Devotional 3-27-10

What It Means to Know Christ
Phillipians 3:4-14

How precious is the gift of the cross, how splendid to contemplate! In the cross there is mingling of good and evil, as in the tree of paradise; it is holy beautiful to behold and good to taste. The fruit of this tree isnot death but life, not darkness but life. This tree does not cast us out of paradise, but opens the way for our return.

This was the tree on which Christ, like a King on a chariot, destroyed the devil, the lord of death and freed the human race from sin. This was the tree upon which the Lord, like a brace warror wounded in hands, feet, and side healed the wounds of sin that the evil serpent had inflicted on our nature. The knowledge of all good, which is the fruit of the cross, cut way the shoots of wickedness.

The wonders accomplished through this tree were foreshadowed clearly even by the mere types and figures that existed is the past. Meditate on these, if you are eager to learn. Was it not the wood of a tree that enabled Noah, at God's command, to escape the destruction of the blood together with his sons, his wife, his son's wives and every kind of animal? And surely the rod of Moses prefigured the cross when it changed water into blood, swallowed up the false serpents of Pharaoh's magicians, divided the Red Sea at one stroke and then restored the waters to their normal course, drowning the enemy and saving God's own people? Aaron's rod, which blossomed in one day in proof of his true priesthood, was another figure of the cross; and did not Abramham foreshadow the when he bound his son Iassc and placed him on the pile of wood?

By the cross death was slain and Adam was restored to life. The cross is the glory of the apostles, the crown of martys, the sancitication of the saints. By the cross we put on Christ and cast aside our former self. By the cross we, the sheep of Christ, have been gathered into one flock, destined for the sheepfolds of heaven. --by Theodore of Studios

Submitted by Rev. Jeremiah Jasper