“What do you gain by oppressing me? Why do you reject me, the work of your own hands, while smiling on the schemes of the wicked?” – Job 10:3
I have a confession. I haven’t asked God, this question once since Azaiah died. I have asked, “why not me?” I mean really. What’s so special about me that I should be spared the momentary affliction of this life?
Is it because try to be a moral person? Or because I am charitable or kind? Or maybe because I have devoted my life to being a partner in ministry to a godly man?
If anyone deserved to be spared, it certainly was not me.
It was however, Jesus. By our temporal reasoning, if anyone should have been spared it was him. He wronged no one. He loved beyond racial and social lines. He fed the hungry and cured the sick. He made the outcasts a home. He forgave the most weary sinner. He promised life not death. If anyone should have been spared it was him.
Did you know he even asked to be spared?
“Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine.” Luke 22:42
But the thing is, Jesus, in his perfection, submitted his will and his humanity to a greater good than his own suffering. He submitted his will for me. He submitted his will for you because God required it. God required that the payment of my sin be the holy blood of the divine. The price to buy you back from hell was the blood of deity.
As he walked into the garden to pray, he dreamed of you. When he surrendered to the authorities he envisioned me. When he endured the injustice of mortals trying the immortal, when he allowed the finite to beat and bleed the infinite, when he relinquished his authority to be hung on a cross, he did it with my son’s name seared on his heart.
We are the greater good that Jesus suffered for. You are. I am.
So what’s his suffering have to do with me? Pretty much everything.
For God’s way of making us right with himself depends on faith. I want to know Christ and experience the mighty power that raised him from the dead. I want to suffer with him, sharing in his death, so that one way or another I will experience the resurrection from the dead! Phil 3:9-11
I may never understand the depth of the love that would surrender so much. But I guess what I’m left with is a better question than “Why me?” But it is “Why you, Jesus?” WHY YOU?
