The Suffering Sabbath

God's love is, of course, beyond comparison but we humans require comparison for understanding; the combining of things we understand in order to comprehend something new. There are very few truly new ideas. When they crop up they are shot down until they are comparable or combinable with something we already understand. God used our feeble and faulty love for our children to setup a paradigm of his Love for us. Both the Father and Son are merely metaphors we can understand through comparison. Abraham and Isaac is one such manifestation of this metaphor of comparison.

Understanding the Love of God is the end-goal of the Great Controversy. Lucifer sought this understanding and lacked it. We, likewise but with lesser ability - sin bound as we are - wish to understand God in all His glory. So, the Father begat a Son and sent Him to live among us as one of us and to die for us as One beyond us. “Father make them one as we are one,” Jesus prayed. It is a revelation of divine love in dusty sandals. He walked our roads as one of us, and calls us to walk His road as one with Him. Since that life, that death and that re-life, God calls us to the life liveable only when we enter His love, although we barely understand it.

I do not think we dwell often enough in the darkness between death and resurrection. And yet, this is where we live. We want the forgiveness He offered by taking our place. We want the life He promised by returning to life. But, what of the dark days of that fearful trial living between the call to death and the gift of life? How long did Abraham walk alongside his son believing he was about to lose him? For the disciples it was a sabbath. What a dark Sabbath indeed. A Sabbath without a Saviour. A day without understanding.

Then the Son rose. A new day dawns. Oneness reveals. The story deepens. Love lives. The metaphor thickens. Death dies. Father and Son are one. Revelation in resurrection.

The great cosmic conflict - life and death - were explained on the Road to Emmaus (See Luke 24:13-35). That must have been the most invigorating conversation humans have ever had with God. Does not your heart burn within you just considering that day, that walk, that conversation? Until the breaking of bread reveals, again, oneness. More inclusive. More reaching. More embracing. “Take eat, this is my body broken for you.”

Forever after, the cry of God on Abraham's mountain "It is enough" is completed by the Cry of God on ours "It is finished."