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The Cross? So What?-John 18 & 19 (Good Friday)
By Charlie Vensel | June 14, 2008
ME:
There is a question I’ve heard a lot over the last few years as I’ve shared my faith with those who have had serious and sincere questions about Christianity. Most of these were not really believers, but open-minded people willing to hear me out. “Why would you want to be a priest (as if it were a choice),” they would ask. They really wanted to understand why I would make such a “career” change, why so many people around the world would devote their lives to following Christ, and why those that did were so insistent that others should too.
The answer I would always give in 2 words is, “The Cross.” Then they would kind of stare, roll their eyes, and perhaps only think it, and a few might even speak it, “Here we go again…More ‘God so loved the world stuff.’”
But they are legitimate questions aren’t they:
• Why would someone change “careers”?
• Why would someone go off and follow a guy who died a horrible death?
• What’s so special about crucifixion; is it supposed to make us feel so guilty we have to follow the guy out of respect?
• What’s the big deal about the cross anyway?
• Why would God not do something about this?
WE:
We have legitimate questions too. Sure, we can all say, “Jesus died on the cross to forgive my sins,” but have we really understood that? Do we really know what that means?
• What difference does the cross really make in our lives?
• Why are we celebrating Jesus’ death on Good Friday? Why is it called “Good”; it is after all, very sad?
• Can’t we just skip to Easter and get to the good stuff?
• Why did Jesus have to be a man?
• Couldn’t God have just snapped his fingers and made everything different?
Can you explain the meaning of the cross in the common vernacular to someone who asks you the questions I’ve been asked?
In a lot of ways, our questions about the cross are not all that different from the world. So tonight, rather than preaching a sermon, I’m going to do a bit of teaching. Besides, you’ve probably had enough of me harping on sin for the last 40 days anyway. Though Good Friday is a solemn occasion, I hope that you will leave here tonight understanding:
• The cross.
• Why it is such a big deal.
• Something more about God the Father.
• Something more about yourselves.
• Something more about God the Son.
• Why it is the symbol of the Christian Faith
GOD’S RIGHTEOUS CHARACTER
To fully understand the cross, we need to consider that God is a just and holy Judge who must punish sin.
Consider the account of Moses in Exodus as he receives the second set of tablets bearing the Ten Commandments; he threw the first set down when he learned of the Israelites dancing around a newly formed golden calf. In Chapter 34, God tells Moses to come back up the mountain and that he will make another set. While there, God tells Moses something about himself, “[God] does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation.” (Exodus 34:7 NIV)
Or remember we learned about Ezekiel’s encounter with the Lord in the Valley of Dry Bones (Ezekiel 37) two weeks ago; that Israel had been judged and reduced to a bone yard, left unattended. But, just a few chapters before, the Israelites were saying that the exile and the destruction of Jerusalem were not their fault; it was because of the sins of the generations before. They were accusing God of injustice. In chapter 18, the Lord reminded them of their own sin declaring that all shall die, “For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son—both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die.” (Ezekiel 18:4 NIV)
So, God is perfectly just. He cannot tolerate sin. It is not something he is capable of doing. He cannot operate outside the boundaries of his righteous character.
MAN & THE PROBLEM
So, to fully understand the cross, we must consider that God is the holy and just Judge, but also that we are born sinners already convicted of our crime.
Yes, we say that we are sinners deserving of wrath, but we don’t really believe it. If we did, the Church would be as full on Good Friday as it will be on Easter Sunday. Look around.
I think we don’t believe it because of a comparison problem. We are a country that loves to compare ourselves to others to see how we are doing. The world around us becomes the rod by which we measure. We even do this with regard to our Christianity, seeing ourselves as better or worse Christians than those around us, don’t we?
And, there is something about human nature that cries out for justice, isn’t there? When we hear of children being abused, or the elderly taken advantage of, we long for people that have done these things to be caught and brought to justice. And, in the name of righteous anger, we have every right to feel that people who do these things should be punished.
But it is not just other people’s sins that deserve punishment. It is our own as well. As long as we compare ourselves to the real sinners, like murderers, robbers, adulterers, child molesters, etc., we look pretty good. But God demands perfect holiness and righteousness. He is the standard, not our neighbor or the prison yard. The fact is we are far more sinful, weak, and evil than we ever dared to believe!
We have a serious problem. When our first parents sinned in the Garden, we sinned. We are born in sin. We are born going to hell; there is no such thing as an innocent child. It is not that we make a few mistakes and God is going to punish us in eternal torment, it is that we are deserving of death out of the womb. We are an affront to God’s holiness and that demands his justice. We are the ones who sin and the ones who will die.
One day, we will all be subject to the judgment of God. No one should want to come before God’s judgment to argue that they are not sinners. No one should argue for God to be just in judging our character.
GOD’S LOVING CHARACTER
So, to fully understand the cross, we must consider that God is the holy and just Judge, that we are born sinners already convicted of our crime, but also that God is a gracious Father who loves to show mercy.
A few minutes ago, we learned of God’s righteous wrath when Moses returned the 2nd time to Mt. Sinai. Once Moses arrived back on the top of Mt. Sinai, the Lord passed in front of Moses saying something else as well, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.” (Exodus 34:6-7 NIV)
And between the Lord expressing his anger of the Israelites in Ezekiel, and the result of the Dry Bones, the Lord told Ezekiel to say to the people, “Say to them [the Israelites], ‘As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live.’” (Ezekiel 33:11 NIV)
So God is both a loving Father and a righteous Judge. We cannot pit the two against each other. They must both be accommodated. Horatius Bonar, the famous Scottish preacher, summed it up like this:
God is a Father, but He is no less a Judge. Shall the Judge give way to the Father, or the Father give way to the Judge? God loves the sinner; but He hates the sin. Shall He sink His love to the sinner in His hatred of the sin, or His hatred of the sin in His love to the sinner? Which is the more unchangeable and irreversible, the vow of pity or the oath of justice? Law and love must be reconciled…the one cannot give way to the other. Both must stand, else the pillars of the universe will be shaken. (Horatius Bonar, The Everlasting Righteousness, p. 3 & 4)
I think many of us see our salvation as God “overlooking” our sin, almost as if he looks out the door of heaven to see if anyone is watching, and lets sinners sneak in the back door so that no one will see him being inconsistent.
Many people speak of God changing his mind in the New Testament. They see the Old Testament as a time when God was angry at the world and that everything he did was all judgment. He finally got tired of trying to be a mean God, and decided he would try a new tactic, “catching more flies with the honey of love.”
But both of those two notions, the overlooking of our sin, or thinking that God had a change of heart, deny God’s justice. It is to call him fickle, it is to speak less of Him than He deserves. It is to denigrate his character. It is idolatry.
No, his justice must prevail! Our sin must be dealt with, the penalty must be paid, and there must be blood for the remission of sins.
So, we see we have a reconciliation problem, do we not? On the one hand, God loves to show mercy, but on the other, he must be just. How will that be handled? How will he not contradict himself?
JESUS & THE SOLUTION
To fully understand the cross, we must know that Jesus is the solution to the problem.
The Good News of the Gospel is that while God is just, he also loves us and did not ever intend to leave us in the mess that we make of our own lives. Jesus Christ came to pay the penalty for us. Theologians refer to this as self-substitution.
In Christ’s death, justice is served and love is poured out.
But why did God the Son have to do this? Why couldn’t it have been just anyone who had lived a pretty good life?
We are back to the sin problem again. God’s standard is absolute perfection. Since we are born in sin, only God himself could live up to that standard; none of us could pay the price.
But why did God the Son have to become a man? Why couldn’t he have just waved his hands in heaven and reversed it all?
• It would have violated justice.
• That is not really love, but a charade.
• He had to be a man since a man, Adam, broke covenant with God through his disobedience….eye for an eye.
• It would require a man to be obedient to all of God’s standards to make an acceptable once and for all sacrifice.
• Everyday sinners are getting the just rewards of the curse when they die. But Jesus’ perfect life undoes the curse when he died on the cross.
• Just as the human Adam was sinful human representative, so Christ is our sinless human representative.
In other words, it took a God-man. It took the perfect obedience of God in the form of a man to reverse the curse of the fall, to get creation back on track, not only back to Eden, but to take us where Eden would have been had there never been a fall.
THE RESULT
So, what happened when Jesus went to the cross?
Consider a couple of images from the New Testament:
The first image comes from the temple. The Old Testament laid down very careful laws as to how sins should be dealt with. In a typical case, the sinner would take an animal, as near to perfection as possible, lay his hands on it and confess his sins. The idea was that the sins would pass from the sinner to the animal, which was then killed.
But, the writer of Hebrews points out that, “it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.” (Hebrews 10:4 NIV) It was only a picture or a shadow. The reality came with the sacrifice of Jesus. Only the blood of Christ, our substitute, can take away our sin, because He alone was the perfect sacrifice for man, since He was the only man to live a perfect life. It is his blood that cleanses us from all sin (1 John 1:7). It has cleansed us from the pollution of our in-born sin.
The second image comes from the marketplace. Debt is not a problem in the world today, but in ancient times, if someone had serious debts, he might be forced to sell himself into slavery to pay them off. It was a common practice.
Suppose a customer came along to the slave market, purchased a slave, and set him free. In so doing, he would be “redeeming him” by paying a ransom price. In a very similar fashion, Jesus paid the ransom price for us. In this way we are set free from the power of sin. It is not that we will never sin again, but its power no longer runs our lives.
The third image comes from the law court. Paul says that through Christ’s death we have been justified (Rom 5:1). Justification means that we have been acquitted in the court room of heaven. God judged us because we were guilty, but then, in His love, He came down as the person of Jesus Christ and paid our sentence for us, dying in our place. He paid the penalty of sin in our stead.
The fourth image comes from the home. Our sin had separated us from God, but the cross brings us back home. The partition of sin has been removed. The veil of the temple has been rent. We have access to God again.
And not only has Jesus delivered us from the sin’s pollution, power, penalty, and partition, but he will deliver us from the presence of sin. Through the cross, we not only have access to the Father through the son, but we will one day spend eternity with him in the new heavens, the new earth…the new Eden.
YOU:
So what does this all mean for us? What can we take away?
First, we must see ourselves as the Dry Bones in Ezekiel’s Valley. If you don’t see the absolute holiness of God, the magnitude of our debt, the necessity of God’s just punishment of your sin, and therefore the utter hopelessness of our condition, then the knowledge of our pardon and deliverance will not be amazing and electrifying. We are far more sinful, weak and evil than we ever dared to believe!
Once we see Christ as the bearer of our foolishness, we gain freedom to let go of our pretense, self-made happiness, self-painted beauty, self-generated dignity, and self-defined rightness.
The only way we can see the glory of grace is to see both his law and his love fulfilled on the cross…both meet and are fulfilled in Christ’s death. God’s perfect love for the sinner and God’s perfect justice are dealt out at the same time. It should leave us speechless.
Second, we must see how much we are loved. We must see the love God has for us in sparing us that wrath by providing a sacrifice for the atonement of our sin, his only begotten Son. This love cost us nothing, but it cost him everything.
We are far more loved and accepted than we ever dared to dream! Unless we see the absolute freeness of our salvation and its richness and its permanence, then we will not have the security of soul and conscience to face just how much sin is really in our heart.
Third, on the cross, he identified with us in suffering. Let us never say that God does not understand the pain we experience living in a fallen world. The cross is about redemption and progress in the midst of evil. It is our model for persevering in the face of adversity. And though we may cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” we remember the rest of Psalm 22 and see deliverance, power, the defeat of sin, and victory for God’s people.
Fourth, on the cross, he set an example of sacrificial love. No greater love has anyone than he who lays down his life for his friends (John 15:13). That is our example as to how we are to live with our redeemed spirits; poured out for one another, poured out for the Church, poured out for God.
• Jesus did not go to the cross after he had his house paid off or his 401k established.
• He did not go to the cross once his mother was taken care of.
• He did not go to the cross because he had accomplished all his dreams and goals first.
• He did not go out of convenience.
• He went to the cross because God so loved the world.
• He went out of obedience.
• He went out of love.
• He went to disarm the evil in the world.
• He went because he was needed…We are to serve for these same reasons.
THE SYMBOL OF OUR FAITH
So now, do you see why the cross, this symbol of death, is the symbol of the Church? It is the summary of the Gospel in one simple picture:
• There is a God who is the just and holy judge.
• We cannot stand before him, and must die to pay our penalty.
• There is a God who loves his creation and cannot watch us perish.
• There is a God who cares enough to sacrifice himself on our behalf.
• There is a way of life that comes through death, dying to self.
• There is a way of life that comes by the one who was lifted up.
• There is a God who requires no more sacrifice…the cross is now empty.
• There is a God who opens the door for us to have life as it was intended to be.
• There is a God who modeled what the Christian life is to look like through self-denial and sacrificial love.
• There is a God who promises us a new home in the resurrection.
CONCLUSION
I hope that you have learned something tonight. I hope that you never look up here behind the altar again, and not notice the cross. I hope you see crosses everywhere.
I hope you feel miserable for a moment about your sin, but then turn to the great hope that is in our Lord.
The cross is a symbol of a lot of things, the greatest of which is God’s love for us. Be encouraged by the cross!
Amen.
Topics: Good Friday, John |