Steadfast love and faithfulness meet; righteousness and peace kiss each other. (Psalm 85:10)
Have you ever experienced a perfect storm? As you probably know, a ‘perfect storm’ is an idiomatic expression meaning that a whole lot of things have come together at the same time – usually bad things. I once lived in a little coastal town and a massive storm front moved up the coast. But at the same time on the same day we experienced a ‘king tide’, which is a tide that has the highest possible tidal range. Not only that, at the same time the low pressure driving the storm carried a swell that was fantastically huge. It all came together in a perfect storm. The result was a catastrophic. Lots of houses were lost, roads were swept into the sea and there was serious flooding. The thing about a perfect storm is that when a whole lot of things come together and reinforce each other the net result is more dramatic than if these things occurred by themselves separately. The cross of Jesus Christ was a perfect storm. On Jesus Christ, every single sin of His people, without exception, sins past, present and future, smaller sins like over-eating, to greater sins like rape and murder, even sins that are too shameful to mention – every sin of every one of His people, was laid on Him. And then He was hung up in the presence of the Holy, Holy, Holy God who, with all His Being, hates sin. This was the perfect storm. It went dark. There was an earthquake. Jesus Christ hung there, abandoned by God, and He died. At the same time there was another perfect storm happening. A coming together at once of a whole lot of other factors. We would not have seen it if the Bible didn’t show it to us. This verse begs the question, when did these things come together so perfectly? Only at the cross of Jesus Christ. At the cross when Jesus died, we see steadfast love, faithfulness, righteousness and peace all swirling around and coming together. At the cross God showed His steadfast love. A love that will never let go. God so loved the world He gave His Son to be crucified. Faithfulness was there too, because all along for centuries God had been promising to deal once and for all with our sin. But when He forgave our sins He didn’t bend or break justice. No, He was perfectly righteous because Jesus died bearing the punishment our sins deserved. The result is peace. God, angry at us, and we, running and rebelling against Him, are reconciled and we experience His peace. It all came together perfectly. And each of those elements reinforce each other at the cross. PRAY and ask God to open the eyes of your heart to see again what a perfect storm the cross of Jesus was. Spend the day thinking about how those four elements meet so perfectly at the cross.