In the relationship of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit we see the greatest love of all eternity past and future. Each year as the Jewish Passover Seder is celebrated, we see one of the most profound and poignant images of this love enacted. Each year, not only Messianic Jews but also all Jews practice the following tradition: before the Seder begins, three separate pieces of matzo, or unleavened bread, are placed in three individual layers of a special napkin. During the Seder, the middle piece of matzo is removed by the father of the household and broken in half. One half of this middle piece is returned to the napkin, and the other half is wrapped in a separate napkin and hidden, to be brought back at the end of the meal. What an incredible insight this gives us into the relationship between the Father and the Son!
Let us consider for a moment the endless love that has always existed between the Father and the Son. We can more easily understand the concept of eternity if we look to the future, but there was also an eternity before time. Imagine for a moment the depth of a relationship between Father and Son that existed from eternity PAST. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1,2). “The Lord possessed Me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old…then I was beside Him as a master workman, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing always before Him…” (Proverbs 8:22,30). In the form of God, Jesus could merely with a word create an ocean, and bring galaxies into being. Together with His Father, He could just imagine, speak, and create. For eternity past, Father and Son so loved each other’s fellowship, of which all earthly loves are but an ever so faint shadow. For an eternity before the creation, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit lived together in such a fullness of love, a fullness of glory, incredible intimacy and joy. We read in Philippians 2:6, “Have this attitude in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, who although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be grasped.” He existed in the very form of God!
But as so graphically demonstrated in the Seder, the middle piece of God—the Son—was pulled out of this unity, to be separated, to be broken, and to be hidden away from this fellowship. When this Son, who spoke universes into being, was about to enter the world, scripture says, “Sacrifice and offering Thou hast not desired, but a body Thou hast prepared for Me” (Hebrews 10:5). When God the Father approached the issue of canceling sin, He knew sacrifices were insufficient. So He prepared a body for Jesus. Contemplate the scene in the manger. Here in the form of an infant lies the co-creator of the universe. Can you picture the angels who have worked with millennia of history, who have watched over prophets and kings, who have waited for God to draw back the veil from His majestic plan? Imagine them staring wide-eyed at this little child with no home, no honor and no glory. Imagine Michael and Gabriel, or the angels who had slain the 185,000 Assyrians (Isaiah 37:36), peering from the heavens at the King of Kings and Lord of Lords lying as a fragile infant.
And like the angels, the prophet Isaiah long before had wondered, “Who has believed our message? And to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” (Isaiah 53:1). He continued, “ He grew up before [the Father] like a tender shoot, and like a root out of parched ground.” Jesus, in a parched, dry, hostile and alien environment, grew up BEFORE THE FATHER; always mindful of the Father, never speaking a word or doing an action unless He saw the Father doing it. This tender young shoot was entirely focused on the Father with whom He had shared all eternity, be it in temptation, in struggle, in honor, whether being rejected or being hailed as king.
As a young boy at the age of twelve, when Jesus was found in the temple He said, “Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house? (Luke 2:49). Is it any wonder that we find Him so often up early, even before dawn, climbing a mountain to meet with His Father, or up at night with Him in communion? In His immediate consciousness as He awakened there was a deep soul-thirst for His Father.
In John 17, we see Him consumed with His relationship with His Father. Jesus prays with lifted eyes, “Father, the hour has come to glorify Thy Son, that the Son may glorify Thee, even as Thou gavest Him authority over all mankind, that to all whom Thou hast given to Him He may give eternal life. And this is eternal life that they may know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom Thou hast sent. I have glorified Thee on earth having accomplished the work which Thou hast given me to do, and now glorify Me together with Thyself, Father, with the glory which I ever had with Thee before the world was.” We see Jesus, having fully taken on the mantle of earthly sonship, now saying in essence, Father, I want to come back to that glory. I long to come back to that eternal place, that fellowship we had. Now glorify Me, that I can glorify You and return to the glory that was there.
Now consider another Jewish tradition that the precious Son enacted just before His trial. During Passover, it was the custom to carefully select a young unblemished lamb and set it apart. For four days this lamb would be with the family. Imagine in your house what an affection your children would develop for this lamb. This was not an incident experienced in the barn by the father. The father was responsible that the children see the tender price that must be paid for sin. To know that this lamb was set apart for slaughter would not have been in keeping with our ideas of positive family memories. Instead it provided a context for a deeply imprinted realization of the horrendous price of sin. As a boy and all through Jesus’ growing years, each Passover His father Joseph had chosen a lamb and brought it to the family, and for four days Jesus would have been with this lamb. How old do you think Jesus was when He realized that He was one day to be the lamb? Yet for years after this realization, He continued to keep the Passover. What a Son! What a Father!
Now we see Jesus, with this full realization, riding into Jerusalem. On the very night that the families were taking the lambs into the house to be examined, the Lamb entered “the house” to be examined before He was slain, before the Sanhedrin, Pilate, and rejection by His own people.
“Then Jesus came with them to a place called Gethsemane, and said to His disciples, ‘Sit here while I go over there and pray.’ And He took with Him Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, and began to be grieved and distressed. Then He said to them, “My soul is deeply grieved, to the point of death; remain here and keep watch with Me.” And He went a little beyond them, and fell on His face and prayed, saying, ‘My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from Me; yet not as I will, but as Thou wilt.” (Matthew 26:36-39. The weight of what was about to take place was upon Him; there was no place to turn aside. Again, it was the Son before the Father, appealing with all of His being for a way out, with a heart completely willing to obey, but in such agony His perspiration is mingled with blood.
On the cross, He was offered something to dull the pain. But here again, He so stood before the Father, looking for the Father’s face and for the Father’s love and vindication. But instead He now entered the darkest void of all. In the darkness of that hour, the Father in some way took OUR sin and placed it upon His perfect, obedient son, and in so doing had to turn His back upon the Son. And here we face the greatest pain of all history. Because of God’s total enmity with and hostility toward the sin placed upon His son, their union and friendship was broken; it was severed; they where separated. To such an extent that in an agony far beyond the garden Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” It was a cry that a million books could not describe. This love had been abandoned. When our sin was placed upon Jesus’ back He faced the full and due penalty of what you and I would have faced in that place, and He was separated from His Father. Now see why He cried out. As He looked for the eyes of the Father who had turned away, He now saw our whole eternity in hell placed on Him alone.
There was an incomprehensible wrenching of this incredible love from all eternity past:
it was this love, this trust and relationship that was on the altar.
The price of sin was to be paid between them.
They alone, together, made atonement for our sin.
We have a picture of colossal magnitude painted for us in Genesis. When Abraham offered up his son Isaac, he was able by faith to tell Isaac “the Lord will provide for Himself the lamb”. (Genesis 22:8). In that scene, the father Abraham raised the knife over the son, but we need to realize the knife of Abraham would never and could never fall. It was merely a sign.
Whereas Abraham had a way out, the Father God did not.
While Abraham saw a ram caught in the thicket, there was no such ram for the Father that day, except the deeply beloved Son before Him. The Lamb, caught in the thicket of our sins, now lay bound. The Father looked to you and to me and to the multitudes that would accept and reject Him, and He could not turn aside.
As the Father raised His hand, “from the sixth hour darkness fell upon the land until the ninth hour” (Matthew 27:45). As the darkness spread over the earth, it was as though nature itself had to shield its eyes from the sight unfolding before it. Can you imagine those angels now? Those angels who years before had stood gazing in intent wonder at the defenseless infant; now where could they run, where could they hide from such a scene? The earth itself jerked back and staggered in such horror that the rocks split apart at such a sight. Is it any wonder that nature itself went into convulsions and that saints of old literally rose up out of their graves and walked around Jerusalem!
As the knife came down the price was paid and the curtain of separation in the temple was rent in two. We read in Hebrews 12:1 that it was “for the joy set before Him He endured the cross”. What was that joy for which He surrendered His relationship with His father, His glory, His dignity, all His natural rights and His very life? It was the joy of seeing that the love that existed with the Father from eternity past would now reach into all eternity future, extended to include every individual who would respond to it. The joy set before Him was the knowledge that “He will see His offspring” (Isaiah 53:10), and that the pleasure of the Lord, which was His longing to be reconciled to all mankind, would prosper as a result of His sacrifice.
After these things I looked and behold, a great multitude,
which no one could count, from every nation
and all tribes and peoples and tongues,
before the throne and before the Lamb,
clothed in white robes and palm branches were in their hands;
and they cry out with a loud voice, saying,
Salvation to our God who sits on the throne and to the Lamb.
