nothing compares

I can't stop thinking about the cross. About Christ dying. When Jesus is talking to his dad in the garden right before he was taken he said "Father glorify me with your own presence with the glory that I had with you before the world existed." I can't even imagine that glory..that deep intimacy...absolute perfection. Where is he sent, though? What is God's response? The cross. Utter seperation. It was a lonlieness, abandonment, a forsakenness we could never possibly experience. They were together before the universe existed. Who was even in more pain, The Father or the Son?

Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani? 

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

And it hit me that all those terrible things God talks about in the Old testement every punishment for their abandonment was met in Christ. Every single one. Judgement was always inevitable. But all judgement was placed on one, in one heart breaking, world changing person's death. In Hosea God says of his people who have cheated on him (which is me as well) he says "I strip her naked and make her like a parched land and kill her with thirst." One of the things recorded in the gospel of John is Jesus whispering "I thirst." I always kind of skimmed past those statements to ones like "I will betroth you to me forever" but the marriage is after the price has been paid and the whoredom has been addressed. Jesus never cheated on Him. But he was judged as the whore for all humanity. Every single consequence of everything all of us we have ever done on that cross, on Christ.

"Only the one who has experienced it can know what the love of Christ is. Once you have experienced it, nothing else in the world will seem more beautiful and desirable."

A close friend asked me during bible study how I could put everything and all of myself into one thing, into Jesus. Its hard a question because you really do have to experience him and have pure holy loved poured on you to abandon every other thing and take after this homeless carpenter and join his ragamuffin group of broken people who strive only to be broken further and follow him where none of us would ever want to go if not for him. There is nothing else and no one else like him. He loves me. He really does. More than I'll ever know or understand or deserve. To exchange all the glory and all the love of God, to abandon his throne first to come and then to die while I was still chasing after every other lover. Nothing compares. This love and this life is really only in him.