Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: October 20th

THE BLIND WATCHERS AT THE CROSS

And they sat and watched Him there. - Matthew 27:36

How possible it is to look at Christ on the Cross and see nothing! For half a day there they sat. It was but a dying Jew that they saw - One of three. A touch of pity came into their hearts once or twice, alternating with mockery which was not savage because it was simply brutal; but when it was all over, and they had pierced His side, and gone away back to their barracks, they had not the least notion that they, with their dim purblind eyes, had been looking at the most stupendous miracle in the whole world’s history; had been gazing at the thing into which angels desired to look; and had seen that to which the hearts and the gratitude of unconverted millions would turn for all eternity. They laid their heads down on their pillows that night and did not know what had passed before their eyes; and they shut the eyes that had served them so ill, and went to sleep, altogether unconscious that they had seen the pivot on which the whole history of humanity had turned; and been the unmoved witnesses of God manifest in the flesh, dying on the Cross for the whole world, and for them. And if we thus look, and look with calm, unmoved hearts; if we look without personal appropriation of that Cross and dying love to ourselves, and if we look without our hearts going out in thankfulness and laying themselves at His feet in a calm rapture of life-long devotion, then we need not wonder that four ignorant heathen men sat and looked at Him for four long hours and saw nothing, for we are as blind as ever they were.

You say, "We see." Do you see? Do you look? Does the look touch your hearts? Have you fathomed the meaning of the fact? Is it to you the incarnation of the loving God for your salvation? Is it to you the death on which all your hopes rest? You say you see. Do you see that in it? Do you see your only ground of confidence and peace? And do you so see that, like a man that has looked at the sun for a moment or two, when you turn away your head you carry the image of what you beheld still stamped on your eyeball, and have it both as a memory and a present impression? So, is the Cross photographed on your heart? And is it true about us that every day and all days we behold our Saviour, and, beholding Him, are being changed into His likeness? Is it true about us that we bear about with us in the body "the dying of the Lord Jesus"? If we look to Him with faith and love, and make His Cross our own, and keep it ever in our memory, ever before us as an inspiration and a hope and a joy and a pattern, then we see. If not, "for judgment am I come into the world, that they which see not may see, and that they which see might be made blind," For no men are so blind to the infinite pathos and tenderness, power, mystery, and miracle of the Cross, as those who all their lives have heard a Gospel which has been held up before their lack-lustre eyes, and have looked at it so long that they cannot see it any more. Let us pray that our eyes may be purged; that we may see, and, seeing, may copy, that dying love of the ever-loving Lord.