I have entered this door one other time in my life and the experience of entering His sufferings allowed me to see Him in a way that is inexpressible. I don’t remember choosing this door the first time I entered but this time it was a conscience choice. When you get to a place in Christ where you enter into His suffering, you are only experiencing a very small portion of it. This small portion is so overwhelming that you prefer death over the pain of this type of suffering. It is only when it is over, and it seems like it will never end, that you realize how small your portion was and how vast His suffering was. Even in this realization, you realize that you cannot even begin to fathom the depths of His suffering. It is here that you see Him and everything He is, differently. You see that you never really knew Him, you only thought you knew Him. You have a splinter of the cross in your finger and how we beg for it to be removed.
I will, for the sake of understanding, use the physical and the spiritual as means to contrast this earthly life and the place of His sufferings. After the experience of this (spiritual), you come back to the physical and you can only remember a small portion of what you experienced. The little that you remember makes you want more, so you then want to go even deeper in order to bring back more. Not only for your own intimacy and understanding of the Lord but to give it to others. As you continue to do this, the veils that distort our view of Him are removed. When He shows us Himself and our veils are removed, we will remember how we thought we knew Him in the physical and see that we never really knew Him, we just thought we knew Him because we knew some things about Him, which were mostly distorted views due to the many veils we have over our face. The sufferings we encounter, I’m speaking of His sufferings, not the suffering that we bring on ourselves, remove the veils. Our understanding of Him is so small in comparison to who He really is. That is why I can honestly say that the more of Him I see, the more I see that I don’t know Him.
Take for example His Love. We know that God is Love because the scriptures tell us that. The scriptures also give us the characteristics of Love, which most, including myself, fall short of living. We may experience His love in many ways and we have a vague picture of love in our relationships in the physical. We use that vague picture of our experience with His Love as a paradigm for what Love is. But when we see Him and experience who He really is and what Love really is, then we will look back and say, I never knew Love at all. I only thought I knew Love. This Love is revealed through His sufferings. He suffered because of His great Love. When we enter into His suffering, we get a greater experience of His Love.
For any of this to take place, you must have ears to hear and eyes that see. When you have ears to hear and eyes that see, you will find that you are just touching the hem of His garment. Even then, healing takes place. Try to imagine what will happen when you see Him face to face. No matter how glorious you imagine it is; it will be so small in comparison to the reality.
Let’s look closer at this act of touching the hem of His garment. In Exodus 28:31 when making the garments for Aaron, the first high priest, God instructed them to make the robe of the ephod entirely of blue cloth. The Hebrew word for entirely is kaliyl, which means perfect and is the root of the word kalal, which means make complete. This robe was to be made in one piece and not to be torn. In Numbers 15:37-41 God told Moses to instruct the males through the generations to wear blue tassels on the edge of their garments to remind them to obey Gods commandments. We can safely assume that Jesus had these blue tassels on His garment. Jesus is our true High Priest that sacrificed Himself for us. He and His sacrifice are perfect and complete. When He walked the earth as a man, He came to fulfill the law. When the woman with the issue of blood came to Him and tried to reach Him through the crowd she was in violation of the law. In Malachi 4:2 we read “But for you who fear (revere) my name, the sun of righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings”. The Hebrew word for wings is kanaph, which means an edge or extremity, specifically of a garment or bed or clothing.
This woman understood what the tassels represented, she understood the meaning that there was healing in His kanaph. She knew that if she just touched the hem of His garment that there was healing in it. She also knew she was violating the law by being there and by touching Him. But He came to fulfill the law which He did as she was healed by her faith (Matt.9:20-22). Daughter, your faith has healed you. This is the only place in scripture where Jesus calls someone daughter. Jesus, the object of her faith, healed her. She acted on her belief by reaching out to touch His garment.
A side note since we are discussing clothing. After Jesus was beaten, almost to death, the soldiers put a purple robe on Him (John 19:2). The color purple is made from combining red and blue. The first man created was Adam, which means red earth in Hebrew. Jesus, our true High Priest, complete and perfect, signified in the blue of the high priests garment. Blue and red come together in the God-man Jesus. Every little detail shows the manifold wisdom of God. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of these types of details all through scripture that all point to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. We must learn a valuable lesson from this woman. Her faith drove her to violate the letter of the law in order to attain the Spirit of the law. The object of her faith made her well. If your faith drives you to just touch the hem of His garment, He will turn to you and you will see Him face to face.
You can see a similar incident in Matt. 8:1-4 with the man with leprosy. He also violated the law and Jesus violated the law by touching him. The law said he was unclean because the law examines and finds guilt. The fulfillment of the law finds compassion through love and forgives and heals. You see the Lords compassion by touching the man. He could have just spoken a word and he would have been healed but the Lord touched Him because the law said not to touch him and Jesus, knowing that the man hasn’t felt the touch of compassion from another person in a very long time, then touches him. Notice that the leper said to Jesus “if you are willing, you can make me clean”. The Hebrew word for willing is hadah, which means to be delighted or make glad. Jesus answered saying “I am willing, be clean”, or I am delighted to make you clean. It made Him glad to heal him. Jesus then told the man to go to the priests to make an offering as a testimony to them. There has never been a healing of leprosy through the law, no matter how many animal sacrifices there have been. This was a testimony to them that Grace was here and the law cannot overcome Grace. You have been given the Grace to touch the hem of His garment.
Let’s look at the parable of the sower and the seed in Luke 8:4-21. After telling the parable, our Lord said, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.” Then He told His disciples (believers) “to you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom. But to the rest (unbelievers) they are just parables in order that seeing, they don’t see and hearing, they don’t understand”. He who has ears let him hear.
When you heard that, did you cry out to the Lord to give you ears to hear? If you did, then as a believer you know that you can only have ears to hear if He gives them to you, and that, only because you asked (humility). The others thought they already had ears to hear (pride). When you hear the parable with ears that hear, you see that the seed in the good soil bears fruit…with perseverance. A seed must die in order to bear fruit. When you enter this door of His sufferings, you must be prepared to die. The way that you get perseverance is when you rejoice in your trials because it brings about perseverance. So if you want to bear fruit, the starting place is to die and to rejoice in your trials. In any true trial allowed by God, rejoicing will lead you to the door of entering His sufferings, which will lead you closer to Him. Now because it brings you closer to Him, you rejoice in the trial, which produces the perseverance that is needed to continue to go deeper. When this circle takes place, you will find that you have proven character which produces Hope and Hope does not disappoint because it is Christ in you, our Hope of glory. We are then transformed from glory to glory by seeing the Lord with an unveiled face and it is inside the door of the sufferings of Christ that the veils are removed, one by one.
It is the same principle with the parable of the lamp. You cannot be a believer and not shed light. The more light you give, the more you will get. Those who think they have light but do not shed light, even what they think they have will be taken away. If you do things in darkness after you have been given light, even that light will be taken away. I speak from experience.
When it is taken away and you experience what you have lost, it should drive you back to the Light in a much deeper way. If you learn to rejoice in your loss it is then that you will find yourself at the door to enter in to His sufferings. If you do not learn to rejoice in your loss, you will have to continue to learn the same lesson over and over again until you take the steps backwards to the beginning and learn it. If you do, you will start the circle of going deeper. You will find that the secret of never thirsting is ever thirsting. This is why we must do everything in the light. To walk in the light as He Himself is in the Light. Confess your sins to Him and to one another. This brings you into the Light and reveals the darkness that was in you. When you do this, He is faithful to forgive our sins and this should cause you to want to go even deeper. With every experience of our Lord’s faithfulness, grace and mercy towards us, it should make us want to go deeper.
Those who have been forgiven or delivered from much will usually go deeper than most. There are many examples in scripture such as Mary Magdalene, the man possessed by legion, Saul who became the apostle Paul to name a few. Those that have been forgiven much have a larger capacity and a deeper understanding of the redemptive power of our God. They have been delivered from so much that they have that much more to be filled with the Living God. The pain of what they were, contrasted by the great Love and redemption of our Lord drives them deeper and deeper. Because of this they are given more light and a greater capacity to love.
The man delivered from legion wanted to go with Jesus but the Lord told him to stay in order to proclaim the great things God has done for him. He was obedient and went through the region of Decapolis telling his story, (Mark 5:19-20). But the people wanted Jesus to leave (Mark 5:17). Later when Jesus came back to the region of Decapolis (Mark 7:31), we see a multitude of people and then a great multitude of people (Mark 7:33 and 8:1). I would suggest that the man delivered from legion was given much light because he was delivered from much. The multitudes received that light. Isn’t this the reason Jesus told him to stay?
Are you not moved to tears when you see the great love and devotion of Mary Magdalene for our Lord? So much so that the Lord appeared to her first, after His resurrection (Mark 16:9). Her great love for Him was to the same degree of her great deliverance. She was literally clinging to Him in her joy of seeing Him again. She wasn’t going to let Him go. Picture a father who is leaving for work and his little daughter is clinging to him saying “daddy, don’t go, stay here with me”.
Let’s look at Saul who became Paul. Saul literally hunted down believers in Christ. He had them beaten, put in prison and even had some killed. After the Lord revealed himself to Paul and he was forgiven much, Paul went deeper. He spent many years going deeper and deeper until the Lord could work through His chosen vessel. Paul became a light to the same people he once persecuted. Now think about it. If you were beaten, or imprisoned by Paul or maybe your father or husband was killed because of Paul, how would you view Paul? Many could not receive from him. Many probably mocked him and refused to believe that he even knew God. I’m sure that wherever Paul went, there were some that opposed him due to this. Could this be the thorn in the flesh that Paul talked about? The pain that Paul caused them prevented them from receiving the gift that God had for them.
Now there were also those who had the same or similar pain inflicted upon them by Paul, as did the others. They chose to forgive Paul. They asked for ears to hear and eyes to see. They saw the redemptive power of God and heard His words through the very one that inflicted them with their greatest pain. They chose to receive the gift that God had for them even though the vessel used to disseminate that gift was not what they expected. In doing so, they entered into a very small portion of His suffering and the cycle of their growth begins as the veils are removed.
Beloved, don’t be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you; but to the degree that you share the sufferings of Christ, keep on rejoicing; so that also at the revelation of His glory, you may rejoice with exultation (1Peter 4:12-13).
That I may know Him and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death (Philippians 3:10)
Dana Leonardi
July 2011
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