The Darkness and the Dawn: Empowered by the Tragedy and Triumph of the Cross

THE DARKNESS AND THE DAWN

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Reflections from the Heart—A Prayer Journal

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When Your Comfort Zone Gets the Squeeze

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THE DARKNESS AND THE DAWN

Empowered by the Tragedy and Triumph of the Cross

CHARLES R. SWINDOLL

THE DARKNESS AND THE DAWN

Charles R. Swindoll

©2001 by Charles R. Swindoll, Inc.

Published in Nashville, Tennessee, by Thomas Nelson. Thomas Nelson is a registered trademark of Thomas Nelson, Inc.

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission from the publisher.

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Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations used in this book are from the New American Standard Bible (NASB)

© 1960, 1962, 1963, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, 1995 by the Lockman Foundation. Used by permission.

ISBN 0-8499-1347-0 (hc)

ISBN 0-8499-1189-3 (tp)

Printed in the United States of America

06 07 08 09 10 RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Dedication

Ever since the inception of

Stonebriar Community Church

of Frisco, Texas, in the fall of 1998,

we have felt that the Lord’s hand

has been on our ministry.

We have experienced a love that is deep,

a worship that is authentic and meaningful,

a joy that is rare, and a harmony

that pastors often dream about but

seldom have the pleasure of witnessing.

A major reason these ingredients are so evident in our church

is the excellent leadership that is present

among our Board of Elders.

It is my distinct privilege to serve

alongside these fine men

as we pray together

and

grow in the Word together

and

lead our church together for God’s greater glory.

Because of their unselfish dedication

and commitment to the work of ministry,

I gratefully dedicate this book

to these six faithful servant-leaders:

STAN BAXTER

DAVID CHAVANNE

DICK CREWS

JIM GUNN

JOHNNY KOONS

BILL SOUSA

Contents

Introduction

THE DARKNESS

1. The Suffering Savior

2. The Cup of Sacrifice

3. Midnight in the Garden

4. Three O’ Clock in the Morning

5. The Six Trials of Jesus

6. The Man Who Missed His Cross

7. The Way of the Cross

8. The Darkest of All Days

9. Father, Forgive Them

10. Today You Shall Be with Me

11. Behold, Your Son! Behold, Your Mother!

12. Why Have You Forsaken Me?

13. I Am Thirsty

14. It Is Finished

15. Father, into Your Hands I Commit My Spirit

16. Lessons in Obedience . . . Taught Severely

THE DAWN

17. What Is Your Verdict?

18. A Sunday Morning Miracle

19. Curing the Plague of Death

20. Breaking Death’s Jaws

21. Triumph for the Undeserving

22. Hope for the Unforgiven

Conclusion

APPENDIX

A Chronology of Events

The Trials of Jesus Christ

Endnotes

Introduction

Heart attack. Those two words sent a chill up my spine. I could hardly believe the physician was talking about me. I found myself crawling into my own inner cave of emotional darkness, facing for the first time in my entire life the reality of my own mortality. I shall never forget the feeling.

It was 5:50 A.M. on October 14, 2000, only four days before my sixty-sixth birthday. I was experiencing only minimal pain, but because of its location, and because it wouldn’t go away, my wife and I decided to check it out. Because we did, I’m alive today. And pain free. According to the latest report of my cardiologist, Dr. Jack Spitzberg, as well as the studied opinion of my personal physician, Dr. Kenneth Cooper, my heart has suffered no permanent damage.

A small stainless steel stent was inserted into the circumflex artery in my heart, which enables the blood to flow freely as it once did. Over a short period of time, I am told, my body will accept this tiny hollow tube of steel, and life for me will return pretty close to normal.

What a contrast between the frightening words I heard that dark morning in mid-October, heart attack, and the latest report I remember each dawn as I enjoy a hot cup of coffee with my faithful wife, Cynthia: no permanent damage. The darkness brought on by the fear of uncertainty is gone. The dawn of renewed hope and revived dreams has made me into a new man with a greater determination than ever to serve my Lord and to fulfill His plan for the balance of my life—whatever that may include.

To say that I am full of gratitude would qualify as the understatement of the year.

Interestingly, I had embarked on a new publishing project when all of that occurred back in October 2000. I had begun writing the book you are holding in your hands. For well over forty years I have been intrigued by the two extremes our Lord experienced at the end of His ministry on earth: the agony of His torturous suffering and death, followed by the ecstasy of His glorious resurrection and triumph over the grave. Time spent meditating on both extremes of His final days on earth always left me hungry for more information, more insights, more understanding.

It seemed to me that these contrasting extremes deserved the kind of time and attention only a book could provide. Sermons on these themes are certainly helpful, as are songs and hymns. But if we hope to go into any depth of understanding and personal application, we need the opportunity to revisit these scenes much more carefully and slowly. Once we have invested the meditation they deserve, they will empower us to worship Him who died for us, as we should, and to exalt Him who was raised that we might live transformed lives, as we so desire.

And so I set out to focus my thoughts on both the tragedy and the triumph of our Savior, with not even the slightest idea that, during the process, God would take me through my own darkness and dawn. Perhaps it was the Father’s plan to take me through all that to enable me to write at a level I could not otherwise have achieved. If that occurs, I am, again, full of gratitude.

My thanks to several good and capable servants with whom I have had the joy of working on this project. My editors, Judith Markham and Mary Hollingsworth, deserve special recognition for their tireless efforts and insightful comments. My longtime friend and coworker in our Pastoral Ministries Department at Insight for Living, Bryce Klabunde, provided needed and helpful counsel on historical details, biblical background, and linguistic research. I am grateful for his keen eye, which kept me from making embarrassing errors. And again I am indebted to Julie Meredith, who assisted me in gaining permissions for the quotations used in this volume. I thank my many dear friends at Word Publishing, especially Joey Paul and David Moberg, for their belief in this project and their compassionate understanding, as well as their prayer-filled encouragement during those days when my rehabilitation required an extension of the deadlines (Ugh, those deadlines—an author’s dread!).

I must also mention the loving support of those men with whom I serve: my fellow elders at Stonebriar Community Church. In more ways than they realize, they minister to me consistently, deeply, and affirmingly. Mine is an enviable role to fill. As I have often said to them, there isn’t a pastor in the country who wouldn’t love to be in leadership alongside a team like those fine and gracious servant-leaders. If you knew them, you would understand better why I chose to dedicate this book to them.

Finally, to my wife and family, whom I love in stronger and more meaningful ways than I ever did before October 14, 2000, I want to express my profound affections and devotion. Each has been with me through the depths of my darkness, and each was there in the glorious light of my new dawn. I give my God great praise for allowing me an extension of time on this earth to demonstrate to them how I treasure their presence and delight in their companionship.

And with that, I ask you to join me as we leave this present, familiar world and walk into the imaginary time tunnel. Return with me to those few, yet epochal, days twenty centuries ago when our precious Lord walked into the awful darkness, which He did not deserve, only to arise into the sunlit dawn of triumph, providing us a victory from which we shall never know defeat.

As we journey together into one sacred scene after another, may we, together, to borrow from Charles Wesley’s grand words, be lost in wonder, love, and praise.

—CHUCK SWINDOLL

Dallas, Texas

The Darkness

It is curious that people who are filled with horrified indignation whenever a cat kills a sparrow can hear the story of the killing of God told Sunday after Sunday and not experience any shock at all.

—DOROTHY SAYERS¹

He was despised and forsaken of men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.

—ISAIAH 53:3A

And so after receiving the morsel he went out immediately; and it was night.

—JOHN 13:30

1

The Suffering Savior

No wound? no scar?

Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,

And, pierced are the feet that follow Me;

But thine are whole: can he have followed far

Who has no wound, no scar?"²

—AMY CARMICHAEL

1

The Suffering Savior

The Scottish essayist and historian, Thomas Carlyle, used to say that the easy, somewhat superficial optimism of Ralph Waldo Emerson maddened him. Carlyle believed it stemmed from Emerson’s rather sheltered life, for no dark shadow had ever fallen across the man’s path. To Carlyle, his contemporary over in America seemed like a man who, standing far back from even the spray of the sea, threw chatty observations on the beauty of nature to those dear souls battling for life with the huge waves beating against them, threatening to sweep them away.

Who knows? Perhaps Carlyle was right in his evaluation of Emerson; we cannot say for sure. But if my personal experience as an adult in the real world is at all reliable, I’m compelled to believe differently. Since he was merely a man and a part of our fallen race of humanity, even the brilliant and gifted Emerson must have had his share of sorrows and felt the sting of rough wind across his face.

The shadow of suffering falls across every path. Even the One who left heaven when He came to live among us was inseparably linked to that shadow. As one of His own followers later wrote, He came to that which belonged to Him . . . and they who were His own did not receive Him and did not welcome Him (John 1:11, The Amplified Bible).

No one knows what Christ looked like. But this has not deterred countless painters—among them some of the greatest artists of all time—from applying brush and paint to canvas to give their own creative version of His likeness. Two of the more memorable paintings I have seen bear the same title: The Shadow of the Cross. Though originally painted by different artists, highlighting different scenes, both convey the same theme.

The first pictures a scene inside Joseph’s carpenter shop, where Joseph is working alongside Jesus. Jesus, portrayed as a young teenager, has paused from His work to look out the shop window. He stands at full height, stretching His arms wide. In doing so, He is casting an ominous shadow across the wall behind Him. A shadow in the form of a cross.

The second painting depicts Jesus as a little lad, running with outstretched arms to His mother, the sun on His back. Cast upon the path before Him is the dark shadow of the cross.

Both paintings leave the indelible impression on the viewer that the cross was with Christ from the very beginning . . . from His earliest days. We may not know what He looked like, but it is clear to all who examine the inspired record that He was intimately acquainted with suffering.

Certainly the cross was a looming reality throughout His life. Although Scripture does not tell us how, His young mind understood that the cross was ahead. His own words testify to this, even before He began His ministry, He sensed a compelling call to be about the things of His Father (Luke 2:49). Furthermore, while training His disciples, He was not hesitant to tell them about the suffering that lay ahead (Mark 8:31–33; Luke 9:44–45). Though such comments confused and even irritated His disciples, Jesus made it clear that each day brought Him closer to His hour of agony.

The Old Testament also gives us a stunning pen portrait of the shadow of the cross. Although writing about seven centuries before Jesus was born, Isaiah vividly foretells the Savior’s suffering and death. As we examine this portrait, we see Christ from three perspectives: as men saw Him; as God saw Him; and as Christ saw Himself.

IT’S ALL IN HOW YOU LOOK AT IT

Who has believed our message?

And to whom has the arm of the LORD been revealed?

For He grew up before Him like a tender shoot,

And like a root out of parched ground;

He has no stately form or majesty

That we should look upon Him,

Nor appearance that we should be attracted to Him.

He was despised and forsaken of men,

A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;

And like one from whom men hide their face,

He was despised, and we did not esteem Him.

—Isaiah 53:1–3

What did Christ look like to the men, women, and children who met Him? To be completely honest about it, probably not much like the images we see in art museums, stained-glass windows, carvings and murals.

From the clues that Scripture gives us, it would seem that His physical appearance was not impressive. He wasn’t tall, dark, and handsome. As the prophet foretold, the coming Anointed One had no appearance that we should be attracted to Him. He didn’t have pomp or flair—no stately form or majesty.

Instead, He grew up . . . like a tender shoot. Not a tall, stately reed; just a little, tender shoot. Fully human, a man with very real emotions, skin with delicate nerve endings, and tear ducts that were activated by sadness and grief. No untouchable giant of a man, He found Himself moved with compassion and stung by sharp words. Though undiminished Deity, He lived among us in true humanity . . . like a tender shoot.

Isaiah also says that He appeared like a root out of parched ground. This parched ground may refer to the land of Israel, which was nothing more than dust under a Roman boot when Christ came to earth. The world hated the Jews then as much of the world does now. Rome ruled over what they called Palestine with a rod of iron. And in the midst of that, Jesus must have seemed like a tender, fragile, vulnerable shoot making its way out of hard parched ground.

He had no stately form or majesty that we should look upon Him. Or, as The Living Bible puts it, there was nothing to make us want Him. Men looked upon Him and they didn’t want Him. John, who did see Christ in the flesh, says the same thing: He came to His own, and those who were His own did not receive Him (John 1:11). They didn’t want Him. There was no apparent reason that we should be attracted to Him.

Aha! you say. "What about the message we occasionally hear today that Jesus Christ swept into the Middle East and the first-century world was amazed at His presence and followed Him by the droves? That’s not true, at least not for long. The majority of the people ultimately hated Him! They didn’t want Him around. He wasn’t the most sought-after celebrity of the day. He would never have made Time’s cover, at least not the first-century edition, as Man of the Year. Israel didn’t want Him as their Savior. Oh, they wanted a savior—a man on a white horse to deliver them from their oppressors. But they did not want the Savior, because Jesus was not what they expected, not what they desired; so they despised Him.

He was despised and forsaken. The Hebrew word that is translated despised is a term that means to regard as negligible or worthless. In other words, Isaiah tells us that when people viewed Jesus, they would say, He’s worthless. This Hebrew term also means to deplore and to give scorn to someone. They scorned Him. They deplored Him. He wasn’t what they expected. Clearly, they despised Him.

The shadow darkens. He was not only despised; he was also "forsaken of men. Here the original language literally means wanting in men. He didn’t have a band of followers that would impress the public. No groupies. No hangers-on. No fans who would be a draw for others to associate with Him. He was wanting in men."

In the eyes of men, He was a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. He was a person from whom men hide their face. Being despised, Jesus was seen as One the people did not esteem. He was not considered valuable, and so they turned away or ignored Him.

Psychologists sometimes use the word discount to describe this kind of treatment. To discount someone is to nullify any of his or her significance—to ignore him . . . to treat her as nothing. Criticism is not the greatest insult; neither is gossip or an outburst of anger. The greatest insult is to ignore a person—to act as if that person doesn’t count, doesn’t matter, doesn’t even exist. That’s what Isaiah describes here. The people personified the ultimate discount: They just didn’t care if He was around.

Early in His ministry, Jesus knew what it meant to be wounded by the behavior of others. Such treatment was severely demonstrated, which surely scarred His tender spirit. Such scars within are not visible, but they are real wounds and are terribly painful.

Amy Carmichael describes the importance of our recognition of Christ’s wounds in her poem, No Scar?

Hast thou no scar?

No hidden scar on foot or side or hand?

I hear thee sung as mighty in the land,

I hear them hail thy bright ascendant star,

Hast thou no scar?

Hast thou no wound?

Yet I was wounded by the archers, spent.

Leaned Me against a tree to die; and rent

By ravening beasts, they compassed Me, I swooned;

Hast thou no wound?

No wound? No scar?

Yet, as the Master shall the servant be,

And, pierced are the feet that follow Me;

But thine are whole: can he have followed far

Who has no wound, no scar?"³

This is where some believers go astray. They become disturbed when followers of Christ are dismissed as extremist or oddball by the media and other critics—when they are unpopular in Hollywood, in sophisticated circles in New York, and within the beltway of Washington D.C. They forget that being a follower of Christ has never been a popular thing to be—that it has never been easy. Though written long ago, Amy Carmichael’s question remains relevant: Hast thou no wound, no scar?

Now, we’ve seen how men and women perceived Jesus, and how even His own people, the Jews, viewed Him. But what was God’s perspective of His own Son? Isaiah describes it this way:

Surely our griefs He Himself bore,

And our sorrows He carried;

Yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken,

Smitten of God, and afflicted.

But He was pierced through for our transgressions,

He was crushed for our iniquities;

The chastening for our well-being fell upon Him,

And by His scourging we are healed.

All of us like sheep have gone astray,

Each of us has turned to his own way;

But the LORD has caused the iniquity of us all

To fall on Him.

—ISAIAH 53:4–6

And then, later in the same narrative, this bold, categorical statement appears: But the Lord was pleased to crush Him, putting Him to grief (53:10a).

God saw Jesus as our substitute. God also saw His Son’s suffering as a part of His sovereign will. The Savior’s suffering, therefore, pleased Him. Yet the Father was not unconcerned about His Son when He went to Calvary. The people of Jesus’ day may have dismissed Him as insignificant, but certainly not the Father! He describes the sufferings of His Son in vivid terms: Griefs. Sorrows. Stricken. Smitten. Afflicted. Pierced through. Crushed. Chastening. Scourging. God had placed on His Son all of our iniquity, and He gives us a clear picture of what that meant to Him, God the Father.

Isaiah 53 is a portrait of a crushed, chastened, scourged individual. I cannot overemphasize this. We need to revisit the scene in order to have a realistic image of the Savior of the Scriptures. Despite all of His power and His unquestioned majesty, we must not picture Him as some kind of Super-hero. He was, truly, the Suffering Savior. Crushed and broken and bleeding, He pursued His God-ordained mission when He went to the cross for us.

Recently we have seen renewed interest in World War II, in everything from Tom Brokaw’s bestselling book, The Greatest Generation, to Tom Hanks’ hit movie, Saving Private Ryan. But those of us who are old enough to remember that war and that era need no reminders. Although I was just a boy in elementary school during that turbulent time, I will never forget the news photographs that were released and printed when the war had ended and the gates of those chambers of horror at places like Dachau and Auschwitz were opened. Or the photos of torture from Corregidor. Concentration camp victims . . . prisoners of war . . . reduced to gaunt, bleeding human skeletons. Crushed and broken survivors. Brave men and women stumbling out into a new existence of freedom and the sunlight of new hope.

Such tragic images give us a glimpse of what the Savior must have looked like, what He must have experienced when He endured the agony of the cross.

The people dismissed His appearance and His significance. The Father saw Him as the Suffering Substitute. But how did Christ see Himself?

Perhaps the most vivid portrait of all is the one Christ paints of Himself through Isaiah’s pen:

He was oppressed and He was afflicted,

Yet He did not open His mouth;

Like a lamb that is led to slaughter,

And like a sheep that is silent before its shearers,

So He did not open His mouth.

By oppression and judgment He was taken away;

And as for His generation, who considered

That He was cut off out of the land of the living,

For the transgression of my people to whom the stroke was due?

His grave was assigned with wicked men,

Yet He was with a rich man in His death,

Because He had done no violence,

Nor was there any deceit in His mouth.

—ISAIAH 53:7–9

As He carefully draws the picture, as He guides the strokes of Isaiah’s stylus from one word to the next, Christ describes Himself as oppressed and afflicted. Oppressed means to be pressed hard, to be driven. It could even be taken to mean to be plagued or hard-pressed. Afflicted means to be bowed down, to be made low, to be forced into submission. Yet, in spite of and through all this, like a sheep that is silent before its shearers, so He did not open His mouth.

In a former pastorate I knew a man who had lived in the West, up in the high plains. He was familiar with sheep raising, and I’ve never forgotten one of his descriptions.

When he shears the wool from the sheep, the shearer wants to take a full pelt, without cutting into it, he said. "But when you shear, you have a fight on your hands. You have to set the sheep on its haunches and then start with the belly and work around the sides. What you have on your hands is just one long wrestling match. It takes several people to get the job done.

But you know something? he added (and this was the amazing