“Our blessed Lord promised His people: ‘I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto Myself; that where I am, there ye may be also’ (John 14:2-3). We know the way by which He went to the Father. He might have ascended at any time during His peerless and holy life to His home in heaven, but it would have been alone. In the language of the Hebrew servant who refused to go out free, He said, ‘I love my wife, and my children, I will not go out free’ (Ex. 21:5). So He was, as it were, pierced to the door-post, in the devotedness of His love. In other words, He ascended to the Father by way of Calvary; it was through death that He would go--crucified, and ‘raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father’ (Rom. 6:4). Thus He laid the eternal and righteous foundation of that home where sin can never enter, and which judgment will never shake. ... Oh, how much was involved in those two brief words, ‘I go.’ They meant Gethsemane and Calvary--the judgment of God first, and then the glory. Thus the place was prepared. He who was cut off from the presence of God for our sins has won the title to enter eternal glory and claim it for every sinner who trusts in Him” (Samuel Ridout, Lectures on the Tabernacle). Comments are closed.
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February 2020
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