The Seven Words of the Cross #7

[HKHaugan]

The Seven Words of the Cross #7

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit (Lk.23:46).”

 Here is where context pictures the final blow. There are seven particulars:

 1.It was now about the sixth hour (apprx.3p.m.).

2.Darkness came over the whole land for three hours.

3.The sun had stopped shining.

4.The curtain of the Temple was torn in two.

5.Jesus called out with a loud voice,

6.“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

7.He breathed His last.

 1.Whenever you see the number 6, remember that it never reaches 7, God’s number. The devil’s number is 666 and can never go beyond that eternally. This is the first step in his defeat. It’s always the 6^th hour when he does his dirty work amongst us. It’s always the 6^th hour when fear takes over. It’s always the 6^th hour when we disobey any of the Word of God, the 6^th hour when we lead from our emotions and not our faith. Add your own 6^th hour experience here.

 2.Darkness came over the land for 3 hours. Here is where darkness is exposed for all to see. Its fear, the devil’s playground where he hides, the ultimate feeling of aloneness, lack of sight, the desperation of facing the unknown and the exposure of death covering the earth. All those present experienced a taste of hell and its chieftain. This passage identifies that reality.

 3.The sun stopped shining. You might change that just a bit. The ‘SON’ stopped shining. The light of the world, Jesus, ceased, His light stopped for 3 hours, the 3 in 1, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, absented themselves and that absence is darkness. You can be in a room full of people. If the light is suddenly gone, again that aloneness and its fear and lack of sight are frightening, and you can feel it. Imagine that for eternity. That’s the promise of death in its finality.

 4.The curtain of the Temple was torn in two. The heart of religion with its hypocrisy and political conspiracies that kept people from a personal loving God, was split down the middle and exposed as well. All the struggle for power, social position and economic security bring death, division and destruction. But the curtain was torn, not from the bottom but from the top, showing the Father intervening to declare the emptiness of legalism, self-centeredness, greed, fear of death and the anti-relational nature of evil and its director. The subtlety of death is the feeling that nice church buildings, protecting my comfort zone, self-defined morality, thinking we are good people at heart and meaning well regardless of the consequences, will justify us before God. These are why Jesus declared “You have made my house a den of thieves.”

 5.Jesus called out with a loud voice. He was shouting with His last breath for all to hear, a clear pronouncement that faith is, for every single person, God’s gift bringing us into His Eternal Kingdom. We go from spiritual invisibility to spiritual visibility, from unseen relational reality in this world to spiritually visible reality in the presence of Almighty God. Our ultimate security was secured on the Cross when Jesus said the work He came to do was finished. He is the way, the truth and the life and His work was an everyday, every moment step n faith. Faith in His Father and His will. Faith in His Father’s Word and the Holy Spirit. Faith in every choice and decision as a spiritual task to be accomplished. He lives under His Cross every day and showed in His earthly life that eternal faith is the substance of true reality, eternal reality.

 6.He shouted for all to hear, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” Several things to notice here. First, He is sharing that His Father is the One to and for Whom He has toiled, labored, worked, because He loved Him more than we will ever understand in this world what that means. He is saying to us that what it means to be human, a fulfilled human being, an image of God, is to love Him with all our heart, mind, spirit and body and our neighbor as ourselves. That is what it means to be fight with Him. Jesus did it perfectly and the Cross is the sign of that perfection. Instead of death being the victor, death is simply a gateway back to the Father. What was once a dreaded finality is defeated by Jesus, His faith, His grace, His truth and His love. He believed with His mind, trusted with His hear and chose the act of dying to give His spirit back to His Father by faith.

 7.He breathed His last. The last breath He breathed was a perfect breath, a faith breath, a trust breath, a Spirit breath. Now as victor He enters Hades to rescue all those, who before Him, were also the object of His love, those the Psalmist says God loves, the saints who have passed into glory (Ps.116:15). He went to witness to Moses and the dead (1Peter 3:18-29). There are several other points to be made here. First, the spirit He gives up is written with a small ‘s.’ That was to identify with us in His last breath. It is our spirit that He came to rescue, thus the small ‘s’, the personal spirit we possess as an image of God, the born-again spirit that is restored by the Holy Spirit when we accepted Jesus as Savior and Lord.

 He gave up His Spirit and journeyed to the place of the dead as was explained. What all that is about we will discover when we die, and He receives us personally. For now, it is the Holy Spirit who breathes spiritually through our Spirit-born nature as He grows and matures us. Jesus died and experienced death for us in our place. He is the Spirit of forgiveness, the Spirit of life and light, the Spirit who brings the mind, heart and life of Jesus into our lives right now.

 What have we seen in these last words of Jesus on the Cross? Each one depicts an area of our personal lives that need to die to the temporary imperfect world order and resurrection to life in the permanent perfection in His Eternal Kingdom. Forgiveness, truth, relationship, aloneness, spiritual thirst, our work (belief, trust, faith), our final moment, our last breath; these are covered by Jesus and give us the program for working out our personal salvation. We accept our limitations of sin and its attitudes and know the Holy Spirit is our guide to Jesus and our real work of faith is to die to self and be a witness for Him. Paul told us it is not easy and done with “fear and trembling (Php.2:12)” but “our momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all (2Cor.4:17).”

 So therefore, Jesus did not die a victim but a victor, not a morbid resignation to the inevitable but a conqueror over the devil, his sin, evil and utter aloneness. A spiritual Kingdom with God as our Father, Jesus, our Savior and Lord, the Holy Spirit, our relational life. Can we now see why Jesus said to take up our cross and with every breath say, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit?”