On the Cross: Death Comes First

I often hear people talk about the Old Testament as being all about law, as opposed to the New Testament which is all about grace.  I'm an Old Testament scholar, and talk like that makes me shudder, because it's really not true.  Consider the book of Exodus - it tells the story of God saving the people out of Egypt, out of the clutches of a cruel master who beat and whipped them, before it moves into telling the story of how the people are now to live, within the hands of a good and kind Master.  In Ex 20, the Ten Commandments begin "I am the Lord your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt..."  Before God commands anything, God demonstrates, "I love you, and you can trust me."  Before God reveals the law, God reveals what is the purpose of following these laws - that you might have life.

When my daughter was born, I could have let her cry endlessly when she was a day old and insisted on my own way, but God had given me all kinds of maternal instincts saying that was not right.  Before I became the one who disciplines her, I spent months upon months dying to myself on her behalf.  I gave up everything to hold her, to nurse her, to quiet her when she was upset, to let her know that in this world there is someone who loves her, someone she can trust whole-heartedly.  It was only as she got older that I began to discipline her, to teach her how to walk the path of life in such a way that she can really live.  I often meditated upon how much this is like the pattern with which God deals with us as his children - before I told her how to live, I told her I would die on her behalf.

This gives Holy Week a whole new meaning for me.  When I was younger, I left everything to follow Jesus.  But my motive was not yet just like Jesus' - I did it because I wanted to draw near to God, not because I so loved the world that I wanted to draw near to it.  I wasn't thinking, "I want the world to know, before I have the Holy Spirit call it to salvation through me, that I would die for it."  I didn't even know, yet, how to think such a thought.  It has been the strange providence of God in my life that the work of parenthood has brought me nearer to the cross than any of the sacrifices of my youth.