What a mighty wonder is the cross! What a place it has in the Scriptures! Well might the Apostle Paul cry out, “God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me, and I to the world” (Gal. 6:14). Well might Sir John Bowring sing,
“In the cross of Christ I glory,
Tow’ring o’er the wrecks or time;
All the light of sacred story
Gathers round its head sublime.”
It is the spirit of Paul’s outburst, the spirit of Bowring’s hymn, that is the irresistible motive force of Christianity. It is that motive force that has led men and women by the thousands to forsake the amenities and luxuries of life in order to devote themselves to the spread of the Gospel. No cross, no Christ. No cross, no Christianity. No cross, no crown. Without the cross there is nothing but cold, blank Unitarianism, and that comes from the bottomless pit, and leads to it.
We need to raise a warning note today. The enemy seeks to empty the cross of its true meaning. Turn the rugged cross into the crucifix, cover it with gold, adorn it with gems and pearls, and it has lost its power. The cross is never the emblem of what is worldly and fashionable.
We are told today that the cross is not atoning, propititiary, sacrificial. If it is not that, we have nothing; we have no cross at all. Any person who can aver that the cross is not atoning, and limits it to the setting forth of an example, is an apostate from the faith. A school boy reading the Bible can see that the Scriptures, from one end to the other, present the cross in its atoning value.
Let us put the subject under the seven heads suggested by a gospel preacher, long since departed.
The cross of Christ is …
THE MAXIMUM OF MAN’S GUILT.
Men have committed terrible crimes in the history of this world, but wickedness rose to its utmost height, when the Lord of glory was gibbetted upon a cross, and put to death. Perfect love was answered by terrible hate. Divine light came in all its splendour, and the darkness could not endure it.
The blessed Lord went about “doing good, and healing all that were oppressed of the devil,” preaching the glad tidings of the kingdom of God, and—they crucified Him.
The leaders of the nation were clamorous for His death. The Roman Governor knowingly and grossly perverted justice, and condemned the Innocent. There never was in the history of the world a crime of such magnitude. The world is verily guilty of the murder of the Son of God, and the day of reckoning will assuredly come for every member of the human race, who having heard the gospel has refused it. Woe betide the man or woman who takes side with a world whose hands are stained with the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ.
But we have another side to the cross of Christ. What constituted man’s greatest sin has become the occasion of untold blessing. The cross of Christ is …
THE MANIFESTATION OF GOD’S LOVE.
Human love is the one thing that keeps any measure of sweetness in the relationships of life. But what shall be said of divine love; love that would not shrink from expressing itself, even at the cost of the death of the Son of God under the wrath of God? What a message to give to poor fallen man that “GOD IS LOVE!” (1 John 4:16). Search the writings of the ancients, and you will find that none of them in their searching after God rose to the height of the fisherman John from the shores of Galilee’s lake, when he penned these sublime words. Surely it was the revelation of God in Christ that brought him to this knowledge.
There was man’s side of the cross, a crime of the greatest magnitude: there was God’s side of the cross, the manifestation of His love. If the cross had been an example of devotedness, which we are called to follow, simply that and nothing more, what then was the meaning of the bitter cry wrung from the depths of the heart of the Son of God, “My God, My God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” Surely God would not have forsaken His faithful Servant in the hour of His supremest need
The martyrs have ever testified to wonderful, upholding, sustaining grace in the hour of their need.
The truth is that Christ suffered to manifest God’s love in bearing our judgment. “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 4:9-10).
Why then was the cross necessary as the expression of God’s love to men? Why could He not express His love without it? There is a school of theologians today which teaches that God being love, He can never put any creature of His into an everlasting hell; that somehow or other all will be eventually blessed, some going so far as to deny the very existence of hell, though the Son of God solemnly affirmed its existence again and again. This school teaches a maudlin sort of love that is derogatory to God. It is an evidence of the advance of the apostasy that is prophesied of in the Scriptures.
This brings us to our third head, that the cross of Christ is …
THE MAINTENANCE OF GOD’S GLORY.
God in His wisdom passed the sentence of death upon the sinner. It is evident therefore, that nothing short of death can expiate the sinner’s guilt. Further it is evident that the One who atones for sin must Himself be sinless, or else He would be under the penalty of death on His own account, and therefore incapable of dying an atoning death for others.
The Lord Jesus was the Holy One who died as a propitiation, and thereby God declared His righteousness “for the remission of sins that are past [this referring to the sins of the Old Testament believers] through the forbearance of God; to declare … at this time His righteousness: that He might be just and the Justifier of him which believes in Jesus” (Rom. 3:25-26). Could anything be clearer than this? When our Lord Jesus uttered on the cross the words, “IT IS FINISHED,” divine justice was satisfied, atonement was made, God’s righteousness was vindicated, and grace now reigns “THROUGH RIGHTEOUSNESS to eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom. 5:21).
Now we go on to the truth that the cross of Christ is …
THE MEANS OF THE SINNER’S SALVATION.
Not by our efforts, or striving, or religiousness, or church membership can we be saved, but only and altogether through the atoning death of Christ. So the message comes, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved” (Acts 16:31). “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must he saved” (Acts 4:12). Many more passages could be quoted, but let these suffice.
The cross of Christ is …
THE MEASURE OF THE BELIEVER’S SEPARATION FROM THE WORLD.
We get this in the text that began this article. It is possible for a believer to rest content in receiving the blessings of the gospel, rejoicing in the knowledge of sins forgiven, and the assurance that heaven is his ultimate abode, and yet remain on friendly terms with the world that crucified his Lord; so to hide his light under a bushel or a bed as to be a persona grata among worldlings. With such there can be no right testimony, no power to reach others, no sense of the danger the unbelieving world is in.
The fact is, the condemnation of Christ is really the utter condemnation of the world, and the place they gave Him is really the place the true believer should give to the world. Did they crucify my Lord, from whom all my blessings flow? Then the world is crucified to me.
Further, if they condemned the Lord of glory for all that He was and did, the world will condemn His followers, for the traits that are in them are the traits that His followers have derived from Him. If they hated those traits in Him, they will hate them in His followers, and so if they crucified Christ, they will morally crucify His followers. Thus the Apostle could say, that he was crucified to the world.
The Apostle James puts it just as strongly. “Ye adulterers and adulteresses, know ye not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whosoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (James 4:4).
Well may we sing, if the power of the cross is in our hearts,
“Farewell, farewell, poor faithless world,
With all thy boasted store
We’d not have joy where HE had woe,
Be rich where HE was poor.”
The cross of Christ is …
THE MOTIVE FOR CHRISTIAN SERVICE.
It is through the cross of Christ that the love of Christ is supremely manifested. So we read, “The love of Christ constrains us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead: and that He died for all, that they which live should not henceforth live to themselves, but to Him which died for them, and rose again” (2 Cor. 5:14-15). Every fervent servant of Christ is one that is marked by a true sense of the meaning of the cross of Christ, the motive power to self-denying service in His name.
Finally the cross of Christ is …
THE MELODY OF HEAVEN.
So we get the outburst, “Unto Him that loved us, and washed us from our sins in His own blood” (Rev. 1:5). Again we read of the holy city, the church of God in the millennial administration, that the glory of God did lighten it, and the LAMB is the light thereof” (Rev. 21:23). Never throughout the unending ages shall the cross of Christ be forgotten. Never shall the burst of melody die down. The unnumbered ransomed hosts shall ever adore Him, who once hung on Calvary’s cross for their redemption.
May the cross of Christ have its due place in our estimation in these latitudinarian days.