Daily Devotionals

Truths to Live By - One Day at a Time

Devotional: April 18th

“For now we see through a glass, darkly…”

At few times in our Christian experience is this so evident as when we come to the Lord’s Table to remember Him in His death for us. “We see through a glass, darkly.”

There seems to be a thick, impenetrable veil. We are on one side of it with all our finite limitations. On the other side is the whole great drama of our redemption—Bethlehem, Gethsemane, Gabbatha, Calvary, the empty tomb, the exalted Christ at God’s right hand. We realize that there is something enormously vast there, and we try to take it in, but feel more like clods than like living beings.

We try to comprehend the Savior’s sufferings for our sins. Our minds strain to take in the horror of His being forsaken by God. We know that He endured the torment that we should have endured for all eternity. Yet we are frustrated to realize that there is so much more beyond. We are standing at the edge of an unexplored sea!

We think of the love that sent Heaven’s best for earth’s worst. We are moved when we remember that God sent His only-begotten Son into this jungle of sin to seek and to save that which was lost. But we are dealing with a love that passes knowledge. We can know only in part.

We sing of the grace of the Savior, that though He was rich, yet for our sakes He became poor, that we through His poverty might be rich. It is enough to make angels gasp. Our eyes strain to see the vast dimensions of such grace. But it is in vain. We are limited by our human shortsightedness.

We know that we should be overcome by the contemplation of His sacrifice at Calvary, but we are too often strangely unmoved. If we really entered in to what lies beyond the veil, we would be reduced to tears. Yet we have to confess…

Oh, wonder to myself I am,

Thou loving, bleeding, dying Lamb,

That I can scan the mystery o’er

And not be moved to love thee more.

Or, in the words of another, we must ask:

Am I a stone, and not a man, that I can stand

O Christ, beneath Thy cross,

And number drop by drop,

Thy blood’s slow loss,

And yet not weep?

Like the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, our eyes are beholden. We long with burning desire for the time when the veil will be removed and when we will see with better vision the awesome meaning of the broken bread and the outpoured wine.