On Death and Darkness

The darkness of the heavens could not match the sin-dark hearts
Of angry crowds of wicked men who played their wicked parts
To bring a perfect, guiltless Man to violently be killed
The cruelest way man could conceive, reserved for vilest guilt.

So filled with hate, so blind with rage, they could not understand
That in the sequence of events moved more than human hands
As the same sovereign power worked as moved the soldiers’ dice,
Unknowingly they crucified a willing Sacrifice.

His face could not be recognized; His beard the crowds had plucked.
Deep in the skin around His head a crown of thorns was stuck.
A placard nailed above His head declared Him as their King
Yet though they had rejected Him, for them He took Death’s sting.

Obedient though suffering excruciating pain,
He for the joy of saving them endured and scorned the shame.
His friends, the few who dared to come, stood helpless there and grieved
As He whose word gave breath to man spent all His strength to breathe.

None other knew the meaning as the midday sky turned black
That on His Son, Who bore their sin, the Father turned His back.
Unknown through all eternity, that God could God forsake,
But God the Son had lost the bond that sin alone could break.

A Man of Sorrows, He was called, acquainted well with grief.
The crowds who railed and mocked His pain considered Him a thief
Not like the thieves who hung by Him, who died for crimes they’d done,
But He, who they thought just a man, had made Himself God’s Son.

As Moses lifted up the snake, so He was lifted high
Though they knew not sin’s fatal bite and that they too would die
Had He not come to die for them and their sin’s wage receive
To offer them eternal life—to all who would believe.

As God’s full wrath was satisfied, the rocks prepared to break,
The temple veil to tear in two, and earth itself to quake.
Then knowing that He had done all the Father’s justice asked
He cried out that the debt was paid, then bowed and breathed His last.

His followers knew not their hope—their grief left hope no room.
In final service, so they thought, they laid Him in a tomb.
But in three days the stone would move, the graveclothes be uncurled,
And He would rise in victory, the Savior of the world.

Krista Besselman