Crucifixion # 5

Four Spans in the Bridge of Salvation

The theme of the entire Bible is the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. "Cut the Bible anywhere and it bleeds; it is red with redemption truth." A suffering, crucified Christ was the Christ preached by the Apostles and to them His sufferings were a vital factor in the sinner's salvation because of their expiatory nature. Paul testifying before King Agrippa preached a suffering Christ.

Acts 26:22, 23, "Having therefore obtained help of God, I continue unto this day, witnessing both to small and great, saying none other things than those which the prophets and Moses did say should come: That Christ should suffer, and the he should be the first that should rise from the dead."

Peter told us that it was through the victorious, atoning sufferings of Christ that men were brought back to God.

1 Peter 3: 18, "For Christ also hath once suffered for sins, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh, but quickened by the Spirit."

John taught that there was no cleansing power except in the blood of Christ shed on Calvary.

1 John 1:7, "The blood of Jesus Christ his Son cleanseth us from all sin."

Respectable sinners will flock to the church today to hear ministers preach on the life of Jesus; many are even not averse to listening to an occasional sermon of the death of Christ, providing that death is preached only as the greatest example of sacrificial love, or as the culminating event in a life of obedience, or as an act of martyrdom in a good cause. But in this age there is a widespread refusal on the part of the man in the pew, and on the part of the man in the pulpit a conspicuous rejection of the Biblical, evangelical teaching regarding the death of the Cross. The reason for this will grow more apparent as we proceed with our studies.

The Cross of Christ - The Great Divide

The Cross of Christ makes a clean cut cleavage between the two spheres, the sphere of death, darkness and disorder, and the sphere of life, light and liberty, and it challenges sinners to decide in which they purpose to live. The Cross of Christ is the battlefield on which the conflict between satan and God over the sovereignty of human lives is being waged and it compels men to take sides either for or against God. The Cross of Christ marks the boundary line between the kingdom of satan and the Kingdom of God and it calls subjects in the one to come out and to become subjects in the other. The Cross of Christ finds men living on the plane of the natural and it  opens a way for them to live on the plane of the spiritual and then appeals to them to enter the open door. The Cross of Christ is the Great Divide: it separates men into two classes, the unsaved and the saved.

1 Corinthians 1:18, "For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God."

The Cross of Christ - A Double Exposure

The Cross of Christ is the place of exposure. There as nowhere else is revealed the hatred of man for God and the love of God for man. Sin is seen at its worst and love is seen at its best in the Cross. Man's sin and God's love both reach a climax on Calvary. There the hideousness of the one and the glory of the other are brought out into sharpest relief.

Acts 2:23, "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken, and by wicked hands have crucified and slain."

The desperate, despicable wickedness of the human heart is uncovered at Calvary. All the rebellion, self-will and enmity of the natural man found vent in this one act. In the crucifixion of the Holy One sin came out into the open and disclosed its inwardness.

"Him - ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain." Sin nailed the Saviour to a Cross and by doing so exposed to the world its ugly hideousness. Sinners stained their hands with the blood of their Saviour and thereby revealed the length and breadth, the height and depth of the infamy of sin.

However, the sin of man could not outstrip the love of God. Nor could sin defeat God by taking Him unawares. Before that hydra-headed monster had raised its head in rebellion against God He had accomplished its defeat. "Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God." In the eternal counsels of the Godhead and Cross of Christ was set up in love before man and was made or the world created. In the atoning death of the well-beloved Son on the Cross of Calvary God was fully prepared to assume responsibility for sin and its consequences. God, the Father, spelled out in capital letters on the Cross His unquenchable love for sinners.

The Cross of Christ reveals not only the love of the Father but the love of the Son as well. In the  lament over Jerusalem, in the parable of the father's love for the prodigal, in the tender look at the denying Peter, and in the pathetic question to Judas the betrayer, Jesus Christ showed His sorrow for sin and the outreaching of His loving heart to the sinner. But only in the laying down of His sinless life in death as the sinner's Substitute do we see the perfect outshining of His infinite, limitless love. With the most perfect apprehension of what the sin of man was on the one hand, and of what the mind of God toward sin was on the other and of sin's due from God, there went up from the depths of Christ's sinless humanity a perfect Adam to the righteous judgment of God against sin, and a willingness to bear that judgment.

The Cross of Christ is the heart of God broken by sin. It tells you and me that the God who must judge and punish sin will save and forgive the sinner. It discovers to us the unfathomable depths of God's love.

Romans 5:8, "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us."

John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son."

Galatians 1:3, 4, "Our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father."

~Ruth Paxson~

(continued with # 6 - "The Cross of Christ - The Place of Victory")