St. Giles Evangelical Presbyterian Church

Devotional: September 23-30, by Eric Newman, Elder

“I spread the corner of my garment over you and covered your nakedness. I gave you my solemn oath and entered into a covenant with you, declares the Sovereign LORD, and you became mine.”
Ezekiel 16:7-9

The work of the cross of Christ is deep and full, and we have not fully plumbed its depth or understood its reach. It is sufficient for the sins of all of humanity but its work is also personal to you and me. It is multi-dimensional and capable of saving to the uttermost. It fulfills our debt created by our sin, our personal sin. It also has power to reach deep into our psyche, our being, and it has the power, through the Holy Spirit, to heal, and to cover—to cover our shame, and to bring cure to those areas that are hidden from all but Him.

If you are human, you have experienced shame. I know what is inside you because I know what is inside me. You have memories of things of which you are ashamed. The reminder of those things still has the power to stir a sense of shame from which we would quickly turn our eyes. Some memories have the power to haunt a person for a lifetime. Perhaps they arise from things we have done, or things done to us, or failures so deep and painful, it seems beyond the reach of God Himself to remedy. Shame and humiliation have been the fruit of human failure since Adam first hid himself from God when he became aware of his own nakedness.

One day some years ago the Holy Spirit opened the scriptures to me to see something that I had never seen before or heard taught or discussed, maybe because of its delicate nature. I was not looking for it, but I had the definite sense of the leading and the revelation of God on the matter. On the day of Jesus’ crucifixion, the Roman soldiers divided Jesus’ outer clothes into four shares, one for each of the soldiers. But His undergarment was woven from one piece and if they divided it, it would have been destroyed. So instead they gambled by using lots to decide who would receive the garment. John 19:23-24.

From this description, we understand that mixed with the excruciating physical agony, and the experience of abandonment and aloneness, Jesus’ suffering included deep humiliation and shame. It is a tenet of our faith that He is both God and man, and he suffered as you and I would have suffered in such unimaginable circumstances. He was a good man, and a modest man in a very modest culture. But we understand from these scriptures that, unlike Adam, Jesus nakedness was not covered by God. Indeed the opposite is true. It is even difficult to write about such a subject, because our impulse is to cover His shame and nakedness because it was so powerfully wrong. We are made to understand here that He experienced a great depth of shame and humiliation even as He hung dying, and bleeding and broken and naked.

Finally, the scripture re-states: “So this is what the soldiers did.” And then adds “Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister,” and others. We do not have to extrapolate further.

So what is the application of this to you and me? It is that the humiliation and shame that Jesus experienced belonged to us–to you, to me. The penalty for what you and I have done, and what you and I have experienced, was experienced in full by Him. This means that not only have our sins been forgiven, not only was our death paid, but it is no longer a just result for you to experience the sense of shame that may yet linger. He lived your shame, your humiliation, even as He hung dying and uncovered.

This means that the haunting of shameful memories and deeds, failures so deep that they will not leave, or even shame and humiliation imposed on us by the sins of others, have all been paid. It is not the passage of time that brings such things to nothing, but it is the fact that His righteous suffering also reaches to these places as well. He is the cure. It is the love of God that covers a multitude of sins. 1 Peter 4:8. He is the one that covers our nakedness. He did not come to condemn and to expose. He came to forgive, to cure and to cover.