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The Desire of Ages
is upon Him. The bolts of God’s wrath are hurled at Him, because He
claimed to be the Son of God. Many who believed on Him heard His
despairing cry. Hope left them. If God had forsaken Jesus, in what
could His followers trust?
When the darkness lifted from the oppressed spirit of Christ, He
revived to a sense of physical suffering, and said, “I thirst.” One of
the Roman soldiers, touched with pity as he looked at the parched
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lips, took a sponge on a stalk of hyssop, and dipping it in a vessel of
vinegar, offered it to Jesus. But the priests mocked at His agony. When
darkness covered the earth, they had been filled with fear; as their
terror abated, the dread returned that Jesus would yet escape them. His
words, “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” they had misinterpreted. With
bitter contempt and scorn they said, “This man calleth for Elias.” The
last opportunity to relieve His sufferings they refused. “Let be,” they
said, “let us see whether Elias will come to save Him.”
The spotless Son of God hung upon the cross, His flesh lacerated
with stripes; those hands so often reached out in blessing, nailed to the
wooden bars; those feet so tireless on ministries of love, spiked to the
tree; that royal head pierced by the crown of thorns; those quivering
lips shaped to the cry of woe. And all that He endured—the blood
drops that flowed from His head, His hands, His feet, the agony that
racked His frame, and the unutterable anguish that filled His soul
at the hiding of His Father’s face—speaks to each child of humanity,
declaring, It is for thee that the Son of God consents to bear this burden
of guilt; for thee He spoils the domain of death, and opens the gates of
Paradise. He who stilled the angry waves and walked the foam-capped
billows, who made devils tremble and disease flee, who opened blind
eyes and called forth the dead to life,—offers Himself upon the cross
as a sacrifice, and this from love to thee. He, the Sin Bearer, endures
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the wrath of divine justice, and for thy sake becomes sin itself.
In silence the beholders watched for the end of the fearful scene.
The sun shone forth; but the cross was still enveloped in darkness.
Priests and rulers looked toward Jerusalem; and lo, the dense cloud had
settled over the city and the plains of Judea. The Sun of Righteousness,
the Light of the world, was withdrawing His beams from the once
favored city of Jerusalem. The fierce lightnings of God’s wrath were
directed against the fated city.