Mt. 26:39 - "My Father. . ."

     Throughout His life, Jesus had resolutely kept a close, intimate relationship with His Father, closer than we will ever fully understand. It was this closeness that always sustained Him.

     Because He never sinned, His heart never knew a cloud of guilt or sense of separation from His Abba (Daddy). He had cultivated such life-long such intimacy He could say “My Father and I are one” (Jn. 10:30).  Often, after long days of ministry, He prayed all night, or arose early in the morning, and was refreshed and strengthened by this communion with His Father.

     Now, as the time of His great Sacrifice approaches, Jesus naturally flees to His Father. But what shocks and pains His heart, what terrifies His soul, is the separation from Abba our sin upon Him is causing.

     Think of the person you hold dearest in life. If they withdrew their love, loyalty, and support (apparently), would it not crush your heart?

     Beginning in the Garden, “He who had been one with God, felt in His soul the awful separation that sin makes between God and man. . .It was the burden of sin, the sense of its terrible enormity, of its separation of the soul from God--it was this that broke the heart of the Son of God.” (The Faith I Live By,” p. 101)

     Writing about Jesus’ experience on the cross (we know His suffering begins in Gethsemane), Ellen White explains: “Upon Christ as our substitute and surety was laid the iniquity of us all. He was counted a transgressor, that He might redeem us from the condemnation of the law. The guilt of every descendant of Adam was pressing upon His heart. The wrath of God against sin, the terrible manifestation of His displeasure because of iniquity, filled the soul of His Son with consternation. All His life Christ had been publishing to a fallen world the good news of the Father's mercy and pardoning love. Salvation for the chief of sinners was His theme. But now with the terrible weight of guilt He bears, He cannot see the Father's reconciling face. The withdrawal of the divine countenance from the Savior in this hour of supreme anguish pierced His heart with a sorrow that can never be fully understood by man. So great was this agony that His physical pain was hardly felt.” The Desire of Ages, p. 753 (Italics mine). 

     Jesus suffered the breaking of His relationship with God so we can experience the healing of ours. What an amazing price was paid so we can receive the acceptance and intimacy Jesus redeemed for us. “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he appears we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself, just as he is pure.” (1 Jn. 3:1-3). 

     “Because you are sons, God sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, the Spirit who calls out, ‘Abba, Father.’ you are no longer a slave, but a son; and since you are a son, God has made you also an heir” (Gal. 4:6-7). Praise God!