Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
We can never forget that the Lord Jesus is one of us; He is the divine Son of God, with all the attributes of divinity; but at the same time He is the Son of man, one with us for eternity. He "took" on His unfallen, divine nature our fallen, sinful nature. He loves us dearly, as His own.
Now, does the Lord Jesus, being divine, have a sense of time as we humans have? Is one of our days like a thousand years to Him, or vice versa? So, could it be that He doesn't care how much longer time goes on?
Well, He says clearly that there will be an "endof the world"! When His disciples asked Him, "What will be the sign of Your coming, and of the end of the age?" (Matt. 24:3), He answered their question directly, thereby making the statement that time will not go on ad infinitum.
And being one of us, forever human with us as well as divine forever, Jesus shares with us our weariness with the on-and-on passage of sinful, painful time with all the suffering there is in the world. Isaiah 63 describes His feelings: "In all their affliction He was [is] afflicted" (vs. 9). There is no pain that any of us on earth feel that He does not share with us.
Yes! A thousand times over, Jesus wants this reign of sin and suffering to end in the glad establishment of His everlasting kingdom on the earth made new.
And there is another reason why He wants the end to come soon: the end of sin and suffering will usher in the glorious "marriage of the Lamb." As a Bridegroom, He longs for His wedding to come.
The reason? He is in love with the church as a man loves a woman; no one person could be the Bride of the infinite Son of God; but when He left His throne and His status as the infinite Son of God to come down here to save this fallen race of humans, His love for us was more than your love for your pets; when you love your dog, you have not become a dog. But He became one of us whom He loved; He joined our family.
And the reason why we want Him to come soon is not because we are hungry for our "reward" and we have these acquisitive feelings for the joys of heaven; we want the divine Son of God to receive His reward!
Why this special love for Him?
Why does this desire for Him to receive His reward transcend our desire for our own reward? There has to be a special reason why we, so naturally egocentric as we are, will be able to realize this unusually non-egocentric desire for Him. We have come to understand that when He "poured out His soul unto death" for us (Isa. 53:12), it was the second, not the first that He experienced. It was saying "Goodbye!" to life forever--the embracing of the darkness of hell in His love for us.
There are not enough words to tell it.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: September 30, 2008.
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