Hi Friends,This week, as we experience Good Friday and await the wonder of Easter morning, I wanted to share with you some thoughts from Wrestling with Wonder about what is happening in the darkness when all hope seems lost.
For those who are facing darkness-when-it-should-be-light in some area of life, I hope this will bring hope and encouragement.
As I always say, in the darkness God does His most intimate work.
Darkness and the Curtain
When Jesus was on the cross, darkness
covered the land for three hours, from noon until three in the afternoon. Commentators
argue about what the darkness symbolized…But for those who have knelt in their
own darkness, the arguments don’t matter. For Mary, for us, we care little what
the darkness symbolizes. It only matters that it is there, that we must live
through it, live in it. We know that darkness means confusion and fear, sorrow
and loneliness. This is a time when we can’t see, we don’t understand. It’s
when things are not as they should be, when life is turned upside down and
nothing makes sense.
That is the kind of backwards,
doesn’t-make-sense, where-are-you-God moment that Mary and everyone around her
experienced.
I’ve experienced it too. You
probably have as well. We’ve been to the place where we can’t seem to see any
light at all. She couldn’t see Jesus. We can’t see God. There were no
comforting visions; there were no glimpses of God’s light. She could do nothing
but wait. We can do nothing but trust ... or not. We choose.
Because for us, like Mary, we often
don’t know what is happening, what God is doing when we can’t see him.
Luke 23:44-45 tells us, “It was now
about noon, and darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon,
for the sun stopped shining. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.”
Something was happening in the
darkness.
Far away from where Mary was
standing (or sitting or kneeling) something important was happening in the
temple. In the darkness, the curtain that separated the people from the Holy of
Holies was being torn in two. Luke clearly links the two events in the text.
God is in the darkness. He is
working. He is tearing the veil.
And this veil that was ripped
asunder was no puny bit of muslin. It was a whole handbreadth thick. It was
forty cubits long and twenty wide. It did not tear easily.
Woven from costly yarns from
Babylon, the curtain blocked access to the Holy of Holies where the inner altar
stood. Only once a year would the high
priest enter through the curtain to make an offering for his sins and the sins
of the people. That’s how unapproachable, how separate, God was to the people.
But not forever. Because in the darkness, God was doing a new
thing.
In general, culturally then and now,
the purpose of a veil is to cover, to separate. Brides wear veils as they walk
down the aisle so the groom can’t see them. Middle Eastern women wear veils to
hide their faces from men.
This veil, this curtain, was to
separate a holy God from a sinful people. But while Mary sat in the blackness,
unable to see Jesus, unable to see God, God rent that veil in two. He removed
the barrier. And he did it in the darkness.
So what does this tell us about our
God? It says that no matter how deep our darkness, no matter the horror we face
in it, God is there. He is working. He is, in fact, doing his most intimate
work. God rends the curtain and reveals himself, takes down barriers, does a
new thing, in our darkest moments.
The curtains in your soul may be thick. They may be difficult to tear away. But
our God knows how to rip through the thickest of veils. He has done it before. He
will do it again. For you.
So what do we do when we face the
darkness? Like Mary, we sit at the foot of the cross. We don’t panic. We don’t
run away. Instead, we stay there, sit quietly, and let God work even though we
can’t see him.
Now, because of Christ, because of
what he did on the cross for us, darkness is no longer the place where evil has
its way. It is not the devil’s realm. Instead, it has become the place where
God works, where he comes near to us in new ways.
God is God, even in our darkness.
There he loves us. There he fulfills
his purposes. There the promises of the Messiah come true because he is
removing the separation between God and man. Between you and the God who loves
you.
He is near us in the dark. He is
opening the Most Holy Place.
We must only trust, even when we cannot
see.
Therefore,
brothers and sisters, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by
the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain,
that is, his body, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let
us draw near to God with a sincere heart and with the full assurance that faith
brings, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and
having our bodies washed with pure water. Let us hold unswervingly to the hope
we profess,
for he who promised is faithful.
Hebrews 10:19-23
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