1-24 The Inspiration Of The Cross In Daily Life
The love of Christ in the cross is to have a continual inspiration
upon us- endless love, countless moments of re-inspiration, are to come
to us daily because of the cross. This is how
central it is to daily life. We are to love each other in on ongoing
way, as Christ loved us in His death in that once-off act (Jn.
15:12,17). The combination of the present and aorist tenses of agapan [‘to love’] in these verses proves the point. Thus our obedience to Christ in loving each other is exemplified by the obedience of Christ (Jn. 15:10). Quite simply, something done 2000 years ago really does affect us now.
There is a powerful link across the centuries, from the darkness of the
cross to the lives we live today in the 21st century. “By his
knowledge", by knowing Christ as He was there, we are made righteous
(Is. 53:11). As Israel stood before Moses, they promised: “All the
words which the Lord hath spoken will we do". When Moses then sprinkled
the blood of the covenant upon them- and this incident is quoted in
Hebrews as prophetic of the Lord’s blood- they said the same but more
strongly: “All the words which the Lord hath spoken will we do and be obedient"
(Ex. 24:3,7). It was as if their connection with the blood inspired
obedience. Likewise the communication of God’s requirements was made
from over the blood sprinkled mercy seat (Ex. 25:22)- another foretaste
of the blood of Christ. Quite simply, we can’t face the cross of Christ
and not feel impelled towards obedience to that which God asks of us.
The
image of soldiers in their time of dying has often been used afterwards
as a motivation for a nation: “Earn this" is the message their faces
give. And it is no more true than in the death of the Lord. “The love
of Christ", an idea elsewhere used of His death (Jn. 13:1; 2 Cor.
5:14,15; Rom. 8:32,34,35; Eph. 5:2,25; Gal. 2:20; Rev. 1:5 cp. 1 Jn.
4:10), constrains us; it doesn’t force us, but
rather shuts us up unto one way, as in a narrow, walled path. We cannot
sit passively before the cross of the Lord. That “love of Christ" there
passes our human knowledge, and yet our hearts can be opened, as Paul
prayed, that we might know the length, breadth and height of it. The
crucified Son of God was the full representation of God. The love of
Christ was shown in His cross; and through God's enlightenment we can know the height, length, breadth of that love (Eph. 3:18,19).
Nothing,
whatever, not even life, our sins and dysfunctions of human life, can
separate us from the love of Christ towards us in His death (Rom.
8:35). His cross is therefore the constant rallying point of our faith,
in whatever difficulty we live through. The resolve and strength we so
need in our spiritual path can come only through a personal
contemplation of the cross. Do we seek strength to endure unjust
treatment and the grace to submit cheerfully to the loss of what we
feel is rightfully ours? Be it discrimination in the workplace,
persecution from the Government, perceived abuse or degradation by our
partner or family...? Let the cross be our endless inspiration: “For it
is better, if the will of God be so [a reference to the Lord’s struggle
in Gethsemane being our struggle], that you suffer for well doing...for
Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust" (1
Pet. 3:17,18). Remember how under persecution, the faithful love not
their lives unto death because of their experience of the blood of the
lamb shed for them (Rev. 12:11).
Or do we live in the
loneliness of old age or serious illness, fearing death and the
uncertainty of our brief future? Again, the cross of Jesus is our
rallying point. “For God has not appointed us to wrath, but to obtain
salvation by our Lord Jesus Christ, who died for us, that, whether we
wake or sleep, we should live together with him" (1 Thess. 5:8-10).
Because we are in Christ, His death was not an isolated historical
event. We also are weak with Him (2 Cor. 13:4 RV), such is the identity
between us and Him. When Paul reflected upon his own sickness [which
the RVmg. calls his stake / cross in the flesh], he could say in all
sober truth that he gloried in his weakness, because his identity with
the weakness of Christ crucified also thereby identified him with the
strength and power of the risen Lord (2 Cor. 11:9).
Do
we feel that life is just pointless, an endless round of childcare,
working all day doing in essence the same job for 30 years, a trudging
through an endless tunnel until our mortality catches up on us? We were
redeemed by the precious blood of Christ from the “vain way of life
handed down from the fathers" (1 Pet. 1:18), from the frustration of
this present life . The word used for “vain" is that used by the LXX
for the ‘vanity’ of life as described in Ecclesiastes, and for idol
worship in Lev. 17:7 and Jer. 8:19. We have been redeemed from it all!
Not for us the life of endlessly chasing the rainbow’s end, slavishly
worshipping the idols of ever bigger homes, smarter technology...we
were redeemed from the vanity of life “under the sun" by the precious
blood of Christ. We were bought out of this slavery, even if in the
flesh we go through its motions. Knowing this, we the redeemed, the
bought out from vanity, shouldn’t spend our hours in front of the
television or doing endless crosswords, or frittering away the time of
life as the world does. James foresaw that a man could appear to be
religious, and yet have a religion that was “vain" (James 1:26)-
because he didn’t appreciate that the cross has bought him out of
vanity. His death was so that He might deliver us from this
present evil world (Gal. 1:4); because of the Lord’s crucifixion, Paul
saw himself as crucified unto the world, and the world unto him (Gal.
6:14). The Lord Jesus looked out across the no man’s land between the
stake and the crowd; He faced the world which crucified Him. We simply cannot
side with them. To not separate from them is to make the cross in vain
for us; for He died to deliver us out of this present world. The pull
of the world is insidious; and only sober reflection upon the cross
will finally deliver us from it. It’s a terrifying thought, that we can
make the power of the cross invalid. It really is so, for Paul warned
that preaching the Gospel with wisdom of words would make “the cross of
Christ...of none effect" (1 Cor. 1:17). The effect of the cross, the
power of it to save, is limited in its extent by our manner of
preaching of it. And we can make “Christ", i.e. His cross, of “none
effect" by trusting to our works rather than accepting the gracious
salvation which He achieved (Gal. 5:4).
Do we feel
simply not appreciated? As a hassled and harried mother, as a hard
working dad who toils to provide for the family he rarely sees, as the
person who feels their ideas and abilities are always trashed…? The
tragedy of the Lord’s death was that when He died, there was nobody to
recount His life, as there usually was at a funeral (Is. 53:8 RVmg.).
The greatest life that was ever lived was so misunderstood and
unappreciated and hated and hurriedly buried, that there was nobody
even to give Him an appreciative funeral speech. In our struggle to
feel appreciated, we share both His and His Father’s sufferings and
pain. The cross was the ultimate example of a Man being misjudged and
misunderstood and condemned unjustly. When we feel like that, and the
nature of our high speed, superficially judging society means that it
seems to happen more in this generation than any other [and with deeper
consequences]… then we know we are sharing the sufferings of the Lord.
Are
we just caught up in our daily work, slave to the corporations who
employ us? 1 Cor. 7:23 begs us not to become the slaves of men, because
Christ bought us with His blood. Young people especially need to be
influenced by this as they chose their career path and employers.
Through the cross of Christ, the world is crucified to us (Gal. 6:14
RV).
Do we struggle to live the life of true love, to
endure people, even our brethren; are we simply tired of people, and
living the life of love towards them? Does the past exist within us as
a constant fountain of bitterness and regret? “Let all bitterness, and
wrath and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you,
with all malice: and be kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving
one another, even as God for Christ’s sake [the sake of His cross] has
forgiven you...walk in love, as Christ also has loved us, and has given himself for us"
(Eph. 4:31-5:2). His cross affects our whole life, our deepest thought
and action, to the extent that we can say with Paul, in the silence of
our own deepest and most personal reflection: “I live, yet not I, but
Christ lives in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh, I live
by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me"
(Gal. 2:20).
Do we find a true unity with our brethren impossible? He died that
He might gather together into one all God’s children (Jn. 11:52).
Before His cross, before serious and extended personal meditation upon
it, all our personal differences will disappear. A divided ecclesia is
therefore one which is not centred upon the cross. Whether or not we
must live our church experience in such a context, the barriers which
exist within us personally really can be brought down by the
humbling experience of the cross, and the way in which we are forced to
see how that death was not only for us personally. The wonder of it was
and is in its universal and so widely-inclusive nature.
Is
humility almost impossible for us, lifted up as we may be by our own
sense of worth and achievement? Is a true service of all our
brethren almost impossible for us to contemplate? Consider Mt.
20:26-28: “Whosoever will be great among you, let him be your
minister...your servant: even as the Son of man came not to be
ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for
many". This is our pattern- to give out, with no expectation of
appreciation or response. And the cross of Christ alone can inspire us
in this.
Do we struggle with some secret vice, in the
grip of habitual sin? The cross convicts of sin, for we are impelled by
it to follow Christ in going forth “without the camp" (Heb. 13:13),
following the path of the leper who had to go forth without the camp
(Lev. 13:46). He “his own self bare our sins in his own body on the
tree, that we might die to sin [Gk.] and live to
righteousness" (1 Pet. 2:24). He died for our sins, there all our
weakness met their death in His death- so close was the association
between Him and our sins. Our response to that is to put those sins to
death in our bodies, as He put them to death in His on the
tree. Speaking of the cross, the Lord said that for our sakes He
sanctified Himself [as a priest making an offering], that we might be
sanctified in truth (Jn. 17:19). Quite simply, if we behold and believe
the cross, we will respond. He mused that if He didn’t allow Himself to
fall to the ground and die, no fruit could be brought forth (Jn.
12:24). The fact He did means that we will bring forth fruit. It could
be that the reference in Jn. 7 to the Holy Spirit being given at the
Lord’s death (His ‘glory’), as symbolized by the water flowing from His
side, means that due to the cross we have the inspiration to a holy,
spiritual way of life. It is not so that His death released some
mystical influence which would change men and women whether or not they
will it; rather is it that His example there inspires those who are
open to it. We have been reconciled to God through the cross of Jesus,
and yet therefore we must be reconciled to God, and take the message of
reconciliation to others. What has been achieved there in prospect we
have to make real for us, by appropriating it to ourselves in
repentance, baptism and a life of ongoing repentance (2 Cor. 5:18-20
cp. Rom. 5:10; 2 Cor. 5:14,15).
Perhaps we feel that
our preaching somehow lacks a sense of power and compulsion of others.
Try explicitly telling them about the cross. The apostles recounted the
fact of the cross and on this basis appealed for people to be baptized
into that death and resurrection. There is an impelling power, an
imperative, in the wonder and shame of it all. Joseph saw the Lord’s
dead body and was compelled to offer for that body to be laid where his dead
body should have laid. In essence, he lived out the message of baptism.
He wanted to identify his body with that of the Lord. He realized that
the man Christ Jesus was truly his representative. And so he wanted to
identify with Him. And properly presented, this will be the power of
response to the preaching of the cross today. “Through one act of
righteousness [the cross] the free gift came unto all men to
justification of life" (Rom. 5:18)- yet “all men" only receive that
justification if they hear this good news and believe it. This is why
we must take the Gospel “unto all men" (surely an allusion to the great
commission)- so that, in that sense, the wondrous cross of Christ will
have been the more ‘worthwhile’. Through our preaching, yet more of
those “all men" who were potentially enabled to live for ever will
indeed do so. This is why the Acts record so frequently connects the
preaching of the cross with men’s belief. Negatively, men do not
believe if they reject the “report" of the crucifixion (Jn. 12:38,39).
Do
we struggle to be truly generous to the Lord’s cause, and to turn our
words an vague feelings of commitment into action? Corinth too were
talkers, boasting of their plans to give material support to the poor
brethren in Jerusalem, but doing nothing concrete. Paul sought to shake
them into action by reminding them of “the grace of our Lord Jesus
Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor" on
the cross (2 Cor. 8:9). Corinth had few wealthy members, but Paul knew
that the cross of Christ would inspire in them a generous spirit to
those even poorer than they. The richer should be made poor by what the
Lord did, Paul is saying- not harmlessly giving of their pocket money.
For He gave in ways that hurt Him, ways that were real, meaningful and
thereby effective and powerful.
Do we struggle with the
ultimate fairness of God? For all we have written about the problem of
suffering, it seems to me that no intellectual answer is enough when
one personally experiences real tragedy. The sending of Jesus to die in
the way that He did was surely one form of God’s response to it. In the
death of the cross, God showed His entering into our suffering and
sense of loss and hurt.
Do we fear that we lack a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus? Do we read of Him, but rarely if ever feel
Him? Reflection upon His cross should elicit in us an up welling of
pure gratitude towards Him, an awkwardness as we realize that this Man
loved us more than we love Him...and yet within our sense of debt to
Him, of ineffable, unpayable debt, of real debt, a debt infinite and
never to be forgotten, we will have the basis for personal response to
Him as a person, to a knowing of Him and a loving of Him, and a serving
of Him in response. If we feel and know this, we cannot but preach the
cross of Christ.
But do we feel ashamed that we just
don’t witness as we ought to? There is no doubt that the cross and
baptism into that death was central to the preaching message of the
early brethren. Knowing it, believing it, meant that it just had to be
preached. The completeness and reality of the redemption achieved is
expressed in Hebrews with a sense of finality, and we ought not to let
that slip from our presentation of the Gospel either. There in the
cross, the justice and mercy of God are brought together in the
ultimate way. There in the cross is the appeal. Paul spoke of “the
preaching of the cross", the word / message which is the
cross (1 Cor. 1:18). Some of the early missionaries reported how they
could never get any response to their message until they explained the
cross; and so, with our true doctrinal understanding of it, it is my
belief that the cross is what has the power of conversion. A man cannot
face it and not have a deep impression of the absoluteness of the
issues involved in faith and unbelief, in choosing to accept or reject
the work of the struggling, sweating, gasping Man who hung on the
stake. It truly is a question of believe or perish. Baptism into that
death and resurrection is essential for salvation. Of course we must
not bully or intimidate people into faith, but on the other hand, a
preaching of the cross cannot help but have something compulsive and
urgent and passionate about it. For we appeal to men on God’s behalf to
accept the work of the cross as efficacious for them .Our preaching
will then never fail in urgency and entreaty. It will concern the Man
who had our nature hanging there perfect, full of love, a light in this
dark world....and as far as we perceive the wonder of it all, as far as
this breaks in upon us, so far we will hold it forth to this world. The
Lord wasn’t preaching good ideas; He was preaching good news.
The cross means that we have a faith to share which is a faith to live
by all our days; not just a faith to die by, a comfort in our time of
dying, as we face the endgame.
The cross alone can shake
people out of their indifference, and force them to make some election
in this world, instead of sliding dully forward as in a dream. Life is
a business we are all apt to mismanage; either living recklessly from
day to day, or suffering ourselves to be gulled out of our moments by
habits, the TV, life... There is something stupefying in the recurrence
of unimportant things. And it is only through the provocations of the
Lord and His cross that we are lead to take an outlook beyond daily
concerns, and comprehend the narrow limits, and great possibilities of
our existence. It is the power of the Lord and His cross to induce such
moments of clear insight. He, there, is the declared enemy of all
living by reflex action. He, there, can electrify His readers and
viewers into an instant unflagging activity of service. Those who
ignore the challenge of the cross turn to their “own way" (Is. 53:6)-
the Hebrew means a custom, habitual way of life. This is what stops us
responding to the radical challenge of the cross- our basic
conservatism, our love of what we know and are used to. Yet the cross
can shake us from this.
Do we feel that our conscience
is so dysfunctional and our heart so hardened in some places that
nothing much can touch us and motivate us like it used to? The cross
can touch and transform the hardest and most damaged heart. Apart from
many real life examples around of this, consider the Biblical case of
Pilate. Jewish and Roman historians paint a very different picture of
Pilate than what we see in the Biblical record. Philo describes him as
“ruthless, stubborn and of cruel disposition", famed for “frequent
executions without trial" (1).
Josephus speaks of him as totally despising the Jews, stealing money
from the temple treasury and brutally suppressing unruly crowds(2).
Why then does he come over in the Gospels as a man desperately
struggling with his conscience, to the extent that the Jewish crowds
manipulate him to order the crucifixion of a man whom he genuinely
believed to be innocent? Surely because the person of the Lord Jesus
and the awfulness of putting the Son of God to death touched a
conscience which appeared not to even exist. If the whole drama of the
death of Jesus could touch the conscience and personality of even
Pilate, it can touch each of us. Just compare the words of Philo and
Josephus with how Mark records that Pilate was “amazed" at the
self-control of Jesus under trial (Mk. 15:5); how he almost pleads with
his Jewish subjects for justice to be done: “Why, what evil has he
done?" (Mk. 15:14). Compare this with how Philo speaks of Pilate as a
man of “inflexible, stubborn and cruel disposition", famous for
“abusive behaviour… and endless savage ferocity"(3).
Mt. 27:25 describes how Pilate washes his hands, alluding to the Jewish
rite based in Deuteronomy, to declare that he is innocent of the blood
of a just man. But Josephus records how Pilate totally despised Jewish
religious customs and sensibilities, and appeared to love to commit
sacrilege against Jewish things. And in Luke’s record, Pilate is
recorded as pronouncing Jesus innocent no less than three times.
Do
we feel so hurt by others that we find forgiveness impossible, sensing
an ever-encroaching bitterness always getting closer to gripping our
whole lives? All around this sad world, there seems an endless round of
revenge being danced out. The knock someone receives is paid back by
them on someone else, and often this ends up in another person being
made a scapegoat, someone incapable of defending themselves, who must
take all the knocks when they can’t pay them back. People
subconsciously are obeying a compelling law- to get even. To pay back
the hard words the postman gave you with hard words to the girl in the
supermarket, and then to scapegoat [say] a child at church for messing
up the church service… But the point is, the Lord Jesus is set up as
the one and only scapegoat for human sin. On the cross He was the
ultimate One who took all the knocks without paying back. For those who
truly believe this to the point of feeling it deep within them, they
are freed from the law of revenge- and thus they become free to live
life spontaneously, for fun, to not be ashamed of fulfilling life’s
natural needs. The cycle of revenge and paying back has to be resolved
in sacrifice- many societies have shown that. I was a few times in far
northern Russia, and it was fascinating to hear the traditions of the
Chukchi people. In the past, they say, when a big crime was committed
and the criminal convicted, an innocent person had to be
sacrificed. The study of primitive societies reveals this basic human
need for a scapegoat. There was a psychological value to the Mosaic
rite of the scapegoat (Lev. 16:10). All the sins, all the grudges that
called for revenge, were to be placed upon that animal, and it was
released into the desert. They could watch it scampering away into the
bush. This is how we are to understand the placing of human sin- yes,
the sins committed against you this day by others- upon the Lord as He
hung on the cross. And we must remember that “Vengeance is mine
[not ours, not the state’s], and requital" (Dt. 32:35). That taking of
vengeance, that requital, was worked out by God on the cross. There the
Lord Jesus was clothed with the ‘garments of vengeance’ (Is. 59:17);
the day of the crucifixion was “the day of vengeance" (Is. 63:4). This
is one reason why God doesn’t operate a tit-for-tat requital of our
sins upon our heads- because He dealt with sin and His vengeance for it
in the cross, not by any other way. Hence David calls God the “God of
revenge", the one alone to whom vengeance belongs (Ps.
94:1,3). Our response to all this is to believe that truly vengeance is
God and therefore we will not avenge ourselves (Rom. 12:19).
I take this to apply to all the micro-level ‘takings of vengeance’
which we so easily do in our words, body language, attitudes etc., in
response to the hurt received from others. The cross alone enables us
to break the cycle.
Finally, and, I think, most
relevantly. Do we, as men and women all too taken up with our lives,
raising families, earning money... lost in the absorption of our daily
work, as computer programmers, drivers, factory workers, housewives,
business executives...do we in our heart of hearts feel that we just
don’t have the faith to believe that truly we are forgiven, and will be
saved? I know I am talking to the heart of every reader here. Are we
like that? I am, and I suspect most of us are. Not that this makes me
feel any better about my own inadequacy of faith. Again, let the cross
of Christ be our inspiration. For there, “when we were yet without
strength, in due time, Christ died for the ungodly". He gave His life
there, in the way that He gave it, without any consideration for our
personal merits. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we
were yet sinners, Christ died for us". The Lord gave His all for us,
the totally unworthy. And with abounding and matchless logic, Paul
continues: “Much more then, being now justified by his blood [i.e. no
longer being so worthless and undeserving, but counted as so much
better through the atonement He achieved], we shall be saved from wrath
through him". In this knowledge we can truly have as an helmet the hope
of sure salvation. If God gave His Son, and so gave His Son, how much more shall He not with Him freely give us all things?
The
knowledge and experience of the love of Christ is the end result of all
our Bible searching. There’s a well known story about the great
theologian Karl Barth, who probably penned more words of theology than
any other writer in the 20th century. Towards the end of his life, he
gave a lecture and invited questions. He was asked something to the
effect: ‘After a lifetime of Biblical study, what’s your single
greatest theological insight?’. After a pause he replied, to a hushed
audience: ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so’. To
know that love of Christ, with the full assurance of salvation which it
involves, is the end result of all our questioning, our study, our
Bible searching, our hunting through concordances, listening to talks,
reading studies.
Notes
(1) Philo, Embassy to Gaius 301-2, Loeb edition, vol. 10, translated by F.H. Colson (London: Heinemann, 1962).
(2) Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews
18.63, Loeb edition, Vol. 9, translated by L. H. Feldman (Cambridge,
Mass: Harvard University Press, 1965).
(3) See James M. Robinson, The Problem Of History In Mark (London: SCM, 1957) and T.J. Weeden, Mark: Traditions In Conflict (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971).
