Awake, O Sword

He...did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all.

(Romans 8:32)

We delight to think of the Christ, whose love was stronger than death and who deemed no suffering too great to undergo for His people.  But what must it have meant to the heart of the Father when His Beloved left His heavenly home!  God is love and nothing is so sensitive as love.  Deity is not emotionless and stoic as represented by the schoolmen of the middle ages.  The Father deeply felt the departure of His Son; it was a real sacrifice on His part.

Weigh well the solemn fact underlying the promise that God "did not spare His own Son"!  Expressive, profound, melting words!  Knowing as only He could, all that redemption involved: the Law, rigid and unbending, insisting on perfect obedience and demanding death for transgressors; Justice, stern and inexorable, requiring full satisfaction, refusing to "clear the guilty."  Yet God did not withhold the only suitable sacrifice.

Though He knew full well the humiliation and shame of Bethlehem's manger, the ingratitude of men, the lack of any place to lay His head, the hatred and opposition of the ungodly, the malice and loathing of Satan -- yet He did not hesitate.  God did not relax any of the holy requirements of His throne nor moderate one particle of the awful curse.  No, He "did not spare His own Son."  The last cent must be levied; the final dregs in the cup of wrath must be drained.  Even when His Beloved cried from the garden, "If it is possible, may this cup be taken from Me" (Matthew 26:39), God did not spare Him.  Even when vile hands nailed Him to the tree, God cried, "Awake, O sword, against my shepherd, against the man who is close to me!  Strike the shepherd" (Zechariah 13:7).

-- A.W. Pink