Following Judah's Lion

A Scene of Violence

And again the country and even the world has become mesmerized at the blood letting that came from the hand of a deranged killer. Columbine and Virginia Tech, Son of Sam and Charles Manson, Bundy and Gacy, and every future event of wanton savagery will grip the attention of the civilized society. Riveted to the next newscast to hear the latest details of the downward spiral of this and other men and hoping to see hand held phone images of fear and panic during the blood bath. Like slowing to see a car wreck, our attention slows to take it all in.

But on a hill outside Jerusalem there once was an awful spectacle, gruesome and repugnant in its appearance and terrible in its viciousness. And the contrast between innocence and deserving punishment infinitely outweighs even the undeserved nature of the murder of the little Amish girls. Holy and blameless hangs the Lamb who was now physically carrying out what had been already seen by God’s prophetic vision. The depth of what was happening at this bloody event can never be fully experienced, it was His and His alone.

The Spirit has shared its meaning to the finite intellect of man, and that same Spirit has illuminated the hearts of believers who see their sin bearer, but to be completely immersed in its suffering majesty is for Christ alone. Whenever the world is fixated on the blood of earthly victims, we as followers of the bloody Lamb must turn our gaze to Golgotha, the place of divine death, draped in crimson, wondered by angels, but glorious in essence. And just as He was slain before the foundations of the world, His amazing sacrifice continues to flow through the sinful hearts of believing saints, washing them clean again as it had on that first believing moment.

The bloody scene at Calvary is a living event, finished in time yet continuing to pour its sin cleansing stream throughout the following days. The cross was our beginning and yet our end, our opening and our closing, our indictment and our release, our guilt and our innocence, our shame and our glory, and our death and our life.

Who can know it? The world in its carnal attempts to explain history misrepresents Him and even blasphemes His name. And even when they accurately portray the human aspect of His crucifixion they completely miss the divine purpose and expression. And the church sets aside a day they call Good Friday to quickly remember the event and then go on about their business never realizing that we should meditate and worship before the suffering Lamb daily, humbly acknowledging that this earthly victim is our Heavenly King. Let the world have their serial killers and their awful and deadly rampages, we have Christ. Let them study and dissect the different reasons why someone must die at the hands of angry men, we know why our Lord died. No one forced Him and no one took His life, He laid it down for the sins of many and the many sins of each.

The blood that gushed from the Savior’s body is the only blood we can love. Truly love. Oh we can Biblically explain it but mere words can never communicate what our hearts say and feel. In a mystery, every sinner who by faith embraces the cross as his only payment for the God separating sin that has pronounced him guilty, he is forever drawn to the place of redeeming love.

The scene of violence becomes a scene of peace to the blood washed sinner. Man can walk on the moon, he can see distant galaxies, he can view atomic particles, he can transplant human hearts, and he can wrap the entire human experience up and cover it completely with his own philosophy about its meaning and importance. But he can never understand the cross without the Spirit. The world in all its growing knowledge about everything, still sees a dead Jew on a Roman cross. And if one day they invent a way to implant all the knowledge from all the computers into every man’s brain so that he knows everything that can be known, and if that same man fails to understand only one thing, the cross, that man knows nothing.

Praise God for the scene of violence that struck an eternal blow to death itself, for us. And while we all watch the constant reliving of another bloody scene of purposeless violence, let us remember the scene which had the eternal purposes of the Creator woven within its bloody wounds…forever.