Chapter 7 - Christ – His life and His work

- 36 - 7. 4 Christ’s suffering in the light of its meaning for the salvation In the fulfillment of their mission, all of God’s envoys have suffered greatly at the hands of mankind. Every one led a life of hardship. They were the vessels from which radiated God’s light and truth, but mankind, in the bonds of darkness, could not endure the light, as it was too bright for eyes afflicted with sin. People turned away from the light and sought to destroy the human vessels that served as lamps for the light of God. So, it has always been. So, it is today, and so it will remain as long as there are human eyes, sore with sin, that ache when the light of the truth is turned upon them. The Evil Powers, and all mortals enslaved by them, hate this light and its bearers, and do their utmost to achieve their destruction. How terrible, then, must the efforts have been on the part of Evil to break the power of the greatest Light-Bearer who ever came upon earth! How bitter the road of suffering that Christ had to travel! His inner sufferings at the hands of Evil were hidden from human eyes, and therefore nothing is said about them in the Bible beyond the very shallow account of his temptation in the wilderness. Yet the onslaughts made upon him there by Satan were so savage that all the earlier Divine emissaries would have abandoned God, if He had allowed the Powers of Hell to proceed against them with the same vigour with which He permitted them to assail Christ. Moreover, the physical sufferings that Jesus had to undergo until his last breath on the Cross were such that his predecessors could not have held out against them, especially as they had to be endured in addition to the simultaneous torment of his soul. It is true that for Christ his sufferings had a substantially higher significance than for any other of the Divine prophets. For them, the end of their life on earth meant that their tasks had been fulfilled, if they had remained true to God. For Christ, however, the end of his earthly life marked the fulfillment of only a portion of his mission. The more important part was to be completed after his death: gaining victory as a spirit over the Prince of Darkness. His Crucifixion was only a precondition to that victory – not, indeed, the Crucifixion in itself, but his enduring it without faltering in his loyalty to God. Christ might, indeed, while yet alive upon the Cross, have lost faith in God at the last moment, and fallen victim to the enemy. Had he done so, he would have died upon the Cross nevertheless, but defeated by Satan and apostate to God. Until that moment, he had stood upon the defensive against the terrific hail of missiles that hell launched upon him. • Had he yielded; all would have been lost. The attempt at Redemption would have failed, and Christ would have been a prisoner of the Prince of Darkness. If, on the other hand, Christ as a human being could hold out against the most dreadful anguish of soul and body inflicted on him by the infernal powers, the moment of his death on earth would mark the beginning of the second part of the battle of Redemption. He, who as a mortal had stood on the defensive against the powers of hell, now advanced, as a spirit, to attack them to make his victory over them complete. To wage the decisive battle, he descended into hell.

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