It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun's light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit! And having said this he breathed his last. - Luke 23:44-46
These are the last words of Jesus from the cross. In His first words, he addressed God as His Father, and now, in His last words, He addresses Him once again as Father. His words have a sense of peaceful surrender and trust in His Father to do what He knows to be best for Him and all of those He loves. He has finished the work His Father had sent Him to do in His life and His death. As the familiar Easter Hymn says: Loves redeeming work is done...Hallelujah. Now, Jesus teaches us with His last breath the way that we should live our lives. He lived and died with profound surrender and trust in the love and faithfulness of His Heavenly Father.
It is significant that Jesus says these words while there is still darkness over the whole land. It is pretty easy to trust in God’s love and faithfulness when it is 72 and sunny. When we are healthy, happy, and seemingly carefree, the words ‘God is good all the time, all the time God is good’ seem to roll off our tongues. But what about when the lights go out? When tragedy, sickness, terror, or anything else that might come into our lives says to us, “You are not in control of anything, and the world in which you live is scary.” Those are the times when these words of Jesus instruct us on how to overcome our fear and confusion and walk through those times by trusting in a faithful God. When Jesus says these words, He is teaching us that if we are children of God through faith in Christ, God is our Father and always with us. He is sovereign over every aspect of our lives and everything that might come into them. We learn from His example that the only safe and restful place for Him and us is in the hands of a loving and faithful Father.
Jesus’ final words are from Psalm 31. As you read the words of this Psalm, notice how saturated David is with the presence of God, both before and after this statement.
Psalm 31:3-5 For you are my rock and my fortress, and for your name’s sake you lead me and guide me; 4 you take me out of the net they have hidden for me, for you are my refuge. 5 Into your hand I commit my spirit; you have redeemed me, O LORD, faithful God.
He refers to God seven times by a personal pronoun and twice by the name that God has reserved for those who know Him deeply and personally. This is the name that only the bride can call her husband. David can rest secure because he is in a deeply committed relationship with his God. Only once does He mention the trouble in which he found himself. We don't know what the trouble actually is. In the next couple of verses, we read that it was an affliction and that it caused distress to his soul. We don’t know the what, and David doesn't know the why. So many things come into our lives that we can’t find any logical reason for. One writer has said, “God has us on a ‘need-to-know basis,’ and there is much it seems that we don't need to know.” This is simply a modern paraphrase of Deuteronomy 29:29: “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever…” David and Jesus could commit their lives to their loving and faithful heavenly Father in the darkness of the “secret things” because they had lived their lives in an awareness of the “things revealed.” If you read Psalm 23, you see that David does the same thing that he did in Psalm 31. He refers to God as ‘He’ for the first half of the Psalm. Then, when he finds himself in the valley of the shadow of death, David changes the pronoun from ‘He’ to ‘You.’ He is saying that God is never closer to us than when we are in the darkness. But we initially learn to trust Him when we are in the green pastures and beside the still waters.
As you read this meditation, you may be in the greenest pastures you’ve ever experienced. You may be in the middle of a night so long and dark that it seems as if it will never end. No matter which set of circumstances describes you or somewhere in between, Jesus' last words can assure you that He is faithful, He is with you, He loves you, and the only way to find rest is to commit your life into His Hands.
When I was going through a profoundly dark season of my life, there was a chorus of a song that was really helpful and encouraged me through many a dark night. It reminded me that I could trust Him in the valley because of who He is, not because of my ever-changing circumstances or my often weak responses to those circumstances. It also encouraged me to not doubt in the darkness what I had come to know and believe in the daylight. I would like to share them with you.
I will praise you on the mountain, And I will praise you when the mountain is in my way
You're the summit where my feet are, So I will praise You in the valleys all the same
No less God within the shadows, No less faithful when the night leads me astray
You're the heaven where my heart is, In the highlands and the heartache all the same.
As we approach what is referred to as Holy Week, in which we observe Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, the pause of Saturday, and the resurrection of our Savior from the grave on Easter morning, we can commit our spirit to a Faithful Father who is the same in our heartaches as He is in the highlands. Because Jesus suffered for us in the darkness, we can know for sure that He is with us, He loves us, and that joy will come in the morning. Yes, there will be a morning; a brighter and more glorious morning than anything imaginable. These are the things He has revealed to us, the things we need to know. C.S Lewis expresses it so well in the last lines of the Chronicle of Narnia: "All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before."