Does God love us?

Jesus’s death on the cross

In this week prior to Easter, we all do well to ask the question “Does God love us?” and to find the answer in the cross of Christ.

The sacrifice of Jesus shows how completely, how desperately, God loves us. The death of Jesus cost God enormously and unimaginably. 

The sacrifice of Jesus in relinquishing his privileges as God, coming to the earth, taking the form of a lowly human servant, and being humbly obedient is unimaginable to us (Philippians 2:6-8).  This sacrifice alone, with all of its ramifications, clearly demonstrates that God loves us.

And yet, his death on the cross gives us just a glimmer of how deep is the love of Jesus, of the Father, and the Holy Spirit. His death was to provide for us forgiveness of our sins so we, if we receive the gift, can have an eternal relationship with God now and through all eternity (1 Corinthians 15:3-7). Without his death on the cross, our condition was hopeless; with it, if we receive him, we have eternal and abundant life (John 3:16-17).

His death was horrifying physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Physically because a more excruciating form of being tortured to death can hardly be imagined. Our English word excruciating derives from the Latin meaning “to crucify.”

The emotional cost to Jesus also was almost beyond our imaginings. In a culture in which honor and shame were the dominating, overarching values, being hung and displayed naked on a frequently traveled thoroughfare into Jerusalem was itself an exquisite form of suffering.  Jesus had, no doubt seen other victims of crucifixion during his many visits to the city and the fear and revulsion he would have experienced at the sight must have been at least as great as our twenty-first century minds can conceive.  Added to this was the emotional trauma of knowing that he, when he suffered his agony, would be punished though completely undeserving.  Such haunting thoughts no doubt plagued his mind in anticipation of the terrible event, only to have his worst nightmares come excruciatingly true. 

The spiritual torture Jesus willingly endured must have been inconceivably horrible, perhaps the worst torture of all. “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” he sobbed from the cross.

Uttered in Aramaic, apparently Jesus’s mother tongue (Matthew 27:45-46; Mark 15:34), I believe that these words were being recalled by someone who heard them, seared indelibly as they were into the memory of the hearer.  Why else record them in Aramaic?  I remember an incident in my parenting when I heard one of my children crying, distressed and disillusioned, beyond hope, an aching wail of disbelief and pain.  I can still hear the moan in my mind to this day. 

I am thinking that the writers of the Gospel accounts that contain these words could recall in their minds the very sound of their Rabbi and friend wailing them from the cross.  Jesus had known the love of his Father from all eternity.  No matter what rejection or hatred he had to face while on earth, he always knew that his Father loved him and was with him.  The night before the awful event, he had told his disciples, “A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me” (John 16:32).  Even if his dearest earthly friends left him alone, he was saying that he would not be utterly alone; his Father would be with him.  Now as the final horror of the nightmare came to fruition, Jesus would perceive that even his Father abandoned him.  He was utterly, totally, achingly alone. 

Another aspect of Jesus’s suffering on the cross comes with the biblical assertion that he somehow was bearing the punishment for the reality of our sin.  To what extent did Jesus actually experience the sin of the world while he was on the cross?  To what extent did Jesus mentally experience every theft, every abduction, every murder, every rape, every abuse directed toward a child?  I do not know.  The thought is too horrifying to entertain.  Still, somehow the punishment for our sin was directed at Jesus, undeserving as he was. 

Written hundreds of years before, the beautiful words of Isaiah sound as though the author was seated, marveling and awe-struck, at the foot of the cross:

Surely he took up our pain 

and bore our suffering, 

yet we considered him punished by God, 

stricken by him, and afflicted.  

But he was pierced for our transgressions, 

he was crushed for our iniquities; 

the punishment that brought us peace was on him, 

and by his wounds we are healed.  

We all, like sheep, have gone astray, 

each of us has turned to our own way; 

and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.  (Isaiah 53:4-6)

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This blog post is an excerpt from my soon-to-be-published book, Is Jesus Real? 5 Types of Evidence for Curious Skeptics & Believers