Mark 15

With hundreds of Old Testament prophecies related to the expected Messiah, it shouldn’t surprise us that God used many people–believers, non-believers, and even some unquestionably wicked individuals–to ensure that the Savior’s earthly life would unfold according to plan. For example, Caesar Augustus ordered a census that brought Joseph and Mary to Bethlehem, Christ’s birth city (Micah 52; Luke 2:1-4).

What’s more, God used some of the most powerful men of the day to bring about His Son’s sacrificial death. The Pharisees’ and Sadducees’ trumped-up charges helped turn the crowd against Jesus (Mark 15:10-11). Pilate condemned Him, and the Romans carried out the actual crucifixion; they even bartered for His clothes and chose not to break His legs, as predicted (John 19:24, 36).

During the dark days between Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, the disciples must have believed the Messianic program had been derailed. But God’s goal wasn’t to bring political revolution as some believed. He sent His Son to redeem mankind: Jesus paid the death penalty for our sins.

Before the foundation of the world, God had planned for the salvation of every tribe and nation. Throughout history, He orchestrated events to fulfill His purpose, using even the ungodly to move His plan forward.

Many have had a hand in advancing the Savior’s story, but the ultimate responsibility is the Father’s. He gave His only Son over to death on behalf of the world He loved (John 3:16). Both the righteous and the wicked who took part in the Easter story were following God’s script

It is similar to the parent who defers the questioning child with the evocation to “go ask” the other parent. Professors who have dedicated their lives to the study of a particular subject are not fond of venturing into unrelated territories. So the student who asks a theological question in economics class is told to ask his theology professor, and the student who asks an economic question in theology class is told to ask his economics professor. The admonishment is laced with the not-so subtle, though common and accepted, language of specialization, privatization, and compartmentalization—namely, stick to the subject at hand and keep these things properly separated.

Professor of theology William Cavanaugh is aware of the academic phenomenon of deflecting such questions, the cultural milieu that encourages compartmentalization, and the natural tendency of students to rebel against it. He sees in students an authentic discomfort with the idea that we need to compartmentalize our lives, a bold awareness that our culturally growing drive to keep politics from theology or theology from finance and religion from law doesn’t actually work. “I think they have a very good and real sense,” notes Cavanaugh, “that in real life things are not separated: that the way you buy has a lot to do with the way you worship and who you worship and what you worship.”(1) Cavanaugh encourages this awareness by commending the kinds of questions that recognize compartmentalization as unlivable, and by doing the historical work that shows this notion of separable entities as a modern, credulous construction in the first place.

Compartmentalization may well be a way of coping with a world that wants to keep the confusion of many religions out of the public square, but it is evident that it is not a very good coping mechanism. Each isolated discipline wants to discuss on some authentic level the good or benefit of all as it pertains to their subjects. And yet they somehow want to bracket any and all questions that might lean too closely toward things of a spiritual nature—purpose, meaning, human nature, morality. While such restrictions might successfully allow us to avoid stepping too closely to religion, in the fancy footwork it takes to do so, we end up sidestepping the actual subject as well.

On the opposite side of these contemporary fences, spirituality is restricted to private realms, personal thoughts, or a single day in the week, and thus becomes far more like one of life’s many commodities than an all-encompassing rule of life. Separate from the world of bodies and societies, the world of hearts and souls is not seen as appropriate or even capable of informing our understanding of business or capitalism, the principles behind our daily choices, how we live, what we buy, or what we eat. The presuppositions here are equally destructive of the true identity of the thing we have compartmentalized. Held tightly in such compartments, the Christian way ceases to be a “way” at all.

So what if our categories are wrong? If our compartments merely confuse and obscure, failing to be the coping mechanisms we think they are, will we remove them? And what does life look like without such divisions? What if Christianity is not a category of thought at all, a set of beliefs, or a religion that can be privatized without becoming something else entirely? What if the life of faith is not about what we think or what we do, but who we are? Such a way would exist over and above every category of thought, every compartment and realm.

In fact, long before theology was ushered out of the public square, out of politics, economics, and the sciences, it was considered to be the highest science, the study of the rational Mind behind our own rational minds. It was the discipline that made sense of every other discipline, the subject that united every subject. Such a perspective is inherently foreign to the contemporary mindset. But it cannot be shooed away like a meddling religion or deferred like an unwanted question without dismissing some sense of cohesion—and without dismissing Christ himself. His very life is a refutation of compartmentalized thought, belief, and action. His cross was neither public nor private; it spanned both, and every century following its own.

In dire contrast to the harried and highfalutin rules of compartmentalization, Jesus’s rule of life was undivided and down-to-earth, pertaining indivisibly to hearts and souls, bodies and societies. He paid theologically-informed attention to every day and everyday lives, and the institutions, ideologies, and systems that shaped them. He went to his death showing the inseparable nature of the spiritual and the physical, who we are, how we live, and what we believe. Those who follow him to the cross, through Good Friday and each day beyond it, do so similarly.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.  

(1) William Cavanaugh with Ken Myers, Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 95, Jan/Feb 2009.
(2) Richard J. Foster, Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 27.

Morning    “O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame?”

Psalm 4:2

An instructive writer has made a mournful list of the honours which the blinded

people of Israel awarded to their long expected King.

1. They gave him a procession of honour, in which Roman legionaries, Jewish

priests, men and women, took a part, he himself bearing his cross. This is the

triumph which the world awards to him who comes to overthrow man’s direst foes.

Derisive shouts are his only acclamations, and cruel taunts his only paeans of

praise.

2. They presented him with the wine of honour. Instead of a golden cup of

generous wine they offered him the criminal’s stupefying death-draught, which he

refused because he would preserve an uninjured taste wherewith to taste of

death; and afterwards when he cried, “I thirst,” they gave him vinegar mixed

with gall, thrust to his mouth upon a sponge. Oh! wretched, detestable

inhospitality to the King’s Son.

3. He was provided with a guard of honour, who showed their esteem of him by

gambling over his garments, which they had seized as their booty. Such was the

body-guard of the adored of heaven; a quaternion of brutal gamblers.

4. A throne of honour was found for him upon the bloody tree; no easier place of

rest would rebel men yield to their liege Lord. The cross was, in fact, the full

expression of the world’s feeling towards him; “There,” they seemed to say,

“thou Son of God, this is the manner in which God himself should be treated,

could we reach him.”

5. The title of honour was nominally “King of the Jews,” but that the blinded

nation distinctly repudiated, and really called him “King of thieves,” by

preferring Barabbas, and by placing Jesus in the place of highest shame between

two thieves. His glory was thus in all things turned into shame by the sons of

men, but it shall yet gladden the eyes of saints and angels, world without end.

 

Evening     “Deliver me from bloodguiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation; and my tongue

shall sing aloud of thy righteousness.”

Psalm 51:14

In this solemn confession, it is pleasing to observe that David plainly names

his sin. He does not call it manslaughter, nor speak of it as an imprudence by

which an unfortunate accident occurred to a worthy man, but he calls it by its

true name, bloodguiltiness. He did not actually kill the husband of Bathsheba;

but still it was planned in David’s heart that Uriah should be slain, and he was

before the Lord his murderer. Learn in confession to be honest with God. Do not

give fair names to foul sins; call them what you will, they will smell no

sweeter. What God sees them to be, that do you labour to feel them to be; and

with all openness of heart acknowledge their real character. Observe,

that David was evidently oppressed with the heinousness of his sin. It is easy

to use words, but it is difficult to feel their meaning. The fifty-first Psalm

is the photograph of a contrite spirit. Let us seek after the like brokenness of

heart; for however excellent our words may be, if our heart is not conscious of

the hell-deservingness of sin, we cannot expect to find forgiveness.

Our text has in it an earnest prayer–it is addressed to the God of salvation.

It is his prerogative to forgive; it is his very name and office to save those

who seek his face. Better still, the text calls him the God of my salvation.

Yes, blessed be his name, while I am yet going to him through Jesus’ blood, I

can rejoice in the God of my salvation.

The psalmist ends with a commendable vow: if God will deliver him he will

sing–nay, more, he will “sing aloud.” Who can sing in any other style of such a

mercy as this! But note the subject of the song–“Thy righteousness.” We must

sing of the finished work of a precious Saviour; and he who knows most of

forgiving love will sing the loudest.

 

In the name of the Lord I cut them off!   Psalms 118:12

Our Lord Jesus, by His death, did not purchase a right to just a part of us, but to all of us. He pondered in His passion our complete sanctification—spirit, soul, and body, that in every area He Himself might reign supreme without a rival. It is the business of the newborn nature that God has given to the regenerate to assert the rights of the Lord Jesus Christ.

My soul, insofar as you are a child of God, you must conquer all the rest of yourself that remains unblessed; you must subdue all your powers and passions, and you must never be satisfied until He who is King by purchase also becomes King by gracious coronation and reigns in you supreme. Seeing, then, that sin has no right to any part of us, we are involved in good and lawful warfare when we seek, in the name of God, to drive it out. Since my body is a member of Christ, shall I tolerate subjection to the prince of darkness?

My soul, Christ has suffered for your sins and redeemed you with His most precious blood; do not allow your memory to store up evil thoughts or your passions to be the occasion of sin. Do not allow your judgment to be perverted by error or your will to be led in chains of iniquity. No, my soul, you are Christ’s, and sin has no right to you.

Be courageous concerning this, O Christian! Be not dispirited, as though your spiritual enemies could never be destroyed. You are able to overcome them—but not in your own strength—the weakest of them would be too much for you; but you can and shall overcome them through the blood of the Lamb. If you wonder how to dispossess them since they are greater and mightier than you, go to the strong for strength, wait humbly upon God, and the mighty God of Jacob will surely come to your rescue, and you will sing of victory through His grace.

The family reading plan for April 6, 2012

Proverbs 24 | 1 Thessalonians 3