God had something to tell us. God had something to say. God had an important message for us. The message was so important that God personally involved themselves in 1) the message 2) its delivery and 3) the guarantee of its genuineness.
What is the message?
The message is that God loves us dearly.
How was the message delivered to us? The message was so important that God did not delegate its delivery to a subordinate. God did not put the message into the hands of a flunky. God delivered the message themselves. The most Holy Trinity sent the Son of God to deliver their message to us. He was the messenger and the message. Furthermore, He was the guarantor of its genuineness.
He was their love note to us.
How did God guarantee the genuineness of the message?
Suffering.
God allowed us to baptize the love note in the boiling cauldron of suffering.
God allowed us to impale the love note on the sharp hook of salvation while He was human, alive, tender, vulnerable and our guest upon the earth..
Like silver, God allowed us to test the love note in the furnace.
God allowed us to torture and kill the Son of God.
If the love note were counterfeit, His love for us would have faded as we tortured Him and died when we killed Him. But it did not. His love for us survived.
The survival of His love for us is the guarantee that God gave us that the love note was genuine. The survival of His love for us despite the suffering and death we inflicted upon Him verified the veracity of the love note. Suffering authenticated it. Suffering proved that God's love for us is indestructible.
Can you even imagine a better, more reliable guarantee?
God wrote the guarantee of the genuineness of their message of love in the ink of suffering. Why? Because the guarantee was addressed to creatures who suffer. Creatures who suffer understand what it means to survive suffering.
On the canvas of Calvary in the pigments of pain and suffering, God painted a self portrait of the nature of God Why? Before Calvary and since Calvary, many representation have been created of the nature of God. All of them without exception and regardless of their author are inferior to the self-portrait that God painted with their own hand at Calvary. All of them must yield to the self-portrait.
In the Ten Commandments, God admonished us not to make any representations of them. Why? God knew that any representations of them would be inferior to the representation God would give us at Calvary.
Suffering was not the message.
Suffering was not the messenger.Suffering did not deliver the message.
Suffering guaranteed the message.
Suffering is the seal that God placed on the message of love to guarantee that the message is genuine.
“The only universal language to survive the confounding of languages that took place at Babel was the language of suffering. All creatures who suffer understand it. It is our native tongue. God became a creature who suffers so He could communicate with us in our native tongue”