The world can be smugly tolerant of the virtues of Christianity as well as of the vices of Christians, but it cannot tolerate the New Testament message of the Cross. The Cross exposes the blackness of the human heart and the perverseness of man’s will. But at the same time it is the sacrificial act of God for our salvation. The Cross says: God alone saves and in his way only. In the face of Calvary men dare not erect their own righteousness. They must fall prostrate, acknowledging that by the Cross God is both just and the justifier of him who believes in Christ (Rom. 3:26).
But, why the Cross? It seems such an unlikely thing. It is unlovely and apparently irrational and impotent as the means to salvation. The world is not opposed in principle to the conception of the divine, and it willingly concedes the importance of the religious quest. As the Stoics of old, men today find it easy to accommodate new gods to old ideas or to bring old gods up to date. Why the Cross?
The offence of the Cross is its claim to finality. The Cross was no accident of history. Neither was it marginal to the divine purpose. It was not simply an expression of human resentment, nor was it the regrettable climax to a saving life. The Cross was not a divine expedient, nor an afterthought by a deity caught off guard. Calvary was and continues to be central to the divine purpose. Of the Cross the Gospel says, “This and not that is God’s Word; this and not some other is God’s Way.”
Without the Cross we fail to comprehend the meaning of Christ’s life and work. He “must needs” die. He was “delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” In the Cross we join the will of God and unite ourselves to the saving historical events (Mark 8:31; 9:31; 10:32–34; Acts 2:23). Only in this way can we save ourselves from the madness of determinism or the notion that history is a series of meaningless, kaleidoscopic happenings. God decreeing his plan from eternity and working it as Creator and Redeemer is the key to the meaning of the world.
The death of Christ for our sins is the supreme expression of God’s love for us. It is no bare, uninterpreted historical event that we view, because no such thing exists for us. Event and interpretation go together. The Christian Gospel is the apostolic interpretation given by the Holy Spirit: that in Jesus Christ God condescended to our estate. His coming, however, has to do with more than a condescension to suffering amongst us and with us. The Passion was more than the proof of love, and more than the demonstration of how to suffer injustice. Such emphases stop short of the vicarious element of the apostolic message and of the connection the apostles and our Lord made between His death and the forgiveness of our sins.
More than a symbol, the Cross was in fact the climactic divine act for the world’s salvation. It was no mere gesture. Something was done, something that was not the case before. The Cross dealt with evil and sin. To put the matter pointedly, we grasp the meaning of the Cross only when we see the love in which it originated on the one hand and the sin with which it dealt on the other. Paul declares that “God commended his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).
Calvary has the world’s sin in view as real, heinous, and culpable. All theological systems can be characterized by their doctrines of sin. Sin is individual, but its consequences and responsibilities are solidaric in the life of the race. The divine judgment of sin in the biblical revelation is real and terrifying. Because of their sinning “the wrath of God cometh upon the children of disobedience” (Col. 3:6; cf. also Rom. 1:17, 18, 32; 2:9). The divine judgment is vindicative and retributive: vindicative in the sense of vindicating the righteousness of God and retributive in the sense of visiting the evil-doer with the just deserts of his deeds.
His Death And Our Life
The Bible knows nothing of a mere verbal solution of the problem of sin and guilt. The law of God and the judgments of God are the possibilities of freedom. The relations between God and man in Scripture always are viewed as personal, but they can be personal only if they are moral. That is what law, grace, and atonement mean for us and the eternal holy God.
Originating in the love of God for sinners, the Cross deals with the judgment of sins where Christ bears them away in his own body (1 Pet. 2:24). This is why the death of Christ stands out so prominently in Scripture, and this is the meaning of the blood of Christ. The four Gospels all look to Calvary as the climax of our Lord’s life and work. To the New Testament writers the unity of the Old and New Testaments rests heavily upon the Messianic interpretation of Isaiah 53. The central theological truth of the New Testament is that there is an immediate and direct connection between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of sins. All doctrines that bypass atonement finally break their teeth on this fundamental, irreducible biblical truth. The cross of Christ registers for us not the notion of love against wrath, nor of love without wrath, nor of love eclipsing wrath, but of love doing its perfect work in the judgment-death of sin that Christ the Saviour died.
This connection between the death of Christ and the forgiveness of sins can be documented voluminously from the New Testament (cf. Matt. 26:28; Mark 10:45; Acts 5:29–32; 10:39–43; Heb. 9:14, 26, 28; 10:12).
A Classic Passage
But nothing stands out more prominently than the brief, direct, and authoritative word of Paul in 1 Corinthians 15:3—Christ died for our sins. Every word bears pondering.
1. It is “Christ” who died. Thereby the Apostle rejects any bifurcation of the historical Jesus from the eternal Christ. The one Lord Jesus Christ was made the sacrifice for sins.
2. He “died” for our sins. That his life cannot have saved us apart from his death is the thrust of the New Testament. He died our death and in that death we died (2 Cor. 5:14).
3. He died “for” our sins. Thus the vicarious aspect of our Lord’s work is forever established. “For” means both “in the interests of” and “in the place of.” If his death has any relation whatever to our sin, then substitution is involved. He did for us what we were incapable of doing for ourselves. The Death of the Cross was judicial in relation to the penalty of sin and vicarious in relation to its regenerating power in our lives. It is true that we may do something for one another and that Christ may do something for us without involving substitution. But, how can this be true of Christ’s death as related specifically to the guilt of our sins? (cf. Matt. 20:28; Rom. 5:8, 10).
4. He died for “our” sins. It is for men as individuals and for men as a race that Christ died (1 John 2:2).
5. It was for our “sins” that He died. When sin is seen to be sin against God, the relevance of Christ’s cross to the need of humanity will be apparent. God accomplished a once-for-all atonement as the ground of the new relations between himself and the world (Rom. 5:2). We stand on redemption ground. God has done something in Christ that we by faith receive.
Just as a poet or artist must along with his artistry generate a capacity in men to appreciate his work, God does not do a work out of the world but within it. The Cross is tailor-made to human need. It is marvelously relevant to the peril of sinful men. God has loved and God has given. Our part is to believe and have the forgiveness of sins that he has won for us.
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