Thursday, December 24, 2015

“Look For Him There"



    "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of Me" (John 5:39).

    
    How saturated is the written Word of God, the Bible, with the living Word of God, the Lord Jesus Christ?  The first two verses of Scripture introduce the answer.

    "In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth.  And the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep" (Genesis 1:1-2).

    First, "the heaven and the earth."  God's initial act of creation typifies the Lord Jesus.  He is God, "the Lord from Heaven" (I Corinthians 15:47).  He is also human, "the man, Christ Jesus" (I Timothy 2:5).  Our Savior is the God who became man, and the man who remains God.  He exists in the holy mystery of Heaven and earth united in one glorious Being, the Infinite Deity somehow resident in a created humanity.  In Heaven and earth, there is no one like Him, leading to the Father's pronouncing Him "beloved Son", and the redeemed adoring Him as beloved Savior.  Genesis 1:1 foreshadows such glory, introducing us to the grand Theme of all 31,000 plus verses of Scripture.  Again, as the Lord Jesus affirmed, "The Scriptures… testify of Me".

   We move on to verse 2 of Genesis 1.  

   "The earth was without form."  The Psalms prophesy that the Lord Jesus would fulfill this typology.  "He shall grow up before Him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: He hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see Him, there is no beauty that we should desire Him" (Isaiah 53:2).  Our Lord's divinity was so veiled in most of His earthly lifetime that His own brethren did not know who He was (John 7:5).  Moreover, "He came unto His own, and His own received Him not" (John 1:11).  The Lord Jesus was "in the form of God" no less than His "from everlasting" preincarnate existence as God the Son (Philippians 2:6; Psalm 90:2).  However, the garb of humanity necessarily enfolded the beauty of His divinity, even as Genesis 1:2 presages.

   "And void."  Again, the Lord Jesus did not empty Himself of His deity.  He did, however, void the perogatives of living as God during His earthly sojourn.  He rather lived as man dependent on God for the purpose of identifying with those He came to save.  "I can of Mine own self do nothing... the Father that dwelleth in Me, He doeth the works… We see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, crowned with glory and honor; that He by the grace of God should taste death for every man" (John 5:30; 14:10; Hebrews 2:9).  The Lord was also stripped of His Father and the Holy Spirit's presence on the cross of Calvary, likely the keenest agony any conscious being will ever know - "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?!" (Matthew 27:46).  Such a void, foreshadowed in Genesis, became the foresakenness of the cross.  

    "Darkness was upon the face of the deep."  The Savior proclaimed Himself as Light, "the Light of the world" (John 8:12).  At Calvary, however, the torrents of God's wrath doused the Flame.  "From the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour" (Matthew 27:45).  The Apostle Paul taught that the Lord Jesus not only bore our sins on the cross, but He also "was made to be sin" for us (II Corinthians 5:21; emphasis added).  We cannot possibly reason what this must have meant in the being of Christ as the darkness of sin and God's wrath enveloped our Savior in spiritual and moral blackness.  We cannot even imagine such horror.  We can only know that it happened, and that the darkness upon the face of the deep in Genesis did not compare with the darkness experience in the depths of our blessed Savior when He bore the wrath of God for our sakes.

   The living Word, Christ, saturates the written Word, the Bible.  The Spirit of the Lord Jesus dwells in and upon every page and upon every book, chapter, verse, word, and letter of the Bible.  It is all about Him, and of Him, and through Him, and to Him.  Thus, we open the Word of God written to know the Word of God living, and to love, adore, trust, revere, obey, and exalt Him.  


Look for Him there.
Where?
In the pages of His Word,
where shines the holy Light,   
the Light of Christ who is the Word.

Look for Him there.
Where?
From Genesis to Revelation,
in chapter, verse, word, and letter
He dwells in glorious exaltation.

Look for Him there.
Where?
In the Bible,  Divine, sublime,
the wondrous Scene
where as we search, God's Christ we find.

Look for Him there.
There!


"Thy Word is truth… I am the Truth."
(John 17:17; 14:6)

Weekly Memory Verse
    I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for Thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.
(Psalm 4:8)
   
     
    
    
   

   

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