5.1

The appointed hour

History measures Jesus’ life in days and describes Him by His recorded words and actions, but there is no measure or description for His life in God’s Sabbath, God’s time on earth that proceeds in His timeless and sacred rest. The world has never witnessed outside of Jesus’ singular life such a violation of the temporal by the eternal. God’s greatest work on earth was done by Jesus, in His abiding rest. It is one of God’s profound paradoxes that when we rest in Him, our life is at its fullest. The substance of God’s rest is not abstaining from work but is His life that is free to thrive. The Sabbath Jesus taught and lived is the Spirit of God holding and transforming in the holiness of God’s rest and in the rest of God’s holiness. The Lord of the Sabbath is with God as both Son of Man and Son of God. Born of a woman, Jesus fulfilled God’s will by entrusting His life to God’s trustworthiness. As Son of God, He comes to us from His eternal place with His Father to confirm, reveal and fulfill God’s will, to reconcile the irreconcilable in God’s holy rest. Jesus lived and fulfilled the Sabbath in history so that it is complete in eternity, this seventh and final day that has no end

In Jesus, the world was able to see the inner workings of God’s heart not only for His Son but also for His creation: HIs encompassing love; His constant faithfulness; HIs understanding in truth; giving and accepting without measure. The purpose of God’s heart will be done, regardless of the opposition. It was evident through Jesus’ temptations, life and ministry that nothing could detour or undo God’s purpose for Him. Jesus was being held by a clear and fixed mission that He referred to as His hour. God gave Jesus a certain hour when He would give HIs life over to both God and us, in death. At His hour of death, Jesus would be cut off by His Father and become nothing (Daniel 9:26). Who can believe such a report (Isaiah 53:1)? Who can fathom a love that perseveres beyond death?

Many of Jesus’ disciples believed He came from God but no one understood God’s full purpose for sending Him, the same purpose that motivated Jesus’ life. From the beginning of His ministry, Jesus spoke of His hour that was ever pursuing Him and drawing Him to meet it. It shaped His identity and relationships with God and others. God had sent Him to accomplish this hour, and He was both anxiously awaiting it and intensely dreading it. He spoke of it in ways that were mysterious and confusing. At His first miracle, when Jesus’ mother told Him the wine ran out at the wedding they were attending, He answered her, “Woman, what does that have to do with us? My hour has not yet come” (John 2:4). What does an hour have to do with wine running out? Was He expressing something of this hour’s living tension between His present and future, His temporal and eternal? When the Jewish leaders wanted to seize Him, He was able to escape them because “His hour had not yet come” (John 7:30; 8:20). How can some future hour rescue Him from capture now? It seems that God was protecting and keeping His life for that hour when He would fulfill His purpose for His Son, the same purpose Jesus took as His own: to sacrifice His life for the sake of God’s love

The eternal quality of this hour was always with Jesus. Past, present and future converged in a super-dimensional, non-linear way that penetrated history with God’s eternal intentions. “An hour is coming, and has come. . .” (John 16:32), Jesus said of that time when He would complete God’s will that has been before time began. From before earth’s founding, God intended a love relationship with His creation. He chose a certain hour in history that would pass as quickly as it came but would be forever sealed in eternity, because at that hour God ripped open the heavens to reach us. That hour fell on the last Passover Jesus kept with His disciples when one of them, Judas Iscariot, betrayed Him to the authorities