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Cross Words: An Emotional Farewell
This past week my wife and I took the last of our children to college.  Our house now stands empty of youth. I had been planning for this day since before they were born and yet I still wasn’t ready. They are a part of me and I of them so it doesn’t feel quite right to be separated. I honestly can’t remember life without them but now I must experience it.
Into a small crevice of the Lord’s mind have I entered this week, wondering what emotions and feelings He must have been experiencing on the eve of the separation between Himself and His Son. Without trying to explain the complexities of the Trinity and eternity, the two had never known anything but complete unity.  So what must have been racing through the Father’s mind?
Regret surely pierced His emotional being. If only He had resisted His thoughts to create man in the first place, there would never have been a need to send a Savior. Just before God would send the flood in Noah’s day, the Bible says that He “grieved” for having created man.  Was that grief caused in part by foreseeing the pain and suffering that the Son would eventually endure on the cross?
Was God anxious? Not in the sense of worry but in anticipation.  Of course time is irrelevant to God, He knows no concept of deadlines and calendars.  Yet when He had first instituted the plan of salvation did some type of paternal clock begin to click off time before the day when the Son was for the first time removed from His presence?
Certainly the Father experienced pain. Just the thought of being separated from a child causes the heart to hurt. Added with the foreknowledge of the pain that the Son would ultimately suffer at the hands of His crucifiers, it makes one wonder how He ever allowed Him out of His presence.
Love was in the Father’s thoughts. Of that I’m certain.  Not love for the Son, that of course is a given, but rather love for us. No other emotion could have compelled Him to experience all the others. For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16).

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