Never Alone

When I think about the first coming of our Lord over 2000, there are several mental images that project across my mind. I imagine the courts of Heaven where the Father, the Son and the Spirit eternally existed in eternity past in perfect harmony and community. (Just thinking about that blows my mind!). As that first coming of Jesus appears, I see my Savior leaving His heaven home--leaving the eternal fellowship of the triune God--leaving the eternal comfort, joy and peace of a sin-free environment. He leaves all alone and the next image to flash up in my mind’s eye is a cradle in Bethlehem. O wait! There’s something off about this cradle: it’s a smelly cow trough. The Creator of the universe is enwrapped in human flesh—God with us! There He is in a cold cave sleeping where the cows come to eat and do other things! The God-man all alone in a manger—the story of His life: “rejected of man...a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

Then the scene changes again to a cruel Roman cross. After living a sinless life, loving everyone, healing many and having compassion on every crowd he ever met, he endures the searing pain of a cruel cross. As Christians we know our Savior “was born to die!” It is the awesome yet costly good of the “good news!” There our Lord is dying all alone. “My God, my God why have you forsaken Me,” haunts the corridors of my mind. However, the images of our Lord’s first coming do not end with the searing pain of a cruel cross! My mind fast-forwards through the triumph of the empty tomb to the end of our Lord’s first coming.

The final image that becomes wonderfully clear when I think about the first coming, is the courts of heaven again. Our victorious risen Lord is not living there all alone! No! He is there at the right hand of the Father and there are millions and millions of people dressed in fine wedding clothes—white and clean! And I hear, “Welcome home, come see the place I’ve prepared for you!” To those who believe, He has promised a place with Him as His bride

in the Father’s house. “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:2-6, ESV). Did you catch that? He is coming again! Are you ready?

I hope you have answered His invitation to become His bride by trusting Him for forgiveness of sin and eternal life: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son that whoever believes in Him will not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

He left the courts of heaven alone, slept in a smelly cow cradle alone, suffered the searing pain of a cruel cross alone, so that He could spend forever with His bride, the church, in the courts of heaven, never alone!

Dr. David Ley is the President of Alaska Bible College.