The judgement of this world

There was no other good enough

To pay the price of sin. Cecil Frances Alexander

 

Read John 12:25—33

It was no trivial thing that troubled the soul of the Son of God. It is beyond me to grasp or imagine. It is a dark supernatural thing that I will never have to face. That is, I would have had to, but now I don’t. It is the judgement on the world, in the encounter with the evil one. I know enough to know that that evil, all the evil of the world, the evil taken in hand by the Son of God, is very, very, very evil. I had fallen rather innocently into thinking that I could sort of side with Jesus, support him and sympathise with him, even stand with him as he confronts the evil of the world. Tonight I must face why it is that Jesus had to go to the cross alone, without me, without his friends. The evil of the world that he bore is not someone else’s evil. I’m not partly free of it. It is mine.

Prayer
Dear Lord, I thank you for this terrible troubling of your soul. Thank you that you did not wash your hands of the world’s evil, turn your back on the world’s rejection, disconnect from responsibility for the world’s long and deliberate sin. Else you would have forsaken me. Else you would have denied me. Else you would have betrayed me. Else you would have put me to death. But you took my part. And I do not have to. In facing the world’s judgement you have faced mine, and delivered me into the joy of the freedom of the children of God.