Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: November 25th

THE RESTING SAVIOUR

Looking unto Jesus, the Author and Perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the Cross, despising the shame, and hath sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. - Hebrews 12:2

It is finished! - John 19:30

The disciples’ vision of their ascended Lord expresses absolute repose after sore conflict. It is the same thought which is expressed in those solemn Egyptian colossal statues of deified conquerors, elevated to mysterious union with the god, and yet men still, sitting before their temples in perfect stillness, with the mighty hands lying quiet on the restful limbs; with calm, faces out of which toil and passion and change seem to have melted, gazing out with open eyes as over a silent prostrate world. So, with the Cross behind, with all the agony and weariness of the arena, the dust and the blood of the struggle left beneath, He "sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty." The rest of the Christ after His Cross is parallel with, and carries the same meaning as, the rest of God after the Creation. Why do we read "He rested on the seventh day from all His works"? Did the Creative Arm grow weary? Was there toil for the Divine nature in the making of a universe? Doth He not speak and it is done? Is not the calm, effortless forth-putting of His will the cause and the means of Creation? Does any shadow of weariness steal over that life which lives and is not exhausted? Does the bush consume in burning? Surely not. He rested from His works, not because He needed to recuperate strength after action by repose, but because the works were perfect; and in sign and token that His ideal was accomplished, and that no more was needed to be done. And, in like manner, the Christ rests after His Cross, not because He needed repose even after that terrible effort, and was panting after His race, and so had to sit there to recover, but in token that His work was finished and perfected; that all which He had come to do was done; and in token, likewise, that the Father, too, beheld and accepted the finished work. Therefore, the session of Christ at the right hand of God is the proclamation from the Heaven of what He shouted with His last dying breath upon the Cross: "It is finished! " It is the declaration that the world has had all done for it that Heaven can do for it. It is the declaration that all which is needed for the regeneration of humanity has been lodged in the very heart of the race, and that henceforward all that is required is the evolving and the development of the consequences of that perfect work which Christ offered upon the Cross. So, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews contrasts the priests who stood "daily ministering and offering oftentimes the same sacrifices" which "can never take away sin," with the fact that "this Man, after He had offered one sacrifice for sins for ever, sat down at the right hand of God "; testifying thereby that His Cross is the complete, sufficient, perpetual atonement and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world. So we have to look back to that past as interpreted by this present, to that Cross as commented upon by this Throne, and to see in it the perfect work which any human soul may grasp, and which all human souls need, for their acceptance and forgiveness.