The Suffering Sabbath

God's love is, of course, beyond comparison. But we humans require comparison for understanding; the combining of things we understand to comprehend something new. There are 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 the feeble and faulty love we have for our children to set up the 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 - wished 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 day? The Sabbath of 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 arose. A new day dawns. Oneness reveals. The story deepens. Love lives. The metaphor thickens. Death dies. Father and Son is One. Revelation in resurrection.

The great cosmic conflict - life and death - is 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, the cry of God on Abraham's mountain: "It is enough" is completed by the Cry of God on our mountain: "It is finished."