A
Poem to God
6/29/2015
“Sometimes I guess there
just aren’t enough rocks” ---Forrest Gump
1.
I remember standing there at the cross. The place was
called Golgotha. In Aramaic it means, “The place of the skull”. Jesus was on
the cross, one among three, with him in the middle. We were just outside of the
city of Jerusalem. I’m convinced that murder was not allowed within the temple
gates. Yet here I was not only witnessing it, but endorsing it.
How could the man who raised others from the dead, healed
people from their sicknesses, remove demons from inside of people, talk so
plainly about the mysteries of God and heaven, allow himself to be publicly
ridiculed, scorned, mocked, beaten and killed? I had angst against this so
called savior of the world. My angst was not so much because of his failure to
come down from his cross, but because I saw him as God’s representative, as if
it was God himself.
I have questions for you, my Lord. Why does God allow bad
things to happen in the world? Why do you allow me to witness the ones I love
to suffer? Don’t you love them too? And have you failed at your job so much
that you even allowed your son, this sinless man, to suffer an excruciating
death, and yet you do not rescue him?
I look around just before the sky becomes blackened and
before the earth begins to shake. I see the disciple, John, the one you loved.
I see the Roman guards dividing your clothes to take home as souvenirs once you
breathe your last. I see all the woman who traveled with this man, Mary
Magdalen, a woman whom Jesus healed from a lifetime of bleeding, a man who was
healed of leprosy. His own mother is there. Many people are horrified at the
brutal look of this man on the cross. His flesh has been torn to shreds. He is
hardly recognizable. No one esteems him but only shakes their head at him. A
few of them even spit at him.
Where are the angels? Has heaven held them back so as not
to fight a cosmic battle against the enemies of God, just like there was a war
in heaven when the devil took his stand against God? Where is Judas? Is he not
here to enjoy the fruits of his betrayal? He cannot even face up to the
innocent blood that he condemned. Maybe he himself is hanging from a tree while
his insides burst forth as a sign that there lies the man who betrayed all of
creation.
And what am I to do? If God would fail to rescue his own
child, how can I ever count on him to rescue me in my time of need? Will life
stop its wave of suffering intended for me? Will life have mercy and say “I
will never again harm you!” I hardly think that I can make it down this hill
and back into the city with no less than a scorpion striking the back of my
heel. Life kills me little by little every waking day. I must fight just to
stay alive, yet this so called author of life is beaten, bent and bleeding all
over this cross. I’ve had enough.
Once the Roman soldiers pierced his side, I saw the blood
flow out of his side. I would be like the criminal next to him who condemned
him for not taking his rightful place on a throne and rescuing us all. But my
actions were different in that I began throwing rocks at him from a distance. I
was up the hill from where he hung. The closest I got to hitting him was when I
caused a pebble to strike the lower beam of the bloody cross. In my heart I
told him and I told his God to go to hell. It was not long after that when God
would take me with him to hell to witness the bigger plan that was happening,
in which I was blinded from seeing because of the sorrow in my own heart.
Immediately after my cosmic temper tantrum, I heard the
man who had the sign above his head that read, this is the king of the Jews,
breathe his last and exclaim in a loud voice, “It is finished.” I would learn
later that inside the temple, the purple curtain that guarded the most holy of
holies was ripped and torn in two. There was a huge earthquake. The sky turned
black as if it was midnight and it was still in the afternoon. Many graves at the
graveyard were opened up and the bodies of many holy men were walking around
the city. All of a sudden they would later vanish after many people would hear
them praising God.
2.
I was now fearful. I had just sent insults to a God who
was creating such a stir from the heavens upon the earth. I felt as if my own
soul were vibrating in fear, excitement, and terror as well. I looked over at
the body of Christ, with his head hanging limp towards his now unrising and
uninflating chest. All creation was telling my soul that he was not dead. In
fact he was more alive than anything that can be called alive can boast; as if
to say he is super-alive. I now feared for my life. Did Jesus see me throw
those rocks at him? I fell to my knees. I knew that God would surely have my
head for this. I remember hearing the stories of demons screaming at Jesus,
“have you come to torture us before God’s appointed time?” If the fallen angels
were that fearful of him, how can I, a fallen man, be so foolish as to not fear
for my very life when I put my thumb up against god.
At that moment, God repaid me for my “go to hell”
request. He took me with him. In hell there is a chasm. A chasm is sort of a
wall or a prison that keeps one thing from another. Hell at that time was
divided into two parts. Until Christ could pay for our sins, no one was allowed
into heaven to be before the holy presence of God. God could not look upon sin
without destroying it. So God kept the godly in the good part of hell, while he
kept the demons and the sons of wickedness in the other part of hell. The
demons hated the spirits of the men that they were captive with. So in this
part of hell there was a tearing apart of the spirits. The demons were at a
constant war with fallen men in this part of hell. On the other side of the
chasm were those who trusted and believed in God before they were to ever
witness the promise of Christ.
Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were there. Samson was there.
Even the ancient Adam and Eve were there. They had long lived out the fall in
their bodies and their spirits as they experienced the death of their
relationship with God, after the fall of man. The prophets were there; men who
were not without sin and some of them had tons of sins, but these spirits were
the spirits of those who through all their sin, still trusted and loved God,
and awaited their rescue. Jonah was there. He was the prophet who spent three
days and three nights inside the belly of a fish for running from God when God
told him to preach to the God’s enemies. King David was there. He knew that
even through all the power and prestige that God had given him, one much
greater than he would come to rule in his earthly throne; a throne that would
one day encompass the whole earth and would never end.
God, in the person of Christ, had a two-fold purpose for
going to hell. He was down there to take the spirits with him to the place that
all saints would now inhabit; heaven itself. He came in on the midnight train
to rescue all these spirits and to put them back into original bliss; that was
lost to Adam. For three days, Christ would rescue the saints and preach to the
demons in hell. You see, just like me, the demons saw the crucifixion of Christ
as the loss for God and the win of evil. But God works in very powerful ways. He
has many jokes. Many times the route that we take to run from our predestined
path is exactly the route that was intended to get us to our destination. God
took me with him to hell to show me his ultimate plan, and to show the demons
that their days were numbered. The crucifixion was exactly what it took to mend
the broken relationship between god and men, all the while tearing the curtain
in the temple to show that we were reunited with our creator.
3.
Now I don’t know what happened to my body while my spirit
was not just with the LORD, but was in fact inside the LORD while he was inside
of me as he transported me throughout the realms of the heavenly places. I was
with God for those three days. In fact it was such bliss for me, and so perfect
that I did not want to return. I pleaded with God to allow me to remain with
him. But he told me that I must come back for a little bit. He said there would
be people that he would bring into my life that would need to hear about the
love of God. He told me that he would give my life the ultimate meaning, for
both my sake and his. And then he told me that I would never die in vain, but
that in my death I would honor God. He told me that I would forget what it was
like to go with God these last three days, but to remember, once the struggle
from life to death is complete, I would immediately be ushered into his
presence from which I would live in perfect bliss for eternity, serving the
King of Kings, and the Lord of Lords, with those whom I loved while on earth.
After that conversation, God reunited my spirit with my
body. I was out in the desert, not far from Jerusalem. When God returned my
spirit, I could see that he had sent angels to protect my body in the absence
of my spirit. I woke up, but did not remember the details of my journey. But I
did remember the lesson of my journey as I traveled with the Son of God. I knew
from then on, the rest of my life was simply a journey of returning to God. But
before that could happen, I needed to see Jesus. I needed to visit him in his
tomb.
I ran for what seemed like a marathon until I got to some
of the crowds in the city. There was uproar about this man named Jesus. It seemed that he was no longer in his tomb.
Some of the woman of the town had discovered that his body was missing. One of
the women even spoke of angles telling her that the man who was in the tomb is
not dead, but indeed risen. I asked where the man’s disciples were. I heard
people talk about a town that they were hiding in, and if I took the road to
Emmaus in search for my LORD. Not all of me forgot the journey, but I knew that
the memory would soon begin to fade until one day I would die and everything
about myself and about God would be known to me. I had to find Jesus.
After running for what seemed like hours, I ran across
two men who were speaking to another man. I recognized the third man as being
Jesus himself. The other men were kept from recognizing, but I recognized my
savior. I went and threw myself at the ground towards him. I said, “LORD,
please let me continue to go with you. I can’t ever live without you or not see
you again” at that moment, Jesus spoke to me. He said, “Son, you can’t hold
onto me like this, for I have not yet returned to my father or my throne. When
I ascend back into heaven, I will send to you and all the church my spirit to
live inside of you. Then you will know that I will never leave you nor forsake
you. Now go to your family and tell them what the LORD has done for you and how
much he loves you.”
With that, Jesus and the two men went on their way. The
two men were kept from understanding the conversation until Jesus would reveal
himself to them as well when they broke the bread at dinner. I would go on
living the rest of my days loving the moments that I physically had with Jesus,
from the time I seen him at the cross, until the time he told me to return
home. I can only barely remember the spiritual journey that he took me on when
he allowed me to witness God rescue his people and take revenge against the
evil powers in the spiritual places.
“Blessings on the King
who comes in the name of the LORD! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest
heaven!”
But some of the Pharisees
(teachers of the law) among the crowd said, “Teacher, rebuke your followers for
saying things like that!”
He replied, “If they keep
quiet, the stones along the road will burst into cheer” ---Luke19; 38-40
The End.
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