The world breaks everyone, wrote...
Illustration
"The world breaks everyone," wrote Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell To Arms,
"and afterward many are strong at the broken places." The letter to the Hebrews tells of
someone whom the world broke. His name is Jesus Christ.
We are not alone in this universe, after all. Someone else, the very Son of God, has broken down the doors of this human life of ours, and taken it by storm. This one has interceded himself between us and the dread ogre we most fear -- death itself -- and he has triumphed. As John Calvin teaches, "... in permitting himself to be overcome of death, it was not so as to be engulfed in its abyss but rather to annihilate it, as it must otherwise have annihilated us; he did not allow himself to be so subdued by it as to be crushed by its power; he rather laid it prostrate, when it was impending over us, and exulting over us as already overcome."
Jesus Christ allowed himself to be broken, for the sins of the world. Three days afterward, he showed himself, truly, to be strong at the broken places. Jesus rose from the dead, showing us a life that will never die.
We are not alone in this universe, after all. Someone else, the very Son of God, has broken down the doors of this human life of ours, and taken it by storm. This one has interceded himself between us and the dread ogre we most fear -- death itself -- and he has triumphed. As John Calvin teaches, "... in permitting himself to be overcome of death, it was not so as to be engulfed in its abyss but rather to annihilate it, as it must otherwise have annihilated us; he did not allow himself to be so subdued by it as to be crushed by its power; he rather laid it prostrate, when it was impending over us, and exulting over us as already overcome."
Jesus Christ allowed himself to be broken, for the sins of the world. Three days afterward, he showed himself, truly, to be strong at the broken places. Jesus rose from the dead, showing us a life that will never die.
