Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
It is interesting to think about Mary, the mother of Jesus our Savior. She was as human as anyone else on this planet. The Bible makes clear: there was nothing special about her that sets her off as different from the rest of humanity, except one thing--she believed the word of the Lord. We find that when, newly pregnant, she came to the hill country where Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist lived. Elizabeth greeted her by saying, "Blessed is she who believed" (Luke 1:45).
You'd think that the mother of the Messiah would be the happiest woman ever. But she knew our sorrows, our loneliness, our pain. And she said, "My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior" (vs. 47). She knew her need for a Savior from, not in, sin.
But no other woman in all of history ever had a giant sword thrust through her "own soul," as the one that the old prophet Simeon predicted would happen to her (2:34, 35). Elizabeth had said she should be preeminently "blessed among women" (that is, especially happy; 1:42), but Simeon said she must also be preeminently wounded among women by the "pierce" of that "sword." (This teaches us that God has a special regard for the sorrows women have to endure.) Seeing her son crucified was a cruel experience. You can't imagine a worse one.
But there was pain greater than her maternal pain. She knew that her Son was born to be the Savior of the world; now, what could His death (on a cross, of all places!) mean? Was this the end of the plan of salvation for the world itself? She may not have understood "the great controversy between Christ and Satan" as clearly as we do today, but it would have been natural for her to have agonized throughout that painful "three days and three nights" while her Son lay in Joseph's tomb. It seemed that the very foundations of heaven itself had crumbled, and that Satan must emerge finally victorious.
God has an agenda for His people. We are to "grow up" out of our childish concern for self so we can share the concern that Jesus has for His triumph in the "great controversy." Will this not be the loving concern of a Bride for her "Husband," the Lamb? "Abiding in Him" involves a deeper intimacy.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: October 7, 2004.
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