Jesus the King: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God

by Timothy J. Keller

inevitable demise of his human body? No.

Sometimes you don’t just know about God’s love but in your heart you actually hear God saying, “You’re my daughter, you’re my son, I love you. I would go to infinite cost and infinite depths not to lose you—and I have.”

You have to repent of how you’ve been using your good things.”

When Jesus called this young man to give up his money, the man started to grieve, because money was for him what the Father was for Jesus. It was the center of his identity. To lose his money would have been to lose himself—to lose what little sense he had of having covered the stain.

Jesus began to experience the spiritual, cosmic, infinite disintegration that would happen when he became separated from his Father on the cross. Jesus began to experience merely a foretaste of that, and he staggered.

Your senses of love and justice are activated together, not in opposition to each other. If you see people destroying themselves or destroying other people and you don’t get mad, it’s because you don’t care.

So it makes no sense to say, “I don’t want a wrathful God, I want a loving God.” If God is loving and good, he must be angry at evil—angry enough to do something about it.

Jesus doesn’t deny his emotions, and he doesn’t avoid the suffering. He loves into the suffering. In the midst of his suffering, he obeys for the love of the Father—and for the love of us.