Morning
Time: 3:39 AM PST
"I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out of joint." --Psalm
22:14
Did earth or heaven ever behold a sadder spectacle of woe! In soul and body,
our Lord felt Himself to be weak as water poured upon the ground. The placing of
the cross in its socket had shaken Him with great violence, had strained all the
ligaments, pained every nerve, and more or less dislocated all His bones.
Burdened with His own weight, the august sufferer felt the strain increasing
every moment of those six long hours. His sense of faintness and general
weakness were overpowering; while to His own consciousness He became nothing but
a mass of misery and swooning sickness. When Daniel saw the great vision, he
thus describes his sensations, "There remained no strength in me, for my vigour
was turned into corruption, and I retained no strength:" how much more faint
must have been our greater Prophet when He saw the dread vision of the wrath of
God, and felt it in His own soul! To us, sensations such as our Lord endured
would have been insupportable, and kind unconsciousness would have come to our
rescue; but in His case, He was wounded, and felt the sword; He drained
the cup and tasted every drop.
"O King of Grief! (a title strange, yet true
To Thee of all kings only due)
O King of Wounds! how shall I grieve for Thee,
Who in all grief preventest me!"
As we kneel before our now ascended Saviour's throne, let us remember
well the way by which He prepared it as a throne of grace for us; let us in
spirit drink of His cup, that we may be strengthened for our hour of heaviness
whenever it may come. In His natural body every member suffered, and so must it
be in the spiritual; but as out of all His griefs and woes His body came forth
uninjured to glory and power, even so shall His mystical body come through the
furnace with not so much as the smell of fire upon it.