Scripture: "My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"—"I thirst."—"It is finished."—MATT, xxvii. 46; JOHN xix. 28, 30.
The three first words on the cross reveal love In its outflow to men. The next three reveal love in the tremendous sacrifice that it brought, to deliver us from our sins and give the victory over every foe. They will still reveal the very mind that was in Christ, and that is to be in us as the disposition of our whole life.
"My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" How deep must have been the darkness that overshadowed Him, when not one ray of light could pierce, and He could not say, "My Father"! It was this awful desertion, breaking in upon that life of childlike fellowship with the Father in which He had always walked, that caused Him the agony and the bloody sweat in Gethsemane. "O My Father, let this cup pass from Me."—but it might not be, and He bowed His head in submission: "Thy will be done." It was His love to God and love to man, yielding Himself to the very uttermost. It is as we learn to believe and to worship that love, that we too shall learn to say: "Abba, Father, Thy will be done."
"I thirst." The body now gives expression to the terrible experience of what it passed through when the fire of God's wrath against sin came upon Christ in the hour of His desertion. He had spoken of Dives crying: "I am tormented in this flame." Christ utters His complaint of what He had suffered. Physicians tell us that, in crucifixion the whole body is in agony with a terrible fever and pain. Our Lord endured it all and cried: "I thirst"; soul and body was the sacrifice He brought the Father.
And then comes the great word: "It is finished." All that there was to suffer and endure had been brought a willing sacrifice; He had finished the work the Father gave Him to do. His love held nothing back. He gave Himself an offering and a sac¬rifice. Such was the mind of Christ, and such must be the dis¬position of everyone who owes Himself and his life to that sac¬rifice. The mind that was in Christ must be in us ready to say: "I am come to do the will of Him that sent Me, and to finish His work." And every day that our confidence grows fuller in Christ's finished work, must see our heart more entirely yielding itself like Him, a whole burnt offering in the service of God and His love.
