The patience of our Lord with the Father's Waiting is truly a great and wonderful deep. God the Father on occasions withnessed to His Son -- "This is My beloved Son: hear Him (cf. [compare] 2 Peter 1:17-18); but yet God never vindicated His Son to the men of His own generation because it was not the Father's purpose to do so. He left Him to the supreme satire of the Jews on the Cross in silence, and our Lord too was silent, "He opened not His mouth." Read prayerfully Mark 15:29-32, and note what might be termed the "Dilemma of Golgotha" in which Christ's own words were turned into a cruel jest and hurled back into His face while He was on the Cross. The way of sorrow for our Lord was turned into a way of derision. Men laughed while God's heart broke, and thus while hard slanders rose against God and against His Christ, the Father waited, and with pure supernatural patience, the prayer arose from the lips of our Lord -- "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). And the end is not yet; the Father still waits. It must be borne in mind that the mystery abides. All the poetical things and the mystical things that have been said and written about our Lord are but effusions that appear and disappear while the mind of the unregenerate man alternates between ridicule and confusion. The patience of God and the patience of our Lord is working to one grand Divine event, and our Lord knows, as He did in the days of His flesh, how all His saints are straitened [constrained, distressed] till it be accomplished. |