The God Who Didn't Leave His Wounds Behind

The Vision of the Lamb ...

There's a striking image in an ancient vision I keep coming back to. It's in Revelation 5:6.

You've got this picture of a lamb standing upright, very much alive, but bearing the marks of having been killed.

Both things at once - alive, mortally wounded ... not healed over, so ... not just about the past.

And the wounds are still there, still visible, still defining Who He is.

Now that vision in the book of Revelation has the Lamb as a picture of Jesus. Risen from the dead, exalted to the highest place in the universe, but carrying the marks, the wounds of the Cross, into eternity.

Why does Jesus still have wounds after His resurrection?

Not as a wound that hasn't healed ... but as an identity that hasn't changed.

And here's why that matters: it means that when Jesus looks at human suffering, at your suffering - at my suffering, He doesn't look from a safe distance.

He carries those wounds.

He knows from the inside what it means to be broken by a world that doesn't care. And He didn't paper over that, He didn't just walk away and leave it behind on His way to Glory.

There's something profound about a God Who enters our pain rather than standing way above it.

And there's something even more profound about that same God rising from the dead, defeating death genuinely, bodily, - undefeatable against life's last enemy, while still bearing the marks of what it cost to bring life in place of death into a world of pain.

His combination of vulnerability and victory is unlike anything else I've ever seen on offer.

It might be worth sitting with that for a bit, as you reacquaint with the Lamb in Mark's account of Him ... it's here to read or listen to in this ...

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