Following Judah's Lion

At Calvary

At Calvary - Willaim Newell

Oh the love that drew salvation’s plan
Oh the grace that brought it down to man
Oh the mighty gulf that God did span
At Calvary

We may never fully know, much less understand, just how far God had to go to purchase our salvation. And when our hearts and minds come to understand the enormity of God’s redemption, and the enormity of our comprehensive limitations, it must elicit the greatest demonstrations of worship as well as unrestricted service. If I was outlining the path to divine redemption for mankind, I would have God just issuing a decree and with that be done. However the mystery of grace, juxtaposed against the mystery of iniquity, demanded an incredible sacrifice beyond all reason, logic, and understanding.
We cannot fully explain the making of a “spirit”, which is what God is, to say nothing of dissecting the makeup and operation of the Trinity. But God has not required of us to explain all mysteries or to be fully versed in all things invisible. But He has granted to us a knowledge so wonderful and so profound that we can never exhaust its depths or capture all its infinite facets. We are so limited in our view of love, and so subjective in our assessment concerning who deserves love. But God has loved His enemies before He ever made them. And God is, in fact, love itself. God not only exhibits the verb form of love; God is the noun itself. He is the essence; the epitome; the source; and the quintessential substance of all love. And it was by the power of this love that God Himself came disguised as one of His enemies.
And the provided grace was birthed through that love. And oh how expansive is that grace. There is no sin that is outside the power of this grace when it is made alive through faith alone. Indeed, only unbelief inhibits that grace and only the works of man rise as false and powerless counterfeits. God’s grace is antithetical to human reasoning and understanding. And when a sinner is required to leave everything he believes might help, however small and insignificant, at the door of grace he often recoils. How could God reject sincere attempts to serve Him and his creation? Why would He discard honest efforts to perform works of compassion to honor Him? And these questions crystallize our fallen understanding of God’s grace which are actually attempts to elevate ourselves. Grace is only for the dead man; dead in his sins and without any life.
The monkeys in India are captured many times by a simple technique. The man places a peanut inside a pot whose neck allows the open hand of the monkey to enter, but when the monkey grasps the peanut and cannot get his fisted hand free he is often captured. And so is fallen man when he continues to cling to his baptism or church membership or his philanthropy or his comparative goodness. God’s grace will not share an apartment with any works other than that of Calvary and the empty tomb. And the only difficulties in God’s grace are not any religious or moral hurdles that some claim it requires. The difficulty always lies within the stubborn and self righteous heart of man who demands a part in that grace.
And the gulf to which the song refers is gaping and irreconcilable without the grace of God. We pitiful humans have absolutely a limited view of sin and a negligible concept of holiness. We tend to think of holiness as something we do not do in order to remain pure and something we do to attain it. In reality rocks do not sin and yet they are not holy. Holiness, God’s holiness, is a state of being known only in essence by the Majestic Being named God and it is an absolute power that emanates from impeccable purity and exhaustive moral virtue. God’s holiness cannot be measured in degrees or levels. It is universal and eternally constant. And any holiness attributed to any man is wholly through imputation and without one iota of his own strength or effort. The difference between our condition and God’s holiness was a shocking and spiritually redoubtable chasm that no amount of human sincerity or works of earthly labors could ever constrict by the smallest whit.
And yet this gulf was not only constricted, it was eliminated without residue by the finished work of the Risen Christ! God did not just shorten the span so we could attempt to leap its breadth. In fact, just that thought reveals how little we understand about the magnitude and eternal devastation our sin had caused. When Jesus died for our sins, and when He arose from the dead as the victorious proof of who He was and what He had accomplished, the might gulf that separated us from God was closed without a seam. And this was done not with technology and higher human learning; this was done at Calvary. And what appeared to the carnal eye as a dead Jew on a Roman cross getting what he deserved, was to the spiritually enlightened eye the Redeemer in prophetic fulfillment receiving what we deserved.

Mercy there was great, and grace was free;
Pardon there was multiplied to me;
There my burdened soul found liberty at Calvary.

I can fully recall the general time in which my soul was set free. Since I did not walk down an aisle to believe on Jesus I do not recall the exact calendar day, but I can recall that night when overlooking Manhattan at night I became a son of the Most High God. And what a night it was! I knew no theology and little doctrine. I owned only one Bible that was given to me at a religious obligation they called confirmation. I could not have told you anything about what concerns the church nowadays, and I believed in evolution, smoked cigarettes, and had other bad habits. But that night, that glorious night, I was no longer who I used to be. I was now a rough piece of clay that God would begin to mold and still is molding with the same power and patience it required in March of 1975.

Years I spent in vanity and pride,
Caring not my Lord was crucified,
Knowing not it was for me He died on Calvary.

I cared for nothing but my happiness before I met Christ. And I would not have been swayed by political debates or even moral scoldings about my lifestyle. I am fully convinced that the core of evangelism is to present the Lord Jesus and His work in all its majesty along with exhibiting that same person through a loving and humble life. And we must not forsake eternity in our witness as if Jesus died to make our lives better and more prosperous upon this earth, Many are the saints whose lives became worse and even became poorer and more dangerous because they professed the Lord Jesus. Just as the Levites were not given a share of the land, our reward is not of this world. We await His appearing and a reward that far outweighs any pitiful offerings this world has to give.
God told the Levites that He Himself was their inheritance and reward. And make no mistake about it. Our reward for all eternity will not be our new bodies; it will not be the removal from the presence of sin; and it will not be the presence of the holy angels. Our reward will always be the Lord Jesus. And all this was purchased at Calvary.

Now I've given to Jesus everything,
Now I gladly own Him as my King,
Now my raptured soul can only sing of Calvary!