Vomiting abomination: the power of Jehovah and man in Christ

 

We all know what it is to have a toxic stomach. We ate something we shouldn’t have, and have poisoned our system. We are in a great strait because we know what we need to do—we need to vomit. But, we resist the distasteful (and maybe humiliating) experience. Yet, even though we know what needs to happen in this regard, even if we choose to do it, we still need an extra help to get it started. That is, we need a probe. Something to start the vomiting reflex needs to touch a special nerve.

 

This is a very crude illustration of the reconciliation of God to man, but I believe our wise Creator left it to give us an idea of what God went through for our redemption at the cross. Sin was in no way our Father’s doing or choice. It was no wrong-doing or indulgence on His part that caused rebellion. “An enemy hath done this.” (Matt. 13:28). And we joined the enemy to cause the long misery to our Father.

 

As the poisoned belly causes a dilemma, so did the sin problem bring the Creator grief and pain incomprehensible to the finite minds of His created children. God’s dilemma was the need to destroy His wicked, but beloved children in order to spare His kingdom the spread of man’s poisonous nature. His eternal principle of self-denial and humiliation was compromised by our insertion of self-indulgence, self-exaltation, self-dependence, self-preservation, self-sufficiency into His family of heaven and the worlds.

 

In jeopardy was the basic law that could never be abrogated without destroying His kingdom:

 

“Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 18:4).

“He that is least among you all, the same shall be great.” (Luke 9:48).

“Whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for My sake shall find it.” (Matt. 16:25).

“Many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first.” (Matt. 19:30).

“The last shall be first.” (Matt. 20:16).

 

But, we were Gods, by Satan’s doing. We believed that we must be first and best and highest. “I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.” (Isa. 14:14). A God deserves utmost praise and respect. Gods should get honor; they should never have to humble themselves. “How much she [Babylon] hath glorified herself, and lived deliciously, ... she saith in her heart, I sit a queen, … and shall see no sorrow.” (Rev. 18:7). Pride will not allow us to be pained for our sin. We had bitten into this delusion and we were in misery. The Spirit of God had departed; and with its departure left peace and health. Gall and wormwood filled our bellies, minds, and souls. We had drunken of the curse and our thigh was rotting and our belly swelling. Our whole persons toxic, we needed to rid ourselves of the poison we had received—the controlling spirit and power of Satan.

 

But, we didn’t know how to unburden ourselves. We needed a helper to accomplish that. Of ourselves, we would have died a slow, bloated, peptic agony. It was a dire emergency—our life was at stake. But, no other man could offer us the method by which we could be freed from our plague. Pride and rebellion were deeply rooted in us, and our puppeteer, the devil, worked our hearts so as to keep our will too weak to affect the riddance of our invisible killer.

 

We needed another person who knew what would bring us to regurgitating the abomination causing our slow death. We needed someone who we could trust in to not needlessly accuse us, which would only increase our unwillingness to finish the unpleasant work of repentance. Our dilemma was a true near death emergency, and only our Creator had the patient love and wisdom, and the knowledge of our spiritual make-up to accomplish our confession and renunciation of our sin.

 

Likewise, our Creator was God’s only hope, who alone knew His Father’s make-up. Only the Son understood the deepest issues that were the cause of the King’s agony, because He alone knew all the work and purposes of His Father’s ingenious enemy.

 

“All things are delivered unto Me of My Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal Him.” (Matt. 11:27).

 

“For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.” (1Jn. 3:8).

 

The self-pity of Lucifer was made to look like pity; the invention of self was subtly inserted into the thinking of man. Pity is good, and now the carcenogenic counterfeit had lodged in our nature, spreading and multiplying into every facet of life. Hurting the children was Lucifer’s method of wreaking revenge on the Lord. Now the curse of sin struck its root deep into our heart, and the wrath of God was invoked. We ate of the cursed fruit, and since that day we would surely die. “There is wrath gone out from the LORD; the plague is begun.” (Num. 16:46).

 

We needed a trigger to repent. Jehovah needed a trigger to relent. A God-man was the only answer to trigger both, and thus broker reconciliation between God and man. If we could see a true friend in the Broker and if God could see in Him a perfect and wise standard-bearer, both us and Jehovah could be unburdened of the enemy’s veiled machinations. Both of us could be moved to unburden our issues to our hearts’ content.

 

Having a friend in God’s authoritative Physician, we could hurl our despiteful, poisonous spirit upon the Physician, and He would adsorb it. “Ye shall defile also the covering of thy graven images of silver, and the ornament of thy molten images of gold: thou shalt cast them away as a menstruous cloth; thou shalt say unto it, Get thee hence.” (Isa. 30:22). Thus, we would receive peace of mind and body through the Physician who died because He took our infirmity. Our horrific malady is gone and buried with the Physician; and now we owe Him for the rest of our life.

 

As for the King, with a proper, sinless, infinitely loving and selfless Physician, Jehovah could thunderously heave His reticence of our poisonous, corporeal representation of Satan. Jehovah would be relieved of the burden of sin by all of His due justice toward sin, which He wretched His wrath upon His only Begotten Son. The Ancient of days exposed His private ills, even if it would be improper. He humbled Himself, doing what He had never before done. He acted out of character and outside of propriety. Divine propriety said that the King must never open up His deepest longings to the purview of His creatures, even though this had caused His interminable ill. In every circumstance, He must use His representative Spokesman, the Word through whom God’s every thought had forever been made audible. Now, in accordance with His own plan of salvation, His Spokesman was on Earth—though there had been silence in heaven, God was still speaking through His Word.

The Law required, “Take now Thy Son, Thine only Son…, whom Thou lovest, and get Thee into the land of Moriah; and offer Him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell Thee of.” (Gen. 22:). In that sacrifice, He would sanctify the wicked site and make it the place of His future kingdom.

As maximum punishment was laid upon His Son, ultimate punishment weighed fatally upon the Father. Jesus submissively strove to extend His existence under His intense, Gommorrah emolation, patiently enduring until all of His Father’s hatred of sin could rise to maximum revulsion and horror, regret and sorrow, tears and death. His Father must rule over Him; and His desire must submit to His Father’s needs. His Father must know the maximum multiplied sorrows of death. He must help His Father ensure that every aspect of disloyalty had been completely addressed, every contingency of the devil had been dealt with. The Son thus assisted His Father to press toward the point of complete and unassailable, legal justification of mankind.

 

No created being could bear up under all the anger and hatred and sorrow that was required for the Father’s emptying Himself of all regret toward mankind’s sin. None else beside Jesus could lead the Ancient of days to reconcile the sparing nature of redemption with unsparing justice; this, not only in His own mind, but, also for the acceptance of His heavenly hosts, who must behold it in awe and mystery forever. Jesus brought His Father to that reconciliation, where the fullest death possible could be known by the great Creator, “who only hath immortality.” (1Tim. 6:16). Jesus brought His Father to the full expulsion of His quandry over the issues of saving His most beloved race which had dug itself so deeply into sin. The only eternally legal way to redeem their precious race was satisfied by the Godhead’s joint and mutual, self-sacrificing love.

Per His Father’s plan, Christ’s willing agony and humiliation by His Father gave rise to His Father’s agony and humiliation. And Their humiliation gives rise to our agony and humiliation. Christ’s pouring out of His soul under the full wrath of God caused the Ancient of days to fully pour out His soul that had been kept shut because of wrath. And They cause us to fully pour out our soul in repentance for selfishness and self-preservation. Because Jesus suffered from their alienation, both parties involved were able to do the same. Jesus was the trigger; He was the mechanism for everyone’s reconciliation, and relief, and rescue from the death knell coming from the burden of sin and from the alienation of man from God. “Wherefore God hath highly exalted Him, and given Him a name which above every name.” (Phil. 2:9).

 

“Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, He also Himself likewise took part of the same; that through death He might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil.” (Heb. 2:14).

 

“It pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He hath put Him to grief: when Thou shalt make His soul an offering for sin, He shall see His seed, He shall prolong His days, and the pleasure of the LORD shall prosper in His hand. He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied: by His knowledge shall My righteous Servant justify many; for He shall bear their iniquities. Therefore will I divide Him a portion with the great, and He shall divide the spoil with the strong; because He hath poured out His soul unto death: and He was numbered with the transgressors; and He bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.” (Isa 53:10-12).