What Jesus Has Done For Us (ft. Ravi Zacharias)Sample

Day Seven: Jesus Came to Love Even Those Who Would Hate Him

Think about it. If death in itself is a “defeat,” how much more a death in which politics, revenge, and power inflict their mark on the crucified one. These are institutions and attitudes with which we measure influence. To the disciples, principally Jewish, this punishment signified the loss of everything. Anger, power, pride, and cruelty were victorious over the One who claimed to be God.

Millennia later, we see the symbol of the cross on necklaces and on church steeples so often that we have no concept of what it meant and accomplished. In fact, if it were truly expounded upon, we would take offense at the preacher.

The first and foremost reality is that suffering and death are not only enemies of life, but a means of reminding us of life’s twin realities, love and hate. Here, the love and hate did not just happen. The paths were chosen. Those who hurt Him hated Him. Those who hated Him, He loved. Those who killed Him wanted to be rid of Him. By allowing Himself to be killed, He made it possible for them to live. The crucifixion of Jesus was the embodied expression of rebellion against God. His desolation was a profound attempt to break apart the very being of God, in the Holy Trinity.

But here is the point. He did not die as a martyr for a cause, as others have done; nor was He just nonviolent so that the enemy would surrender through public outcry, as still others have done. He did not even die because He was willing to pay the price that someone else would live. He came to lay down His life so that the very ones who killed Him, who represented all of us, could be forgiven because of the price He paid in the hell of a world that does not recognize His voice. Those who rejected the text and manipulated the context of His Word saw and heard what God incarnate disclosed of reality. Every feeling they experienced, every state of mind, every utterance was the opposite of what Jesus felt, did, and said. His counterperspective stands in brilliant and sharp contrast, even as He invited them on the basis of that death to come to Him for forgiveness, because He longed to reach out to them.