If we had no winter, the spring wouldn’t be so pleasant; if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity wouldn’t be so welcome.
Anne Bradstreet
The irony of the cross is that it’s a beautiful tragedy.
Darkness covered the entire world at the exact moment that the most beautiful event in the history of the world occurred.
For eternity to happen, the cross had to happen.
For the greatest thing that ever happened in the history of the world…
For the greatest thing to ever happen to humanity…
The worst thing had to happen. The hardest, most unbearable thing imaginable had to happen.
The crazy thing is that the picture of the cross explains everything about life.
God’s same plan for the salvation of the whole world is also woven throughout every detail of our own lives.
In life there is great joy mixed with great pain.
Take these examples of human experiences….
- Having a child comes with the pain of labor
- Marriage (for it to be good) takes hard work on both ends
- For a delicious meal, much time and effort must be put in to prepare it
- The visual of a rainbow after a storm
- The joy that one can experience after great loss. Without such depths of hurt and pain, one might never experience such depths of healing and peace.
- Spring after Winter
God has created life to mirror his work on the cross. EVERYTHING points to him.
Maybe not ALL good things have to come with great price, but maybe all things that come with great price can (have the potential to) become good.
Rather than getting stuck on the question of, “why do bad/hard things happen?” Lets look at, what reward, what gift, what GOOD thing can come from the hard things. There will ALWAYS be something. Even if it may seem impossible to imagine or think of, God doesn’t waste anything. He will use EVERYTHING no matter how ugly.
He didn’t waste the cross. It was the only way. The only way God could destroy sin without destroying his children was by sacrificing his own son.
Nothing is a surprise to God. He doesn’t mess up. He didn’t accidentally let his son get crucified. He wasn’t surprised by this event. He hated it, but it was his plan all along to USE it to accomplish the best thing in the world- to take away our sins and offer everyone the gift of salvation, so that those who believe in him would get to live for eternity in Heaven with him.
In the same way, God doesn’t mess up our lives. Nothing that happens to us is a surprise to him. He hates the evil and the pain we face, but it’s his plan to USE all of our lives to accomplish his purposes.
What other examples might you think of that mirror the cross? What hard/terrible/hurtful/ugly things do you see that might be revealing something beautiful in your life or in the world?
