Resurrection and the end of pain (John 14:1-3)

 

I am conscious that my grief is not unique.  My dad was 92 and we had a great relationship.  I am aware that most of you have lost loved ones.  Pain is an inevitable consequence of living in a fallen world.

My grief is somewhat complicated by the fact that I struggle with an anxiety disorder, but again that does not make me unique.  I am aware that many of you will struggle with mental health issues, or have people you love who do.

This morning I want us to see that Jesus speaks into our suffering at Easter time.

I have three points:

                - Easter shows us that we have no friend like Jesus.

                - Easter shows us the depths of His love.

                - Easter shows us that Jesus wants us.

1.  Easter shows us that we have no friend like Jesus

Do not let your hearts be troubled.   Trust God.  Trust also in me.’

These are the words that I feel Jesus has been challenging me with at this time.  ‘Trust me.’  But why would we trust Jesus?  Well look at the sort of friend that He is!

This is the night before the crucifixion.  On that night Jesus could have demanded that the disciples comfort Him, for he was going to go through far more than they.  But instead He comforted them.  It was almost as if He was more concerned about their suffering than His own.

Then think of who this is that He is comforting.  He knows that these men will desert him at His greatest hour of need.  But He holds no bitterness against them.

There is no friend like Jesus.

He then tells them that He will deal with our greatest fear, the fear of death.

In my Father’s house are many rooms, if it were not so would I have told you?  We misunderstand Jesus if we think that He is reluctant to bring people to the Father’s house.  He is a God who delights to rescue people.

But how do we cope as we live in the shadow of death.  The Good Shepherd is with us.  These disciples will have many difficult days in the years ahead, but he will be with them.  Look down at verse 18, ‘I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you.’  He is talking about how He wills send them Holy Spirit after He has ascended to heaven.  Somehow, where the Spirit is, there the Father and the Son are also.

One of the terms we use for the Holy Spirit is ‘comforter.’  God promises to be close to the broken hearted and to lift up those who are crushed in spirit’ (Ps. 34:18).  He is more than close to us, He is in us.

2.  Easter shows us the depths of Jesus love

‘… I am going there to prepare a room for you’ (2b). 

I don’t think that He is saying that ‘I am going to my Father’s house and when I am there I will spend my time decorating a room for you.’  I think He is saying, ‘I am going, and in my going via the cross and the resurrection, I am preparing a room for you in my Father’s house.’

It is as He takes our guilt upon Himself on the cross and as He is raised to life that we are made ready for heaven.  Through His work we are forgiven and changed.  Being a Christian is not about what we do for God, but accepting what He has done for us in Jesus.

This life is genuinely offered to all of us.  Jesus desired than none would reject it.  But if we refuse His love and will not let Him transform us by His grace then we will be excluded from His forgiveness and spend eternity apart from Him.  I wish it were not so, but that is the clear teaching of the Bible.

C. S. Lewis explained that at the end of the day there are only two types of people.  Those who say to God, ‘Thy will be done’, and those to whom God says, ‘Thy will be done.’  All those in hell choose it.

Easter shows us that Jesus wants us

‘And if I go to prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me, that you may be where I am’ (3). 

There is a debate about what this coming back is referring to.  Is it Jesus’ coming back to be with them after the resurrection, or when He sends the Holy Spirit, of bring us to Himself at the end of our lives or His final return?  I don’t know.  But what I do know is that it expresses His longing.  It is almost as if He is saying to them, ‘I love you so much, that I must have you in my Father’s house with me.  The Father’s house without my people is not enough for me.  So, I will come back to bring you to where I am.’

Indeed, this longing gives us the assurance that He will never let us go.  ‘And this is the will of my Him who sent me, that I shall lose none of them that He has given me, but raise them up on the last day’ (6:39).

Conclusion

Many of you have experienced greater grief than I am going through.  Jesus suffered more than all of us.  In this life we will have many sorrows.  But He has given us the Comforter, and He has given us each other.  He has given us His Word, with promises of His presence and wisdom for our need.  And he speaks of a future day, when the risen Christ brings all our pain to an end.  Then there will be no more crying or sickness or pain or death.  Then God Himself will wipe away every tear from our eyes.

Easter shows us that Jesus is a trustworthy friend.

Easter shows us the depths of His love.

Easter shows us that Jesus wants to be with us.      

What do you see?

A man asked to see me to talk about Christianity.  He told me that he believed that Jesus was a great teacher, but he didn’t seem to think that he was more than a great teacher.  The other thing that he told me was that he struggled with an awful sense of guilt.  Those two things are actually related.  If Jesus only tells you how to live a good life, then he offers no solution for the fact that we fail to live a good life.

How do you destroy self-righteousness and pride?  What is the source of Christian joy?  Can God prove that he loves you?  What do you do when you are overcome with feelings of guilt?  How do you know that Christianity isn’t just the same as every other religion?  How can you change and become more loving?  Why should you forgive?  The answer to each of these questions is the same: look at the cross of Jesus!

This morning we are going to look at the cross through two sets of eyes.  Firstly, we are going to think about what the centurion saw when he watched Jesus die.  Then, secondly, I will tell you about some of the things I see when I think about Calvary.  

What did the centurion see when he saw Jesus die?

The centurion hated being stationed in Jerusalem.  Jerusalem was in a relative backwater of the Roman Empire.  The Jews that lived there hated the Roman occupation and despised the soldiers who enforced it. 

Passover was a particularly difficult time, with pilgrims flocking to the city from far and wide.  During the festival rebellious thoughts were more likely, as the people were hoping for a political messiah who would set them free.

That year there was talk of a Nazarene carpenter, who apparently claimed to be king, and had entered the city to great fanfare.  However, the religious leaders had arrested him, Pilate had interviewed him, the crowds had cried for his blood, and now he was being crucified. 

This centurion had overseen many crucifixions.  He was only doing his job.  He had no longer felt any pity, morbid fascination or even revulsion.  Yet there was something about this execution that would remain with him for the rest of his life.  What was it about the way Jesus died that caused him to conclude that this man was innocent and that he was the Son of God?

It wasn’t the many prophecies that were been fulfilled in even incidental events that were unfolding.  The centurion was not a Jew and had not read their scriptures.  He did not know that these things were written about hundreds of years before.  Who was responsible for the death of Jesus?  You could blame greedy Judas, the jealous religious establishment, cowardly Pilate or the easily-led crowd.  We could also say that we put Jesus on the cross, for it was our sin that sent him there.  But ultimately Jesus died because God had planned it.  The Scriptures had foretold how God would send a substitute for his people’s guilt.

Matthew links the earthquake to the centurion’s conclusion.  As well as that earthquake, there was three hours of darkness during the afternoon.  It is interesting that the early opponents of Jesus didn’t deny that the darkness happened (but said it was an eclipse), and the gospels were written during the lifetime of many who would have been there.

Then there was the dignity in how Jesus died.  The centurion had never seen a man pray for those who taunted him.  Yet Jesus pleaded, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’  Even the criminals who were being crucified with him hurled abuse at him, and yet when one of them changed his mind, Jesus spoke words of forgiveness and assurance.  ‘Today you will be with me in Paradise.’  Or, what about the loving way Jesus looked down from the cross and told John to behold his mother?  Even in the time of his greatest despair, he makes practical arrangements for Mary.

Then there is the manner of the death itself.  At one stage Jesus cried out in despair, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’  The centurion did not know that Jesus was quoting the twenty-second psalm (a psalm which also speaks of the victim’s deliverance).  Jesus seemed to see purpose in his suffering, stating that the task was finished.  While it was normal for the crucified to speak their final words in a weak, exhausted, muffled voice, Jesus lets out a loud cry before he dies.  While the condemned normally tilted their head back to grasp for air, Jesus bowed his head and committed his spirit to God.  It is as if no-one is taking his life from him but that he is giving it up himself.

Seeing all this convinced the centurion that Jesus was an innocent man and that he was the Son of God.  Son of God was a title the centurion would have reserved for the Emperor.  He was giving Jesus the highest praise his culture let him imagine.  Job done, the centurion marches his men back to the barracks.  If he survived his military service and went home to whatever part of the Roman word he was from, I imagine that he never forgot what he saw that day on the hill of Calvary.

What do you see when you look at the cross?

I see the centre-piece of our faith.  The apostle Paul can sum up his preaching saying, ‘I preach Christ crucified.’  The risen Jesus told a couple of the disciples, on the road to Emmaus, that the whole of the Bible pointed to him, and his death and resurrection.  If the cross is not at the centre of your religion, then you religion is not that of the Bible.

I see justice.  I was doing a questionnaire with some of the small groups in our last church.  These were good Christian people.  I asked them what attributes come to find when they think of God.  I was surprised that no-one mentioned holiness.  The heavenly chorus cries, ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty.’  How can a perfectly holy God, who will not tolerate our evil, accept us as his sons and daughters?  Only through the cross!  At the cross, God shows that he is both just and the one who justifies the ungodly.

I see a sacrifice of infinite worth.  Not only is Jesus a sufficient price for your sin, he is a sufficient price for the sins of the world.  Indeed, he is a sufficient price for the sins of a million worlds.  If all the sins of everyone in this room were lumped on your shoulders, Jesus’ death is enough for you.  Your sins are viler than you have imagined, but never dishonour the sacrifice of the Son of God by claiming that they are too great to be covered by his blood.  No matter what you have done, you can have confidence in his forgiveness and joy in his grace. 

But I also see a sacrifice of definite value.  The Son knew those that he would purchase for the Father.  This is an actual payment for actual sin—our sin, past, present and future.  This is personal.  The apostle Paul could speak of the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.

Finally, I see love.  This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and gave his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  ‘Unless you are assured God loves you, it is pretty hard to do anything in the Christian life’ (Jack Miller).  We are told to behold (look and see) the love of God for us.  This beholding is life-changing.  We love because he first loved us.  Our love is a response to his far greater love.  So, as I said a number of months ago, ‘your problem is not that you don’t love God enough, but that you fail to see how much he loves you.’  Behold your saviour upon the cross.

Must reads about the Cross

I read an article in a university magazine where one of the chaplains claimed that the cross is not the crux of Christianity.  Similarly a youth leader explained to a group of us why the cross doesn’t feature in the logo of his organisation—he said that the cross is ‘bad public relations.’  I find all this staggering given the fact that the apostle Paul can summarise his message by simply saying that he preached Christ crucified.

When evangelicals are asked to define their core beliefs the cross is always included.  For example, the statement of faith for Evangelical Alliance Ireland includes our belief in the ‘substitutionary atoning death on the cross.’  Christ died the death I deserved.  He took the punishment my sin earned.  This is the grounds of my peace.  This is great news.

So, in this age of theological vagueness, I have two books to recommend.  One book is heavy, and the other is light.  One book is long, and the other is short.  One book should be read quickly, and the other should be pondered over and digested.

The first book is C. J. Mahaney’s delightful ‘Living the Cross-Centred Life.’   This is a refreshing and inspiring read that won’t take even a slow reader like me long to get through.

The second is John Stott’s ‘The Cross of Christ.’  Of all Stott’s books this is the best.  It is comprehensive and will take time to get through, but will more than repay the effort.

I finish with some words of John Wesley (the eighteenth-century evangelist and founder of Methodism).  Wesley declared that because of Christ’s death on the cross:

‘His [the Christian’s] sins, all his sins, in thought, word, and deed, are covered, are blotted out, shall not be remembered or mentioned against him any more than if they had not been. God will not inflict on that sinner what he deserved to suffer because the Son of his love hath suffered for him. And from the time we are "accepted through the beloved," "reconciled to God through his blood," he loves and blesses and watches over us for good, even as if we had never sinned.' [from Wesley's sermon entitled 'Justification by faith']

My wife has tattoos

I came across this on another blog.  This is brilliant ...

Today is the day of my wedding.  And I am not marrying the girl of my dreams.If you would have told me when I was a teenager that my wife would have seven tattoos, a history in drugs, alcohol, and attending heavy metal concerts, I would have laughed at you, given you one of my courtship books, and told you to take a hike.  My plans were much different, much more nuanced with careful planning, much more clean-cut, and much more, well, about me.  You see, it wasn’t my dream to marry a girl that was complicated.  I never dreamed that I would sit on a couch with my future wife in pre-marital counseling listening to her cry and tell stories of drunken nights, listing the drugs she used, confessing mistakes made in past relationships.   This isn’t my dream – it’s better.

To read on go to,

http://unspokenblog.wordpress.com/2014/04/26/my-wife-has-tattoos-marriage-new-birth-and-the-gospel/

Words that end in SHUN

Colin Buchanon is no ordinary song-writer.  He is a Christian song writer for kids, and he not afraid to hit them with the truth of the gospel.  On an album entitled 'Super-Saviour' he writes a song called, 'Big Bible words that end in SHUN'.  It opens,

Big words that end in SHUN

Show what The Lord had DONE

Through Jesus, his own SON

... Big words that end in SHUN.
           

Then he sings about revela-SHUN, substitu-SHUN, salva-SHUN, justifica-SHUN, imputa-SHUN, redemp-SHUN, adop-SHUN, and propitiat-SHUN.  There are a lot of big Bible words ending in SHUN (tion)!  The word that we are looking at this morning is 'propitiation'.  Colin explains that this means that 'God's anger is turned away.'

                         

The word 'propitiation' was more familiar to English speakers of previous generations.  For example, in the King James Version we read, '... Christ Jesus, whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood' (Romans 3:24-25), and, 'herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins' (1 John 4:10).  In our NIVs the Greek word is translated 'sacrifice of atonement' or 'atoning sacrifice.'  But is propitiation what happens as a result of this atoning sacrifice and is propitiation a truth worth celebrating?

'God's anger is turned away.'  For the first two and half chapters of Romans the apostle Paul outlines that all of humankind is guilty of sin.  'All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.'  God's anger at human sin is clearly spelt out.  Then we read, 'God presented Christ as a sacrifice of atonement ...' (Romans 3:25).  We are called to respond to this sacrifice with faith and the result is peace with God.  We no longer need fear being condemned and we are accepted as dearly loved children.  Because of the death of God the Son, God can look at us without displeasure and we can look at him without fear.  God's anger has been turned away.

This all raises three questions.

                  

1.  Can God be both good and angry?

To 'propitiate' someone means to appease or pacify their anger.  This assumes that God is angry.  Indeed, God's anger is portrayed in the Bible as being a personal thing.  Without Christ people are the subjects of his holy anger. We were by nature deserving of wrath (Ephesians 2:3).  It is obvious why many people don't like this teaching.  In the lovely hymn, 'In Christ Alone', there is a line with states that at the cross 'the wrath of God was satisfied', and some people have changed this to read 'the love of God was magnified.'

                                    

The love of God and the anger of God are not opposites.  For God to be good and angry does not mean that he cannot not be good and loving.  If God was not angered at human sin then he would not be good, he would not be holy.  The opposite of a loving God is not an angry God but an indifferent god, a god who simply does not care about the evil that is done in the world.
                                         

We have already seen that God's anger is very different from our anger.  God is slow to anger and abounding in love.  His anger is not irrational or the result of a lack of patience.  It is not stirred up by injured vanity.  God's anger is his settled response to evil.  Were there no evil, then he would not be angry.  In holy love he makes peace with objects of his anger.

                                     

2.  Does our God act like a petty pagan deity?

Some people claim that the idea of God being angry, and then being appeased by a sacrifice, makes him look like a petty pagan deity.  However, the gods of the pagans were easily angered and could fly off the handle, whereas our God is slow to anger and abounding in love.  Also, in pagan religions, it was humans who had to take the initiative to divert the divine wrath, whereas the initiative in Christianity lies with our God.

                            

In the Old Testament the picture is of a gracious God who provides the sacrifices in order that he might act graciously towards sinful people.  God takes the initiative.  God reveals the way.  Similarly, in the New Testament it is God who takes the initiative; God is motivated out of sheer love and grace to send his Son to die as a propitiation for us. 'God does not love us because Christ died for us; Christ died for us because God loves us' (Stott).

The Old Testament sacrificial system looked ahead to the sacrifice of God's own Son.  Note that this sacrifice comes at such a great cost to God.  This is more than an animal or vegetable.  This is not even a third party.  Cruel religions would burn their children on an alter.  But on the cross God himself, in the person of God the Son, willingly dies for others. 

It is God himself who in holy wrath needs to be propitiated, God himself who in holy love undertook to do the propitiating, and God himself who in the person of his Son died for the propitiation of our sins.  thus God took his own loving initiative to appease his own righteous anger by bearing it his own self in his own Son when he took our place and died for us.

3.  WHJD?
You might be familiar with the question 'what would Jesus do?' (WWJD?).  That is a good thing to ask in every situation we face.  But there is a more important question we need to be clear about: what has Jesus done? (WHJD?)  If we are not clear about what Jesus has done then we won't get Christianity.  If we don't understand what Jesus has done we will never be inspired to change.  If we are not sure what Jesus has done then we will have a false-religion of humanity working its way towards God rather than God coming to our rescue.  This is why doctrine matters.  This is why we are spending so much time thinking about what Jesus has done on the cross.

WWJD, on its own, can't save you.  Even as we try to imitate Jesus our actions fall so short of his perfection.  The Bible teaches us that our righteous deeds are like filthy rags.  So self-righteousness is a road to hell.  Without grasping WHJD we will end up living lives marked by humiliating defeat in the face of certain temptations and, in other areas of our lives, superficial change that is marred by ego and pride.

WHJD?  'Moved by the perfection of his holy love, God in Christ substituted himself for us sinners' (Stott).  God's anger is turned away.  Because of the death of God the Son, God can look at us without displeasure and we can look at him without fear.  This is life-changing truth.  This is truth that we must remind ourselves every day.  In Christian teaching we never go beyond the message of the cross; instead we grow deeper in our grasp of it.    

The author Michael Horton noticed that sermons that simply focus on the things that we ought to do for God don't actually change people, what we need to be told is what God has done for us. 

'... bring me into the chamber of a holy God, where I am completely undone, and tell me about what God has done in Christ to save me; tell me about the marvellous indicatives of the gospel - God's surprising interventions of salvation on the stage of history despite human rebellion - and the flickering candle of faith is inflamed, giving light to others ... On its own, more advice (law, commands, exhortations) will only lead to either self-righteousness or despair.  Yet the more Christ is held up before us as sufficient for our justification and sanctification, the more we begin to die to ourselves and live to God' (Christless Christianity).

Pictures of the cross

One of the awkward questions that we may be asked when we present the gospel is 'how can a loving God send people to hell?'  The Bible doesn't struggle with that question the way we do.  In fact the Bible aims to answer a different question.  'How can a holy God not send people to hell?'

You won't get far in reading the Bible before you realise that God is angry.  It is true that God's anger is not like ours - it is not prompted by injured vanity, it is not petty, it is not irrational or ignoble.  It is his predicable, settled hostility to sin.  God's anger is aroused by evil, and evil alone.  But his anger is red-hot.

Given that we all have thought, said and done wicked things we may ask how a holy God can avoid sending us to hell.  How can a holy God pardon our rebellion against him?  'Only by providing a divine substitute for the sinner, so that the substitute would receive the judgement and sinner the pardon' (Stott).  This is a doctrine call Penal Substitution, and we are going to examine it by looking at five pictures in the Old Testament.

1.  Abraham and Isaac

The first picture is taken from the book of Genesis.  God tests Abraham's faith by commanding him to sacrifice his son, Isaac.  Abraham takes the boy up Mount Moriah (where Jerusalem would later be situated).  At the last moment, when it was clear that he would do what God said, Abraham is told not to slay Isaac but to kill a ram instead.  That ram was sacrificed as a burnt offering in the place of Isaac.  That ram died as a substitute for another.  Like the man, Jesus, who died the death of a substitute, in that area, many centuries later.

2.  The Passover

In the book of Exodus we see how the blood of a substitute saves people from God's judgement.  On the night of the Passover God's judgement swept over the land of Egypt.  But the judgement passed over every home that had its doorposts marked by the blood of a lamb.  That lamb died so that God's people did not have to.  Each of the four gospels associate the death of Jesus with the Passover.  The first Lord's was a Passover meal.  The apostle Paul explicitly declares that Jesus, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed (1 Corinthians 5:7-8).

3.  The Sin offerings of the Old Testament

The sin offerings of the Old Testament showed that the blood of a substitute was demanded to pay the price of the people's guilt.  Of course the blood of an animal can not make up for our sin.  These offering pointed ahead to what Jesus would do on the cross.  The New Testament teaches that Jesus 'offered himself' (Hebrews 9:14), and gave himself up for us as a sacrifice to God (Ephesians 5:2).  John Stott explains that Jesus sacrificed himself (not animals), once and for all (not repeatedly), and thus secured for us purification of our consciences and restoration to God.

4.  The scapegoat

The day of atonement gives us a clear example of a substitute bearing the sin of guilty people.  On that day the high priest took two male goats.  One goat was sacrificed and its blood was sprinkled in the usual way. On the other goat the high priest lays his hands, confesses the people's sin and wickedness, and then the drives it into the wilderness, so that it carries away their sins.  One goat demonstrated the means by which our sin is dealt with (a substitute bears our penalty) and the other the results of the atonement (our sins are taken away from us).

5.  Isaiah 53

The prophecy found in Isaiah 53 is a wonderful foretelling of what would happen to Jesus on the cross.  It was written hundreds of years before the event.  Yet when I read it at the youth fellowship in our last church one person asked, 'which gospel is that from?’ It sounds as if it was written after the events rather than before them.

'He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him ... the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all ... it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer ... the LORD makes his life a guilt offering ... he bore the sin of many and made intersession for the transgressors.'  These verses seem to be clear about a substitute who bears the penalty for our sin.

Conclusion - Does Penal Substitution pit the Father against the Son?

We have looked at the Old Testament for teaching on Penal Substitution.  We can also see this doctrine taught in the New Testament.  Notably, Romans 4:25 (He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification), 1 Peter 2:24 (He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree . . .), 1 Peter 3:18 (For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God).

However, the doctrine of Penal Substitution has many critics.  For example, there is a blog called 'The Red Letter Christian.'  You know the way some Bibles highlight the words of Jesus by printing them in red.  Well, the people behind this blog say that they want to highlight the words of Jesus.  That is good.  But actually all the teaching of the Bible needs to be taken into account.  The whole of the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit, not just the words of Jesus.

Anyway, one man, writing on the Red Letter Christian blog, calls penal substitution a 'schizophrenic view that pits God against Jesus.'  Another writer of a similar ilk, Steve Chalke, famously referred to penal substitution as 'cosmic child-abuse '.  Such criticisms are based on caricatures of this doctrine, so we must be careful how we teach it.

Take the following illustration.  It comes from America of the 1930s and centres on a man called John Griffith.  

John was a bridge-conductor across the Mississippi River.  He was responsible for raising and lowering the bridge so that boats could get through and trains could pass.  John had an eight-year old son who loved to accompany him to work.

One day the father and son decided to eat their lunch on the bank of the river when John realised that in about three minutes the Memphis Belle carrying about three hundred passengers was getting ready to cross the bridge.  But the bridge had not being lowered.  John didn't want to alarm his son, so he patted him on the shoulder and told him to stay where he was while he sorted out the bridge.

When he got up the stairs to the lever, John realised that his son had managed to climb to the bridge and had fallen between the gears of the bridge.  He could hear the train coming, with its three hundred people on board.  He tried to think of any way there might be that he could lower the bridge and not crush his son.  There was none.  He lowered the bridge just in him.  His son dying to save those people's lives.  As he watched the train go by he could see a man reading his paper, a woman drinking her tea, and another talking to his wife.  He screamed at the top of his lungs, 'don't you know what I've just done for you?'

On one hand that's a good picture of something of the cost of the cross to God the Father.  But in other ways this picture falls so short.  The cross was not an accident but a rescue that had been planned before the foundation of the world.  God the Son was not a helpless victim who happened to be on the wrong place at the wrong time, he went willingly to his death.  God the father was not subject to circumstances outside of his control but was choosing to gloriously display both his holiness and mercy.  If this picture is the only illustration we use to explain the cross then we will be accused of pitting the Father against the Son.

Take another illustration set in the Second World War.  

     

Scottish soldiers were forced by their Japanese captors to labour on a jungle railroad.   Moral among the prisoners was low and their behaviour had become barbarous towards each other.  Then something happened.  When the shovels were counted there appeared to be one missing.  The officer in-charge was enraged.  He demand that the shovel be returned.  When no one moved he threatened to kill all of the prisoners on the spot.  He meant what he said.  Then, finally, one man stepped forward.  The officer put away his gun, picked up a shovel, and beat the man to death.  When this was over, the survivors pocked up the body and carried it to the second tool check.  On the second check it was discovered that no shovel was missing, there had been a miss-counting.  Word spread throughout the whole camp.  An innocent man had been willing to die to save others.  People were inured and he behaviour of the prisoners was transformed.  They began to treat each other as brothers.

On one hand that is a great picture of the loving sacrifice of the Son.  Jesus came into the world to die.  He set his face to Jerusalem knowing what awaited him there.  The only truly innocent man dies so that those who trust in him will be spared eternal death.  Such love should inspire us.  But again this picture falls short of the glory of the cross and if this is all we teach about the cross we will play into the hands of those who despise the notion of penal substitution.  For he cross was not an act of injustice, but of justice upheld.  The father is nothing like the cruel Japanese soldier.  His anger is not the irrational, and vain.  He is the God of immeasurable love giving an incalculable gift to save a wretched people.

In order to teach the doctrine of the cross correctly we must not portray either Jesus choosing to pacify an angry God and wrestle from him a grudging salvation, or, God sending a helpless son to die for guilty people. Instead, we read of a God who sent his Son in love (he did not have salvation reluctantly wrestled out of his hands) and we read of the Son who willing gave his life for us (John 15).

We must not lose sight of either the love of the Father or the love of the Son.  We must not lose sight of the cooperation of the Father and the Son.  We must not lose sight of the intent of the Father and the Son.  We must not see love a simply the result of the cross but love is the cause of the cross.  We must delight in the truth that 'God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting men's sins against them.  And he committed to us the message of reconciliation'  (2 Corinthians 5:19).

How can a holy God forgive?

(The following is partly adapted from John Stott's 'The Cross of Christ', chapter 4).

The question might be asked, why does God need the cross in order to forgive?  Why does he demand the payment of such a price?  Why can't he simply forgive and forget?  After all if we are sinned against we are told simply to forgive.  No price needs to be paid.  No-one's death is required before we forgive each other. Why can't God do what he commands us to do?  Why can't he practise what he preaches? Why is it impossible for God to forgive us without his Son's sacrifice for sin?

John Stott states that such questions betray our shallowness rather than our sophistication.  We are simply private individuals and any sin against us is simply a personal offence.  For us to forgive does not alter the balance of justice in the world.  We can leave the issue of justice to God.  But God is the creator of all morality.  He is both the injured party and the divine judge.  He is the king against whom all wickedness is treason.  He is the one who gave us life and to whom we owe our life.  He is the God of immeasurable love, love that we have spurned.  Indeed, the central problem with our opening questions is that they fail to give due weight to the fact that God is God and we are not!

The crucial issue is actually how it is possible for him to forgive.  How does our God, who has been stirred to righteous anger, come to peace with those who have acted as his enemies?  How does our God, who lovingly yearns to embrace sinful people, do so in a way that does not condone our evil?  How can he express his love without compromising his holiness?  How can he both be a righteous God and a Saviour?  

1.  The gravity of sin

A couple of years ago, on the BBC news, there was an item on a particular mega-church in America.  The church has tens of thousands of attendees.  Everything is professional and polished.  We might be impressed.  But even the news reporter noticed something was missing.  He said something along the lines of, 'you will not hear much talk about traditional doctrines like sin and judgement here.'  Writing a few decades earlier, A. W. Tozer said, 'There is a strange conspiracy of silence in the world today - even in religious circles - about man's responsibility for sin, the reality of judgement, and about an outraged God and the necessity for a crucified Saviour.'

The New Testament speaks of sin in terms of missing the mark, inward corruption, stepping over a known boundary, and as lawlessness.  The emphasis is on the 'godless self-centredness of sin.'  When we sin we are not just failing to love God with all our being, we are actively refusing to acknowledge and obey our Creator and Lord.  It has been described in terms of 'getting rid of the Lord God' in order to put ourselves in his place in a spirit of 'God-almightiness.'  'Sin is defiance, arrogance, the desire to be equal with God ... the assertion of human independence over against God' (Brunner).  Sin is utter terrible and God is utterly holy.

2.  God's holiness and wrath 
   
People today feel the freedom to make God look the way they want him to look.  They rightly claim that he is compassionate, good and kind.  But they wrongly assume that he is tolerant of human sin.  They think that he would not be bothered about their everyday offences because they neither see the seriousness of all wrongdoing nor understand the utter holiness of a perfect God.  Even in churches people have lost vision of the majesty of God.

The Bible speaks of God being transcendent, the high and lofty one.  The Bible speaks of a God who is inapproachable light and a consuming fire.  The Bible speaks of God standing at a distance from sinful humanity.  It even portrays God as being made nauseous by our moral compromises, they are distasteful and repulsive to him, and he vomits out of his mouth those who refuse to give him their full allegiance.

You cannot read the Bible properly and fail to see that God is good and angry.  But we do him a great disservice if we imagine that his divine anger is like our human anger.  'What provokes our anger (injured vanity) never provokes his; what provokes his anger (evil) seldom provokes ours' (Stott). 'God’s wrath in the Bible is never the capricious, self-indulgent, irritable, morally ignoble thing that human anger so often is.  It is, instead, a right and necessary reaction to objective moral evil' (Packer).  'His anger is neither mysterious nor irrational.  It is never unpredictable, but always predictable, because it is evoked by evil and by evil alone ... [It] is his steady, unrelenting, unremitting, uncompromising antagonism to evil in all its forms and manifestations' (Stott).

Conclusion

Sin is serious.  It is 'cosmic-treason' (Sproul).  It is hostility towards God.  It is deep-rooted rebellion.  God is angered by every act of sin and refuses to condone any of our wrongdoing.  What's more the Bible tells us that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  So how can their be hope for any of us?  How can we escape the Day of God's Vengeance?  How can a God who has a red-hot antagonism to all that is evil, accept us as dearly loved children, given the evil in our past and the fact that we fail him every single day?

The answer, as John Stott puts it, is that

At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgement we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God's holy love was 'satisfied.'

One writer says that 'only he who knows the greatness of God's wrath will be mastered by the greatness of mercy' (Gustav Stahlin).  We used to be objects of God's wrath, but God, who is rich in mercy, has made us alive in Christ in order that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable riches of his grace, expressed in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus (Eph. 2:1-10).  We are rescued by grace through faith.  God's forgiving, justifying, reconciling love is extended to us as we admit our moral bankruptcy, hold out our empty hands to receive the free gift of eternal life, and now live in Christ our risen king.

One final question: what is the relationship with sin now?  Well, if we have been born again we are no longer slaves of sin.  We have been forgiven. We have been justified.  We need not fear the Day of Judgement.  God has given us a new heart and has placed the person of the Holy Spirit within us, transforming us from within.  He promises that we will not be tempted beyond what we can bear and that he will give us an escape route when we are tempted (1 Cor. 10:13).  Sin is not our master anymore.

Yet, the Apostle John tells us that we lie if we say we have no sin and that thankfully the blood of Jesus goes on cleansing us from all sin.  But when the Christian sins it is more of a lapse than a lifestyle.  If we refuse to enter the battle sin, if we redefine what is sin to justify how we live and if we ignore God's moral commands, then we are simply demonstrating that we have not yet enthroned Christ as our king, we have not yet received his forgiving grace, he has not yet entered our lives, and we are not yet born again.  So the Apostle Paul can write:

Or do you not know that wrongdoers will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral [which includes sex outside marriage] nor idolaters nor adulterers nor men who have sex with men nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God. [We could also add Jesus' warning about not forgiving or James warning about not controlling our tongues]. And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Cor. 6:9-11).

Friends, may each one of us know what it is to be washed, sanctified and justified in the name of the Lord Jesus.  May we grow in the assurance that we have been saved from the wrath of God as we witness the transforming presence of Jesus within us.  May we produce fruit in keeping with repentance.  May we keep close to God as we confess our sins every day.  May we delight in the fact that our God of perfect holiness has acted, through the death of his Son on the cross, to save sinful wretches like us!

I want to know what love is

(The following is adapted from John Stott's 'The Cross of Christ', chapter 8)

In the 1980's a band called Foreigner sang, 'I want to know what love is.'  The Bible makes an amazing claim in this regard.  It says that you don't truly know what love is until you have looked at the cross.  'This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us', writes the apostle John (1 John 3:16).

   
So what makes the love at the cross so special?

1. God gave his Son

'God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son' (John 3:16).  If God had sent an angel, as he sent Gabriel with good news to Mary and then to the shepherds, we would consider it an awesome privilege.  If God sent a prophet, as he did many times, warning people to turn back to Him, we might be thankful.  Yet in either case God was sending a third party, he was sending someone else.  But sending his Son is something altogether different.  God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit have blissfully enjoyed one another for all eternity.  For God to send his Son, God is giving himself.  Love is about sacrifice and self-giving and God 'did not spare his own Son, but gave himself up for us all' (Romans 8:32).  God gave himself for us.  The apostle Paul calls Jesus 'an indescribable gift' (2 Corinthians 9:15).

2.  God gave his Son to die

It was amazing that God the Son has become a man and dwelt among us.  Just to watch how God lives in our world: battling temptations and trials, being adored by a fickle crowd and opposed by by jealous enemies, teaching like no-one has ever taught, being moved by a holy compassion, preforming miracles, and being misunderstood by both his family and his closest friends.  We have a God who has rolled us his sleeves and got his hands dirty; a God who knows what it is to be tired and hungry; and a God who wept.

But God taking on flesh is only the beginning of his self-giving.  God sent his Son to die.  He became obedient to death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:7-8).  Crucifixion was unimaginably painful.  However, it wasn't the physical pain that Jesus dreaded the most as he anticipated the cross.  It wasn't the mocking of the crowds that he feared.  It was the fact that on the cross he would take the punishment for our guilty and sin, experience the full weight of God's holy anger, and be separated from the Father.  In this life we will never fully comprehend the depths of that sacrifice.  John Stott writes, 'for the Sinless One to be made sin, for the Immortal One to die - we have no means of imagining the terror or the pain involved in such an experience.'

Nor should we imagine that it is only the Son who suffers.  The Father and Son suffer together but in different ways.  'The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son.  The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son.  The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father' (Moltmann).

    
3.  God gave his Son to die for us 

The Book of Romans says that apart from a relationship with Jesus we are sinful, ungodly and actually enemies of God. It also says that

... at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. (Romans 5:6-8).

The last wedding I conducted was that of Louise and Elton.  I don’t know how Elton and Louise got together.  I am sure that they told me but I have forgotten. But it probably went something like this: Elton sees Louise and thinks ‘Umm, she’s not so bad looking.’  He get’s to know her and finds that her personality matches her good looks.  He spends time with her and he enjoys her friendship.  So he says, ‘this girl is worth spending the rest of my life with.’ Now they are married.  Elton’s love for Louise may be the real deal but God’s love goes way beyond it.  Let me explain!
       
God looks at us and sees that we are in rebellion against his rule; he looks at our hearts and sees that we are self-centred and self-obsessed; he looks at our lives and sees all sorts of moral failings. Spiritually speaking it is as if we have the most horrendous breath, a huge bulbous nose, greasy skin and the personality of Gengus-Khan. Yet God declares ‘I love him’ ‘I love her’. Elton loves Louise because she is lovely but God offers to love us despite our many blemishes.  Elton loves Louise because she is lovely but God loves us because he is love.
   
Conclusion

'I want to know what love is.'  'This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.'  John Stott explains,

... that only one act of pure love, unsullied by any taint of ulterior motive, has ever been preformed in the history of the world, namely the self-giving of God in Christ on the cross for undeserving sinners. That is why, if we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in a dictionary, but at Calvary.

So don't try to earn God's love, we can't earn it, and we definitely don't deserve it.  Instead, receive that love, delight in that love, be thankful for that love and be transformed by that love.

What really happened at the cross

(The following is an adaption of chapter 3 of John Stott's 'The Cross of Christ')

What on earth did Jesus think he was going to achieve by going to the cross?  What was the point of all it all?  We are going to look at three scenes that explain what happened.

Scene 1:  The Upper Room.

Jesus spent the evening before the cross with his closest disciples.  They gathered to eat the Passover meal.  They would have reclined on cushions at a low table.  There was no servant in attendance and so no-one had washed the disciples' feet.  Jesus gives them a lesson in authentic love and humble service as he puts on a slave's apron, pours water into a basin and does what none of the rest had been willing to do - he washes their feet.

At some stage during that meal he took a loaf of  bread, gave thanks for it, and gave it to his disciples saying, 'This is my body, which was broken for you; do this in remembrance of me.'  In the same way, after the supper had ended, he took a cup of wine, gave thanks for it, passed it to them, and said 'This is my blood of the new covenant which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins ... do this in remembrance of me.' 

Of course he wanted his teaching and miracles to be remembered, but what he want remembered most was that his body was broken and his blood was shed for the forgiveness of sins.  But how would his death result in forgiveness of sin?

Scene 2:  The agony in the Garden

A man called George went to a leader in his church and asked, 'Why did Jesus have to die?'  The leader asked for two weeks to consider that question and came to the conclusion that he did not know why Jesus died.  What's more this leader concluded, from the account of the Garden of Gethsemane, that Jesus didn't know why he had to die either.  That leader spectacularly refused to see the significance of Jesus' words in our second scene. 

In the garden Jesus talks about the cup.  The Old Testament imagery of the cup would have been well known to him.  The cup was a regular symbol of God's wrath.  Jesus was not primarily anxious about the physical pain of being flogged and crucified, the mental distress of being despised and rejected, but rather the spiritual agony of bearing the sin of the world.  He was going to experience the divine judgement that our sins deserved.

We may not know, we cannot tell,
What pains he had to bear;
But we believe it was for us
He hung and suffered there.

Scene 3:  His cry from the Cross

So Jesus was going to die for our sin as he experiences God's holy anger.  This brings up to Golgotha ('The Place of the Skull') and the cross.

Darkness descends for three hours at midday.  In the Bible darkness symbolises separation from the God who is light.  'Outer darkness' was an expression that Jesus used when teaching about hell.  Jesus was enduring a sort of hell.  There is real abandonment, as is seen in the words translated, 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me?'  Yet there is mystery, for even though the God-forsakeness is utterly real, the unity of the Trinity is even then unbroken (Cranfield).

I think that the most comforting word that Jesus speaks from the cross is that translated 'It is finished.'  At the moment of his death something amazing happens in the Temple of Jerusalem - the curtain, which for centuries had symbolised the alienation of sinful people from God, was torn in two from top to bottom.  Christ's people can now approach the throne of grace with confidence.

Conclusions:

Having examined these scenes John Stott draws three conclusions.

Firstly, the cross teaches us that our sin must be extremely serious.

For if there was no way by which the righteous God could righteously forgive our unrighteousness, except that he should bear it himself in Christ, it must have been serious indeed.  It is only when we see this that, stripped of our self-righteousness and self-satisfaction, we are ready to put our trust in Jesus Christ, as the Saviour we urgently need.

Second, God's love must be wonderful beyond comprehension.

God could quite justly have abandoned us to our fate.  He could have left us alone to reap the fruit of our wrongdoing and to perish in our sins.  It is what we deserved.  But he did not.  Because he loved us, he came after us in Christ.  He pursued us even to the desolate anguish of the cross, where he bore our sin, guilt, judgement and death.  It takes a hard and stony heart to remain unmoved by love like that.  It is more than love.  Its proper name is 'grace', which is love to the undeserving.

Third, Christ's salvation must be a free gift.

He 'purchased' it for us at the high price of his own life blood.  So what is their left for us to pay?  Nothing!  Since he claimed that all was now 'finished', there is nothing for us to contribute ... we have to humble ourselves at the foot of the cross, confess that we have sinned and deserve nothing at his hand but judgement, thank him that he loved us and died for us, and receive from him a full and free forgiveness.

Who sent Jesus to the cross?

(The following is an adaption of chapter 2 of John Stott's 'The Cross of Christ')

 

The whole thing is very unsavoury; crucifixion was a humiliating and painful way to die.

Pilate had him scourged. Scourging by itself was horrific. The condemned person was tied to a post and beaten with a leather whip that had been interwoven with pieces of bone and metal. This tore the skin, exposing bones and intestines. Scourging could kill a man.  After the crowd cried 'crucify', Pilate handed him over to the soldiers.
    

The soldiers led him into the governor's residence. They dressed him in a purple robe, placed a crown of thorns on his head and put a sceptre of reeds in his right hand. They blindfolded him; spat on him; slapped him in the face and struck his head. At the same time they challenged him to identify who had hit him.
  

Then they led him out to be crucified. According to Roman custom he was made carry the cross beam. But he was too weakened. A man from Cyrene, in North Africa, was made carry the cross instead. It is interesting that in Mark's gospel Simon is identified as the father of Alexander and Rufus; clearly Simon's sons were knows to Mark's first readers. He could have said to them, 'if you want evidence of this talk to them about what their dad saw.'
   

The prisoner was then stripped naked and laid on his back. He was either nailed or tied to the horizontal beam and his feet to the vertical beam. The cross would then have been hoisted upright and dropped into a socket that had been dug in the ground. Usually a peg or rudimentary seat was provided to take some of the weight off the victims body and prevent it from been torn loose. There the criminal hung, helplessly exposed to intense physical pain, public humiliation, daytime heat and nighttime cold. This torture could last several days. Of course for Jesus it was not the physical pain that wounded him so much as the spiritual pain. 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.'
    

Who sent Christ to the cross?
   
1. Pilate

Pilate was the Roman governor of the province of Judea. He was known to be a man of hot temper, violence and cruelty. He was hated by the Jews that he governed.
    

The Jewish leaders brought Jesus to Pilate saying that he opposed paying taxes to Caesar and claimed to be a king. However, Pilate was convinced of Jesus' innocence. He wriggled in his attempts to release Jesus and appease the crowd. Yet despite his hand-washing he capitulated to the crowds demand and surrendered Jesus to their will. Pilate was responsible!
     

But before we distance ourselves from the sin of Pilate we have to ask some searching questions of ourselves. Have we ever failed to take our stand with Jesus? Have we never compromised when put under pressure?

      

2. The Jewish leaders
 

Pilate was succumbing to the crowd. Peter would later look at the people and declare, 'men of Israel ... You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murder be released to you. You killed the author of life ...' (Acts 3:12-15). 'The very same crowds, it seems, who had given Jesus a tumultuous welcome into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, were within five days screaming for his blood' (Stott). But it was their religious leaders who had incited the people Jewish and who had put the pressure on Pilate to have Jesus crucified.

   

Jesus had upset the religious establishment from the beginning of his ministry. He had called the hypocrites. They accused him of blasphemy, seeing that he made himself equal with God. But their motivation was not simply for the protection of their beliefs and customs. What drove them more than anything else was envy. John Stott writes:

'It is significant that Matthew recounts two jealous plots to eliminate Jesus, the first by Herod the Great at the beginning of his life, and the other by the priests at its end. Both felt their authority under threat. So the sought to 'destroy' Jesus.'    

But before we distance ourselves from the religious leaders and the crowd we need to ask some search questions of ourselves. Have we ever been swept along with the crowd? How do we feel about Jesus' claim of authority over us?
      

'We resent his intrusions into our privacy, his demand for our homage, his expectation of our obedience. Why can't he mind his own business ... And leave us alone? To which he instantly replies that we are his business and that he will never leave us alone. So we too perceive him as a threatening rival, who disturbs our peace, upsets our status quo, undermines our authority and diminishes our sel-respect. We too want to get rid of him' (Stott).
     

3. Judas
   

We could also say that Judas was responsible as he betrayed Jesus. What a sad story Judas is; to be for ever known as the one who betrayed Christ! What cynicism to betray Jesus with a kiss. Judas had spent three years in the company of the most loving and compassionate of men. We are told that he was the groups treasurer but that he stole from the money bag. He is enraged when Jesus is anointed by Mary of Bethany; the money could have been given to the poor. Yet he is insincere, he had been stealing from the money bag. He immediately went to the priests to recoup his loss. He sold Jesus into their hands for thirty pieces of silver, the ransom price for a common slave. Mary loved Jesus with in calculating generosity, Judas betrayed his in his coldly calculated bargin. She poured a year's wages on him, he sold Jesus for barely a third of that amount.
      

But before we distance ourselves from Judas's sin we need to ask some searching questions of ourselves. The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil. It is impossible to serve God and money. Judas chose money over God. Has there ever been times when our possession have meant too much to us?
     

Conclusion: Their sin and ours.

    

Judas 'handed him over' to the priests (out of greed); the priests 'handed him over' to Pilate (out of envy); Pilate 'handed him over' to the soldiers (out of cowardice), and they crucified them. They may have acted in ignorance but they knew enough to be culpable. Before we condemn them let's be honest about ourselves. We too our culpable for we have shared in the sort of sins that handed Jesus over to be crucified. 'We too sacrifice Jesus to our greed like Judas, to our envy like the priests, to our ambition like Pilate.'

   

The old spiritual songs asks, 'were you there when they crucified my Lord?' Yes we were! John Stott writes, 'Before we can begin to see the cross as something done for us (leading to faith and worship), we have to see it as something done by us (leading to repentance). Canon Peter Green wrote, 'only the man who is prepared to own his share in the guilt of the cross may claim his share in its grace.' The nineteenth century Scottish hymn writer expressed it well when he penned:

   

'Twas I that shed the sacred blood;

I nailed him on he tree;

I crucified the Christ of God;

I joined the mockery.

One last thought. We have looked at the role of Pilate, the religious authorities, Judas, and even at our own culpability. But there is a real sense that the person responsible for the death of Christ is none of the above. For God sent his Son to save sinful people like us, Jesus declared that he must die to fulfil his mission. 'Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy; - but the Father, for love!'  It was our sin that sent him there, and his love that took him there!

The Centrality of the Cross

(The following are adapted thoughts on chapter 1 of John Stott's, 'The Cross of Christ.') 

Choosing the symbol

Almost every religion and ideology has a symbol.  The Jews have the Star of David, to remind them that a Messiah will come from that king's line.  The Muslims have the Crescent (or slice of the moon), which symbolises the sovereignty of Allah.  The Soviets had the hammer and sickle, signifying the union of worker and peasant, and of factory and field.  The central symbol for Christians is the cross.

The cross was not always the main symbol for Christians.  You see, many early Christians were persecuted and the cross would have been a dangerous symbol to choose.  For the cross had a direct association with Jesus.  So the Christians used more subtle symbols, like the fish.  Only the initiated would know that the fish (Icthus) was a Greek acronym for 'Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour.'

But from at least the second century onwards Christians drew, painted and engraved the cross.  They also made the sign of the cross on themselves and others.  Although the crucifix (a cross with a figure of Christ attached to it) does not appear to have been used before the sixth century.

One key moment in the church's use of the cross came with the conversion of the Emperor Constantine.  He was the Roman Emperor in the fourth century.  Whether or not Constantine was actually born again is open to debate, he certainly was not exempt from corruption and violence, even killing his own wife and son.  The evening before Constantine went into a famous battle he apparently claimed to have see a cross of light in the sky along with the words 'conquer by this sign.'  He immediately adopted the cross as his sign and had it emblazoned on the standards of his army. 

Is the cross the best symbol to use?

So if the cross was not the first most common symbol of Christianity and is owes some of its prominence to a corrupt emperor is it the best symbol for us to use?  Without doubt it is!  For the cross is central to our message.  As P. T. Forsyth, a congregational minister, wrote in 1909, 'You do not understand Christ till you understand his cross.'

Roman people of that time would have considered the cross a strange symbol for a religion to use.  After all crucifixion was a most shameful and humiliating way to die.  It was reserved for the worst criminals.  Could you imagine a religion setting up in America that had the symbol of an electric chair or the needle from a lethal injection?  Roman citizens were exempt from crucifixion and were discouraged from speaking about it in polite company.  What a strange we are to always want to be reminded of the death of our king!

Jewish people from that time also regarded crucifixion with horror.  They made no distinction between a tree and a cross, and so applied the words of Deuteronomy that stated, 'anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse' (Deut. 21:23).  Jews could not bring themselves to accept that God's Messiah would die under God's curse.  However, the apostle Paul taught the Galatian Christians, explaining, 'Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole”' (Galatians 3:13).  He was cursed for our sin!

The first three gospels are sometimes referred to a the synoptic gospels because of the similarities between them.  These synoptic gospels devote between a quarter and a third of their words to the days surrounding Jesus' death and resurrection.  The gospel of John is often divided in two by scholars, the second part, almost half of the gospel, dealing with the days surrounding the cross and resurrection.  Mark records three occasions where Jesus taught the disciples plainly that he was meant to suffer, die and rise from the dead.  Luke describes how Jesus set his face for Jerusalem, determined to endure what awaited him.  In John, Jesus refers to his time/hour, which is linked with his return to the Father via the cross and resurrection.

Writing to the Corithians the apostle Paul quotes an early creed, saying 'For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures' (1 Corinthains 15:3-4).  The Christians had looked at the Old Testament and had their eyes opened to see that it foretold the Messiah who would die of the cross.  I remember as a young student in a Christian Union being amazed as I listened to a speaker speak on Isaiah 53 (a passage that clearly portrays the cross hundreds of years before Jesus died).

The apostle Paul called his gospel the message of the cross (1 Corinthians 1:18).  He declared, 'we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles' (1 Cor. 1:23).  The cross remains a stumbling block to many.  The cross tells me that our guilt is so serious that nothing less than the death of God's eternal Son was sufficient to deal with it.  We can't truly accept that message and remain proud!  It is a great offence to the self-made person who wants to proclaim their own virtue.  Respectable people want to make Jesus a non-judgemental moral teacher who would affirm our petty acts of charity; rather than a dying God sent to rescue fallen people living as part of an evil world.

Opposition to the cross

There are many opponents of the cross, both ancient and modern.  Muslims see no place for a sin-bearing Saviour.  The Quran states five times that 'no soul shall bear another's burden.'  Muslim theologians commonly claim that God cast a spell over the enemies of Jesus and that Judas or Simon of Cyrene was substituted in his place.  Although Hindus may accept the historicity of the crucifixion, they reject its saving significance.  Gandhi wrote, 'his death on the cross was a great example to the world, but that there was anything like a mysterious or miraculous virtue in it, my heart could not accept.'

The cross is politically incorrect.  It does away with the commonly held notion that we can work our way to heaven.  If there was any other way for people to be put right with God would the Father have sent his beloved Son to die in our place?  I once head a clergyman state that 'God has given us many religions but only one world.'  A year later that same man said that one of the questions we will have to ask in the twenty-first century is 'who is God?'  Needless to say that such a clergyman does not hold to an evangelical understanding of the cross!

Conclusion

Anglican Bishop Stephen Neil claimed that the death of Christ is the central point of history.  Is it the central point of our history?  Is it central to our understanding of who Jesus is?  Do we worship, as they do in the Book of Revelation, 'the Lamb who was slain' (Rev. 5:12)?  Do we remind ourselves every day that our confidence is to be based on a Saviour who rescued us from guilt and sin?  Do we allow this truth fill us with thanksgiving?  Do we let the cross erode our pride and make us humble?  Do we see such sacrificial love as the model that we are called to follow?  Do we live by faith in Son of God who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20)?

I want to finish with some words of assurance from the great eighteenth century evangelist, John Wesley.  He preached about the person who has truly put their faith in the cross:

His sins, all his sins, in thought, word, and deed, are covered, are blotted out, shall not be remembered or mentioned against him any more than if they had not been. God will not inflict on that sinner what he deserved to suffer because the Son of his love hath suffered for him. And from the time we are "accepted through the beloved," "reconciled to God through his blood," he loves and blesses and watches over us for good, even as if we had never sinned.' [from Wesley's sermon entitled 'Justification by faith'].

The Mystery of the Cross

I miss Rachel Scoley (now Steiner).  She used to live in Richhill and attend RMC,but now she is in beautiful Switzerland.  I asked her to write a short reflection on the cross.
Reflection on the cross.

The cross is a mystery. It is a mystery to me. There are moments when I see it in the crystal clear clarity and simplicity of my childhood, and others when it makes absolutely no sense at all. A lot of times I'm ashamed of my lack of reaction to it. I can sing songs, read verses, hear stories and feel........nothing.

And yet without it, I would have nothing.

The whole Gospel doesn't seem like something a human could have thought up, it's not really our style. When Peter got wind of the cross he couldn't believe his ears, “Heaven forbid, Lord,” he said. “This will never happen to you!” (Matthew 16 v 22). Jesus rebuked him strongly, telling him he was seeing things from people's perspective, not God's. It's hard for us to see things from God's perspective. It's not simple. I love how C.S Lewis thinks:

“It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not. The table I am sitting at looks simple: but ask a scientist to tell you what it is really made of – all the atoms and how the light waves rebound from them...................and of course, you find that what we call “seeing a table” lands you in mysteries and complications which you can hardly get to the end of.

….Besides being complicated, reality, in my experience, is usually odd. It is not neat, not obvious, not what you expect.

…....Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed"  (Mere Christianity).

Of course all our discussions, studies, debates, songs, sermons about the cross are important, and they have their place. But if I really want to see what it actually meant that Jesus died then I look at the lives of the people who live it out.

The ones who are filled with hope in the face of tragedy

The ones who risk their lives to tell others about Jesus

The ones who are selfless in their love for others

The ones who aren't afraid to die

The ones who pick themselves up and try again when they have fallen

The ones who forgive the unforgivable.

The cross has completely altered our eternal future. But I pray that even when it is a mystery to me, the reality of the cross will completely alter the way I live today. And that the people around me would see it's power at work in me.