39
The Final Hours
Scripture Reading: Matthew 26:20-28, 36-46
Faith can be challenging. Putting our trust in something
or someone else can make us feel insecure, which puts
us at a high risk of operating out of fear. But faith isn’t
necessarily a challenging concept to understand. We put
faith in things every day. You put faith in your cell phone
to keep your personal data, photos, and many other things
secure and in working order. You put faith in your leaders
and in PPM to ensure that you have a rewarding mission
trip experience and that you return home in “relatively” the
same condition in which you started. So why is it so hard
for us to put faith in God? Why do we struggle sometimes
to believe that He is going to do what He says He’s going
to do?
In the first portion of scripture you read today, Jesus is
hosting what we often refer to as the Last Supper with
His disciples. At one point, He stands up and tells them
that one of them has betrayed Him. To the disciples,
this is shocking. Jesus is the promised Messiah, the One
they have walked with for three years and have watched
perform some of the most incredible miracles. Who would
want to betray the One they all believed was the Chosen
One sent by God? Here’s the incredible part, though: to
Jesus, this was all part of the plan. This is literally what He
came to do.
Later in the story, we read about Jesus in His final
moments leading up to His capture in an olive grove
called Gethsemane (Geth· sem· a· ne | geth-se-mə-nē). It’s
a challenging scene, during which Jesus is fully aware of
what is coming, but He is determined to go through with
it in spite of the suffering that awaits Him. This scene,
more so than almost any other moment in Jesus’ life, is an
incredible demonstration of God’s justice and mercy at full
force. Humanity is sinful by nature and deserving of the
punishment that comes with it; God is justified in holding
us accountable for that sin. However, His affection for us
is so strong that His mercy wins out as He sends Jesus to
pay the debt of our sin.
In his book Knowledge of the Holy, A.W. Tozer writes,
“If we could remember that the divine mercy is not a
temporary mood but an attribute of God’s eternal being,
we would no longer fear that it will someday cease to be.”
In other words, even though we still struggle with our sin
nature (our humanity), God’s mercy has not and will not
fade. We no longer need to live in fear of not being enough
or being too messed up. Understanding the depth of this
moment and the task ahead of Jesus should free us from
self-doubt and inflame our love for God.
We all struggle with sin. We’re all human. The most incredible thing about the Gospel is that, in spite of
who we are, God’s love and mercy are freely available to us. How should God’s mercy change the way you
live your life on a daily basis?