The Beauty Of A Really Rotten Day
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Psalm 22:1
David had some pretty bad days during his journey on earth—hiding from Saul in a cave, fleeing from his own son’s murderous plot, betrayed by people he had trusted—yet I have a feeling that the depth of despair you read in this psalm was a bit exaggerated.
We do that, too, sometimes. When we’re going through a painful experience, we often use hyperbolic language to describe our emotions: “I just want to die…I’ll never get over this…this pain is too great to bear…I am all alone.” It is a universally accepted practice to communicate the depth of our feelings by this sort of exaggeration.
But think about this: David was not just speaking on a personal level about having a really rotten day. He was also speaking prophetically of a time when Jesus, the Son of David would have a really rotten day hanging on a cross as God’s sacrifice for our sins.
Jesus, who knew no sin, became sin for us, bearing the wrath of God on that old rugged cross. We will never in a billion years be able to understand the pain—not just the physical pain—but the spiritual pain of the sinless One taking on sin, and having the Father turn his back on the Son because his holy eyes could not gaze upon the sin his Son had become in that moment. That’s why Jesus fulfilled David’s prophetic utterance in Matthew 27:46 when he, too, cried out,
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
I am so grateful that my Lord endured that really bad day so I wouldn’t have to. So the next time you are having a really awful day, take a moment to rejoice that even though your day is not so great, you will never really know a really rotten eternity, thanks to Jesus.
Try doing that, and see if your really rotten day isn’t so bad after all.
“Much that worries us beforehand can, quite unexpectedly,
have a happy and simple solution … Things really
are in a better hand than ours.”
—Dietrich Bonhoeffe
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