plans. These times are there to strengthen our faith, to give us opportunities to learn how to trust His Word.

That Saturday between Good Friday (the crucifixion) and Easter (the resurrection) wasn’t a break in God’s plans. Rather, it was an integral part of what the Lord was doing in His glorious plan to save the people He created, the people He loved. The disciples didn’t understand that, rather than a time of mourning, it was a time of thanksgiving, of celebration. The promised salvation had finally come!

When darkness comes in our lives, rather than fighting with God or surrendering our faith, it is a time to praise Him and learn how to trust. There isn’t anything to be afraid of in the darkness; He has been there all the time!

© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.

For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com

Isaiah 53

Who has believed what we have heard? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed? For He grew up before Him like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him, nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him. He was despised and rejected by others; a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity; and as one from whom others hide their faces He was despised, and we held Him of no account. Surely He has borne our infirmities and carried our diseases; yet we accounted Him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; upon Him was the punishment that made us whole, and by His bruises we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have all turned to our own way, and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He did not open His mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so He did not open his mouth. By a perversion of justice He was taken away. Who could have imagined his future? For He was cut off from the land of the living, stricken for the transgression of my people. They made His grave with the wicked and his tomb with the rich, although He had done no violence, and there was no deceit in His mouth. Yet it was the will of the Lord to crush Him with pain. When you make His life an offering for sin, He shall see his offspring, and shall prolong His days; through him the will of the Lord shall prosper. Out of His anguish he shall see light; He shall find satisfaction through His knowledge. The righteous one, my servant, shall make many righteous, and He shall bear their iniquities. Therefore I will allot Him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong; because He poured out Himself to death, and was numbered with the transgressors; yet He bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (NRSV)

"When will we get there?"

"Mom, how many days ‘til we go to Disneyland?"

"Only seven days until we get married."

"The escrow will close in a month."

"Tomorrow we’re going on our first date."

Anticipation. It’s something that we live for, something that often fuels what we see as the mediocrity of our lives. We do our best to look into the future, to plan something "better" and then use that to fuel our efforts through the boring.

What did our Lord anticipate? When the Lord Jesus woke up that Thursday before Easter, what did He see? What did He sense? What did He plan?

He planned His death.

In fact, since the beginning of time, God has been planning His ultimate sacrifice, the sacrifice that would save us from ourselves and from an eternity with Him, the Creator within Whom we are made complete.

After God had finished creating this reality, He stopped and saw that it was very good (Genesis 1:31). Looking back over the six days of creation, He saw the good. But in Genesis 3:15, He looked forward into the future and saw our need for a Savior. The Father knew from the beginning that He would have to die.

So when the Lord Jesus awoke that Thursday morning, what He had to look forward to was a death of horrendous proportions. But His physical and emotional sufferings at the hands of His human torturers was nothing compared to what He would suffer at the hands of the Trinity itself!

All of His existence (which is eternally backwards and eternally forwards), the Lord Jesus had existed as the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. He existed within that perfect, sinless communion of absolute love, absolute justice, absolute sinlessness. Even during His life here on earth, He was still completely God (just as much as He was completely man).

But the Lord Jesus knew that morning that He would be facing the most devastating time of His existence . . . in the rejection of the Trinity! As He hung on the cross and became sin for you and me, He would experience existence without the Father. How that is possible, I don’t understand, but we know from scripture that it happened.  The Father rejected the Son.

"At three o’clock Jesus cried out with a loud voice, "Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?" which means, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" . . . Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom." (Mark 15:34, 37-39 NRSV).

While we can spend our lives in anticipation of heaven, God spent more than 6,000 years in anticipation this one brutal moment, the moment when the Trinity would somehow tear itself apart—even temporarily—so that the Son could become the sacrifice for our sin. The Lord Jesus woke up that Thursday morning knowing that the most savage of experiences would happen to Him . . . and yet He still walked down that path because of His love for us!

Somehow it makes the small things that He expects of me so much, much less. If He can do this for me, then the least that I can do is to live for Him through whatever pain, loneliness or suffering there is in store. At least I know that I will not be walking it alone because He has promised that the Holy Spirit will never leave me. The Lord Jesus suffered alone and rejected so that I wouldn’t have to.

© 2014 Robin L. O’Hare. All Rights Reserved.  For permission to copy, please contact servinggodalone@yahoo.com