God entered our human frailty
and made Himself vulnerable to our deepest evil.
Jesus, innocent of any offense against us
opened His arms and let us slaughter Him
with all the vicious disdain
of our primal imagination.

This is sin . . . it lies in the buried core of every heart . . .
the craving to murder God.

We say, as though it were merely His duty,
and only His idea,
- having nothing to do with us -
"He died on the cross to pay for our sins."

"How noble of Him. What price He paid!"
Yet that is not the full story.
It is about Him, but also, me.

The story is personal, grim and accusing . . . .
"I was the one who murdered God
because I secretly have hated Him.
I hate Him for no other
offense than this . . .
He is God and I am not."

The Jews killed Jesus.
The religious killed Jesus.

Roman soldiers killed Jesus.
It was "they" who did it,
but certainly not I.

No, give me sufficient pressure to the place
of my fondest rights,
give me enough fierce suffering,
and I would come out with nail and whip
to tear my own Creator to shreds
by the most agonizing death I could effect.

Every person ever born could murder with relish,
the God who dreamed their being -
for that very reason! 

I am the one who mocks Him and dares
Him to defy my killing.
I am one who takes the last garments from
His back to gamble with my soul.

I am the one who killed Him. 

"But I wasn't there! Prove I would have killed Him.
It's not real to me."

To hate any person, made by God for God,
is to hate Him.
Including my "self."
(1 John 4:20)

Had the high priest not ordered it,
I would have.
Had the soldiers failed to beat Him,
I would have.
Had the centurion not driven the nails,
I would have.

Jesus knew the thoughts of the Pharisee hypocrites.
"You say, 'If we had been living in the days of our fathers,
we would not have been partners with them in shedding
the blood of the prophets.'

"So you testify against yourselves, that you are
the sons of those who murdered the prophets.
Fill up then, the measure of the guilt of your fathers.

"You serpents, you brood of vipers,
how will you escape the sentence of hell?"
Matthew 23:30-33 NASB

This is iniquity.
To kill God and believe I am innocent.

"If we Christians had lived in Jesus' day we would
not have killed Him. 'They' did it.
We are above the
brutal murder of God's Son.
Far too civilized.
Much too knowledgeable now."

By that secret patronizing, we give proof
that we are the same vicious murderers
who ripped His flesh from His bones,
and loved His bloody agony.
We too, by false innocence,
"testify against ourselves"
by the blindness to our guilt, by
our superiority to 'those-lesser-than-us'
who killed our Blessed Savior.

There dwells in every descendant of Adam,
the ambitious lust to be God and
a madness of hatred because He is!

We are - by very nature - killers. Cains are we.
We murder by words, by deeds, by thoughts
that boil and spit
in the angry cauldron of
a primitive heart.
"The heart is more deceitful than all else
and is desperately sick; Who can
understand it?" Jer. 17:9 NASB

The Bible declares God's knowledge by the Holy Spirit:
"To hate is to murder."
"To covet is to murder." James 4:2 

Hatred and greed prove we are simply assassins
without a corpse to prove it.
A killer in the making
by having descended from myriad murderers.

 
We murder reputations, we kill relationships,
we annihilate confidence, we crush individuality,
we quench life and terminate the move of God.
We curse with thoughts and
kill with words. We plot to destroy.
Confident fools, certain we are right
and even righteous in our killing . . .
just as "they."
"Doing God a service."

The ancients killed the prophets because they
were the closest link to the God who kept interrupting
their schemes to rule.

To put away the prophet is to kill the Voice of God.

But God, who all along knew our murdering ambition,
came in all the innocence of a lamb,
laid Himself sweetly down and let
us cut His throat.
Man could finally do to God what he had before been able
to do only to his brother . . . torture, maim
and execute. 

Really!
Not figuratively, not in effigy!
Actual murder. Unimaginable suffering.

We longed for Him to be in agonized pain,
to reject Him and have Him hurt over it.
And all the vicious attack of humanity
was given to Him . . . contempt, rejection,
societal casting out, berating
mocking, beating,
until the Son of God was so broken,
so battered
His cross could not be borne by
His own bloodied shoulders.

Until He died the absolute death
of humanity's subconscious dream.
 

We rehearse it at Easter on the stage,
in righteous horror as though
we couldn't imagine "their" so hurting Him,
our precious Jesus.

We were not there. At best we could say,
"I was in the crowd."
No.
I held the whip that thrashed Him till
His flesh hung in strips and white bones
saw the sunlight.
My spit ran down His face. "I" pulled out His beard
and mocked His Name.
I nailed huge spikes into His delicate bones.

I did it . . . because I could have.

To us
Sin is just a painful collection of actions and failures,
a list of embarrassments.
Sin is not plural. Sin is singular.
One sin - the personal murder of God.
All others sins tie back to that ONE.
It is the origin and the reason.

"Oh, my God, I killed You,
By my bare hands I tore
You to pieces with willful delight!"

This is the bottom,
the bedrock
of repentance. 

This is sin. The only sin. The root of all sin.
To murder God . . .
 

We blithely annihilate Him . . .
We exalt a mere human to His place
and so disown Him.
We reduce Him to a little baby in a mother's lap
and so renounce the Real Man-King.
We hang Him on a dramatic cross and
leave Him permanently dead.

When we say who He is and
is not, we create Him.
And by that arrogance,
destroy a personal God
by invalidation.

Oh, we have invented many ways to murder God.

We might see that we forsook Him as did all His followers.
We could comprehend that we denied Him, as did Peter.
We might even guess that we would have
screamed for Barabbas.
But to see that "I" was the one who murdered
the Savior I proclaim and serve?
That thought would rarely find us
willing to consider. 

And this is what He forgave,
His own undeserved murder.

Amazing plan:
while He hung dying,
paid the penalty due His killer.

This is what I have been forgiven.
Not merely stealing, lying, coveting and the rest.
These are but symptoms of the Real Sin.

This is sin. To murder God . . .
and of that I am forgiven!
He died being punished for His own murder
and I, the killer, am free.
He, my victim, took my death penalty!

My gratitude spills in endless tears on His
feet, forever gashed with nail holes.

My God, let me love You with
the unfathomable love You
gave me on the Cross
even as my hand was piercing You.

I never knew I was the one who killed You!

Before I understood . . . long before I asked,
this is what You uttered in Your final fading strength,
"Father, forgive them, they do not know
what they are doing."
Luke 12:34

Copyright © 1999 Martha Blaney Kilpatrick