Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
Some Europeans who came looking for Jesus found Him in a pensive mood a few days before Calvary. Their invitation to Him to come to Europe and escape the horror before Him in Jerusalem was a severe temptation, and drew from Him a sober statement of the kind of death He knew He was to die: "Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone." If I accept your invitation to escape My cross, I will be the grain of wheat laid up on a shelf "alone" and useless, side by side with your Greek philosophers. "But if it dies, it produces much grain" (John 12:24).
If I go through with what My Father has appointed Me to do--die the second death on a cross--then I will fulfill My mission and the hopes of the Sychar Samaritans as "the Savior of the world" (John 4:42; any death on a cross involved the irredeemable "curse" of God--Gal. 3:13; Deut. 21:23). "He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. … What shall I say? 'Father, save Me from this hour?'" (John 12:25, 27). His answer to that question: No!
Then His mind went forward to our day when our world is locked in the futility of self-seeking. "'And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all peoples to Myself.' This He said, signifying by what death He would die" (John 12:32-33). Thus He described the light that will "lighten the earth with glory" in the work of that "other angel" whose final message will call out of Babylon all of God's people scattered around the world (Rev. 18:1-4).
His being "lifted up" for all to see, to "comprehend" (cf. Eph. 3:18, 19), will be the full revelation of the significance of "what death He would die"--all men's "second death" (cf. Rev. 2:11; 20:6). The world will then be terror-stricken, but His final message will not be terror-driven. It will not be a me-first, but a Christ-first message--an at-last full revelation of the love (agape) intrinsic in His much more abounding grace. It will "constrain" every honest heart to self-less devotion to the One who died for us (cf. 2 Cor. 5:14, 15).
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: November 12, 2005.
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