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Grace, mercy, and peace be unto you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

This morning when we had the day school kids here and I was preaching this, it struck me almost at the moment of being spoken that how completely unapplicable it seemed for these kids, at least for the little ones, because when you were little, you remember how nothing in your mind could daunt or cause you great fear or doubt when it came to God and His ability to answer prayer and His ability to complete what He has promised. It’s not until you began to grow a little older that rational reason came in to play and you began to think a little bit deeper than just the statement that Scripture gives. And in fact, as you and I grow older, do doubts grow exponentially with each passing year as we begin to see inconsistencies in how God acts or our way of perceiving how God acts.

When Christ was ridiculed from the ground up to the cross with words that mocked Him and said, “Come down if you are the Son of God,” He was showing Himself to be exactly what they claimed Him not to be. But they, like we, wished to place our Lord and our God in a specific box of expectation. How will He deal with us or with that situation or with them? Because we fervently pray, and yet God allows someone to die. We fervently pray and yet our job still is taken from us. We seek God’s wisdom and yet it seems as if He has turned a deaf ear to us. And these things pry upon our hearts more as we grow older. It becomes kind of a playground of Satan, because our memory of things in the past is clearer sometimes than our memory of what happened yesterday. And in thinking about the things of the past, it’s interesting the things that we cannot seem to forget; isn’t it? Oh, Lord, how I wish we could forget those things at times. They serve no purpose but to be used by Satan and our own flesh to flagellate and beat ourselves down.

Mocking Him and calling Him to come down to prove Himself is the complete antithesis of what He had been doing all along prior to this moment. And all the miracles that He performed from healing, raising the dead, walking on water, stilling the storm, and so on and so on. Just like you in your own life can recount all the times that God has been good and gracious so much so that you can actually point to that and say that was God being good and gracious when there was no reason for Him to be. And then we still wake up and are fearful. We still wake up and are frustrated with how God has allowed things to be. They wanted Him to come to them in their definition and in their manner and means to prove Himself. Had He come down from that cross, He would have proven Himself to be only the Son of God but not their Savior. For to prove Himself to be the Savior and to be the King of all, He would have to suffer all, the very exact opposite of what we think.

When you and I tend to think of accomplishments and abilities, it never is looked upon as a negative. It’s always as a positive, meaning the ability to do something. The very thing that He does is the very antithesis to what you and I, or they, should expect it to be. And that’s why you and I say hindsight’s 20/20; isn’t it? When we look back and see the maneuvering of God’s hand in our life and our families’ lives and our loved ones’ lives, how He has moved us around and shaped us and our children, and all through suffering, which is always a part of God revealing Himself as the One who saved us from the utmost suffering.

You see, you and I were joined to that suffering. We were joined to the One who was crucified, and to ask Him to come down is to completely eliminate our entire being joined to Him and His life. It negates the fact that we will rise again with Him. It robs us of the comfort of true forgiveness. For Him to do anything but to die and to be mocked as He is in the text. But when He is caught between a rock and a hard place, He doesn’t bicker and complain. He doesn’t cast stones at others in his mind’s eye, which unfortunately is what we do. He only dies. That is worth believing. That is your and my God who is our Savior, and it proves He is a God who does not break His Word, which enables little kids and children to believe and which enables His grownup kids and little children to believe.

Thanks be to God for such a God who has kept His Word in spite of how the world paints Him, in spite of how we paint Him. In the name of Jesus, Amen.

The peace of God which passes all understanding keep your hearts and minds on Christ Jesus to life everlasting.

Amen.