While understanding God’s refusal to allow Moses into Canaan, we can empathize with the anger Moses felt when he lashed AT THE ISRAELITES, though by doing so disobeyed God. It symbolized the truth of James 1:20 “that man’s anger does no bring about the righteous life that God desires.”
However, and the point of this series, Jesus excelled Moses when facing the greatest crisis of his ministry. Anticipating Gethsemane at the Last Supper, Jesus expressed his appreciation of the disciples’ faithfulness to him “in my trials” Luke 22:28. That statement alone proves the Master’s amazing, persevering fortitude and strength of mind and emotion. He carried lightly the onerous burdens of disease, demonology, leadership rejection, disciple-incompetence and crowd fickleness. And only in brief glances, and nearly always with the Cross in view, do we see the stress it imposed. At the first LESS and MORE as his ministry advanced, until it hit him between the eyes in the Garden. However, far from feeling he would die in Gethsemane, he became intensely aware of what the Cross demanded: separation from God! While I feel it almost a sacrilege to intrude on his sacred struggle—and do so only to prove the Master’s valorous self-control before his destiny contrasted to Moses’ loss of it before the rock, we see Christ’s far greater patience in an infinitely greater issue. His destiny to die, and provide forgiveness of sin, experienced as never before the assault by his first-time-ever separation from His Father. That momentarily drew from him his REQUEST, “take this cup from me”—instantly followed by his DESIRE, “yet not my will, but yours be done” Luke 22:42. The crisis had been reached and mastered in those two phrases. But...the result of his surrender to his Father’s will; that it meant the loss of their eternal fellowship, affected him so crushingly that, as an angel “from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him,” Luke 22:43, Christ Jesus, “being in anguish...prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground” Luke 23:45. The angel came and strengthened him through that loss. There is one more phrase in Luke 22:29 to consider. Since the disciples had remained loyal to him, Jesus would “confer on you a kingdom, just as my Father conferred one on me....” That comported well with the Master’s later invitation to depraved Laodicea, Revelation 3:19-21. Read it for yourself. Understand, from the latter text, that Jesus is talking to each of us. He has come to us. He has lived among us. He has been here with us. He knew what it meant. He knew what his cry of abandonment meant. A shriek that surely terrified onlookers at the cross, coming out of the dark, from him, righteous man they knew him to be. No one could know then what it all meant. We hardly know now. But it did mean he had gone through life as its Conqueror and made every generation of believers his companions in spiritual conquest. He has returned to the Father, awaiting the time God sends him again to PROVE his earlier conquest and to take with him into his Holy City all who love and serve him. Let us all bow in face-down adoration before his Majesty. Let us kneel our lives side by side as we worship the One who “loved us and gave himself for us” Galatians 2:20. Amen. Fini
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