Today's Devotional

March 14, 2005

Subject:  A Separation Problem

Mark 15:34 - "And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

After attending school with my 8 year-old, Caylah, and talking to her class, and after going to the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo and spending a day at the Carnival riding the rides and playing games, and after a day of horseback riding and painting molds at the mall, it was finally time for me to go back to work and leave my daughters with my mother.  As is typical with Caylah, she began to whine and complain about her daddy leaving her.  I asked her to be a big girl as always and she tried to straighten up, but when I asked her why she was acting the way that she was acting, she finally responded, "I can't help it.  I have a separation problem."  Where she gets terms like that, I have no idea.  However, I saw her complaining as whining, but perhaps it parallels in some small way another "separation" scenario.

While Caylah had spent a short amount of time with me, her daddy, that weekend, Jesus Christ had spent an eternity with God the Father.  They had known oneness like we can't even imagine.  Even though we speak of it, they had a oneness that exceeds the capacity of the human mind.  Then something happened.  For our sake, they had to experience the ultimate separation.  In the passage above, you see The Christ "whining" to our profit.  He had a separation problem.  He whom had no sin, became sin and separated Himself from His Heavenly Father so that through His separation, we could be united with Him. 

Here's the difference in His separation problem and the separation problem Caylah experienced.  When Caylah leaves her dad, as her father, I'm sad because she is gone and who knows when I will see her again.  That can be true of friends, relatives or in the death of loved ones.  We feel the pain of separation and it oftentimes appears that we have little to gain.  However, when Christ separated Himself by taking on our sin, He brought in you, me and multitudes of children to the Father.  That's a separation problem with purpose.  The Son felt the pain, but the Father saw gain; united by a separation problem.  Thank God today.  

Carlen