The Joy Set Before Him
Part 8
“Looking to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:2
I want you to read that verse one more time. Slowly. Because buried inside it is something so staggering that if you really let it hit you it will change the way you see everything. Jesus endured the cross FOR THE JOY that was set before Him. Not in spite of joy. Not waiting for joy on the other side. FOR joy. Joy was the fuel that carried Him through the worst suffering any human being has ever endured. The question is – what was that joy? What could possibly be so joyful that it made the cross endurable?
What the Cross Actually Cost
We talk about the cross so often that I think we have lost the weight of it. We wear it around our necks. We hang it on our walls. We sing about it on Sundays. We put it on bumper stickers next to “My other car is a chariot of fire.” And all of that is fine. But I wonder sometimes if we have domesticated the most brutal event in human history. If we have turned the thing that split history in two into background decoration.
Crucifixion was designed by the Roman Empire to be the most painful and humiliating form of execution ever devised. The word excruciating literally comes from the Latin excruciatus – “out of the cross.” The Romans invented a word for the kind of pain that crucifixion produced because no existing word was sufficient. That is what Jesus walked into. Willingly. Knowing exactly what was coming.
But the physical pain was not the worst of it. Isaiah 53:6 says “The Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” Every sin. Every act of rebellion. Every dark thought and selfish motive and broken promise from every human being who ever lived or ever would live – all of it was placed on one man. Paul says it even more starkly in 2 Corinthians 5:21: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” He did not just CARRY our sin. He BECAME sin. The one being in all of existence who had never known sin was made to BE it. And in that moment the Father turned His face away. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). For the first time in all of eternity the Son experienced separation from the Father. That was the true cost of the cross. Not the nails. Not the thorns. The separation.
And Jesus endured ALL of that – the physical agony, the shame, the sin, the separation – for JOY.
So What Was the Joy?
Here is where it gets personal. Here is where it gets so personal that if you really take it in you may need to put this down and sit quietly for a while.
The joy set before Jesus was YOU.
Not heaven. He had heaven. He came FROM heaven. Not the throne. He had the throne before the world was made (“Glorify me with the glory I had with you before the world existed” John 17:5). Not the glory – He had that too. Do you see? He was not enduring the cross to GET something He did not have. He was enduring the cross to get SOMEONE He did not have. You. Me. Us. The joy set before Him was the bride. The church. The people who would be rescued by what He was about to do. We were the treasure He did not yet possess and He was willing to pay everything to get us.
Think about that. In the garden of Gethsemane when Jesus was sweating drops of blood and asking the Father if there was any other way – and the answer was no – the thing that kept Him walking toward that cross was the thought of YOU. Your face. Your name. Your rescue. He looked through time and saw you and said “They are worth it.” That is not theology. That is love so extreme it defies every category we have for it.
And here is something that ties this entire series together in a way I did not expect. The word Gethsemane comes from the Aramaic Gat Shmanim. It means “oil press.” It is the place where olives were CRUSHED to produce oil. Do you see this? We have been talking throughout this series about the oil of gladness – the ten virgins and their lamps, the oil of the Holy Spirit, couples filling their lamps together, the joy that lights the way. And here is Jesus, the night before the cross, being crushed in a place literally called THE OIL PRESS. Olives had to be crushed to produce oil. Jesus was crushed to produce the oil of gladness that would be poured out at Pentecost and into every believer who would ever live. The very joy we have been writing about for eight posts was pressed out of the Son of God in a garden named for the process. His crushing became our oil. His agony became our joy. That is not a coincidence. God does not do coincidences.
In my earlier post Jesus Believes in You I wrote about how Jesus entrusted the disciples with the work that He Himself could not do in His own country because of their unbelief. He had faith IN them. Do you see the pattern? The Father had faith in the Son. The Son had faith in the disciples. And on the cross the Son looked at ALL of humanity and said “I have joy over them. They are the treasure. They are the prize.” That is the faith OF God expressed in its most extreme form. And it was aimed at you.
The Parable That Explains Everything
Jesus told three parables in Luke 15 and every one of them is about the same thing – the JOY of recovery. A shepherd loses one sheep out of a hundred. Now any sensible farmer would write that off. One percent loss? That is a good year. But this shepherd leaves the ninety-nine and goes after the one. He searches until he finds it. And when he does he does not just breathe a sigh of relief and move on. He calls his friends and neighbours together and says “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost” (Luke 15:6). He throws a party. Over one sheep. A woman loses one coin out of ten. She sweeps the whole house until she finds it. Same response – “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin that I had lost” (Luke 15:9). And then comes the big one. The father whose son had taken his inheritance – which in that culture was essentially saying “I wish you were dead” – and wasted it in a far country. The boy comes home rehearsing his apology speech the whole way. He has got it memorised. He is ready to grovel. And the father sees him coming from AFAR OFF – that phrase again, the same phrase used of Rebekah seeing Isaac – and he RUNS to him. Does not wait for the speech. Does not stand at the door with his arms folded. He runs. In the ancient Near East a dignified man did not run. It was beneath him. This father did not care. He hiked up his robes and sprinted. And he threw a party so big that the older brother got jealous. That was one heck of a party.
Do you see what Jesus is teaching? The joy of heaven is not in the ninety-nine who stayed. It is in the ONE who came home. “There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). Heaven throws a party when YOU come home. That is not a nice thought. That is the theology of the cross. Jesus endured everything He endured because the party at the end – the joy of bringing lost people home – was worth it. YOU were worth it.
This Changes How You See Yourself
I spent years believing I was a bum. I wrote about this in the I Am Not a Bum series. The enemy uses human voices to plant lies about your identity before you ever discover the truth. And one of the deepest lies he plants is this: you are not worth it. You are not worth fighting for. You are not worth suffering for. You are certainly not worth dying for. Let me tell you something – the cross says otherwise. The cross looked at every lie the enemy ever whispered about you and said “THAT is what I think of your opinion.”
If you ever doubt your value – and we all do, even those of us who should know better by now – go back to Hebrews 12:2. The Son of God looked at the cross with all its horror and then looked at you and decided that the joy of having you was greater than the pain of saving you. That is your worth. Not what someone said about you. Not what you have accomplished or failed to accomplish. Not what the mirror says or what the world says or what that voice in your head says at three in the morning. Your worth was decided on a Friday afternoon outside Jerusalem when the Creator of the universe hung on a Roman cross and refused to come down because YOU were the joy set before Him.
HOW COOL IS THAT?! How staggering. How utterly beyond anything we deserve. And yet here we are – rescued, redeemed, and called the joy of the Lord.
The Joy That Endures
Here is one more thing I want you to see in this verse because it matters for where you are right now. Hebrews 12:2 does not just say Jesus had joy. It says He endured the cross FOR that joy. The joy was future. It was set BEFORE Him – out ahead, on the other side of the suffering. He had not received it yet. He was looking at it by faith. And the looking – the anticipation, the certainty that it was coming – gave Him the power to endure.
That is the model for your life. Whatever you are enduring right now there is a joy set before you. Not a vague hope. A certainty. The certainty that God finishes what He starts (Philippians 1:6). The certainty that what He has promised He will deliver. The certainty that you are heading somewhere so good that the suffering of this present time is not worth comparing to the glory that is going to be revealed (Romans 8:18). Jesus endured by looking ahead. And so can you.
The cross was not the end of the story. If it were we would all be in trouble and this would be the most depressing blog post ever written. But it was not the end. The resurrection was. The empty tomb was. The ascension was. And Hebrews 12:2 tells us where Jesus is now – seated at the right hand of the throne of God. Seated. Not pacing. Not worried. Not wringing His hands wondering if it all worked out. SEATED. The suffering is over. The joy He endured for has been realised. And because He went through it YOU get to share in the outcome. His joy becomes your joy. His victory becomes your victory. His seat at the right hand is the guarantee that everything He did on that cross WORKED.
You are the joy set before Him. Let that truth go so deep that nothing the enemy says can shake it loose. And the next time you are tempted to doubt your worth or question whether God really loves you or wonder if the suffering you are going through has any purpose at all – remember the cross. Remember what it cost. And remember why He did it.
He did it for joy. And that joy was you.
A Prayer
Father, I cannot fully comprehend what Your Son endured for me. But I know this – He did it for joy, and that joy was me. That truth is almost too much to hold. Forgive me for the times I have doubted my worth or questioned Your love. You answered that question on the cross once and for all. Help me to live like someone who was worth dying for. Not in arrogance but in awe. And when the suffering comes – because it will – give me the same eyes Jesus had. Eyes that look past the pain and see the joy that is set before me. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
— — —
“The Son of God suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.”
– George MacDonald
“The cross is the greatest illustration of God’s love and the greatest demonstration of His joy over us.”
– A.W. Tozer
Always i-CH