FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

Scripture Reference: Galatians 6:11-14

The Cross – A Sign of Our Hope of Heaven – Continued

That cross is a sign of our hope of glory. If, (and I say that rhetorically) there is any tomorrow, if there is any Heaven, if there is any God and life yet to be, the cross is a sign of that hope.

Pass by any large cemetery and you will find that most of them have an area filled with hundreds, if not thousands of white crosses. When you look at them you can’t help but think of many other cemeteries, especially American military cemeteries around the world, such as at Arlington, Virginia, in the Philippines, in the Hawaiian Islands, in France. Everywhere, erected above that fallen American boy who has died in battle, our people erected a cross. Why? Because it is a hope. It is a prayer, it is a vision, it is a dream, it is an expectation, it is a promise, it is an assurance that God has prepared some better thing for us than what we know in the sorrow and tears of this life. If we have any hope, any forgiveness, any tomorrow, it lies in the atoning death of the Son of God.

I’m reminded of a story of a little girl in Charing Cross in London:

There was a little girl in the city who lost her way. She just wandered around in the streets of London, crying heart-brokenly, piteously. An English bobby saw the child wandering and stopped her to ask her why her sobbing. The child answered that she was lost and did not know how to find her way home. The bobby said to her, ‘Do not cry. Sit down here by my side and we will find where you live, where home is.’ So the bobby sat on the curb of the street and the little brokenhearted girl sat by his side. He said, ‘Now I am going to ask you some places in London and you tell me if you recognize any of them. Piccadilly Circus?’ ‘No.’ ‘Westminster?’ ‘No.’ ‘Charing Cross?’ ‘Ah,’ said the little girl in her tears, ‘Yes, yes. Take me down to the cross and I can find my way home from there!’ ”

How true for all humanity, for all mankind, for our hopes and our hearts, and our lives! Take me to the cross and I can find my way home from there. This is God’s invitation to each and everyone of us. This is God’s love and mercy poured out in the earth. This is God’s sweet invitation to us today. I invite you all, especially as we celebrate this season of the resurrection, come, come, to the cross. The cross is where we all have to start!

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture Reference: Galatians 6:11-14

The Cross – A Sign of Our Hope of Heaven

Third, the cross is a sign and an emblem of our atonement and our salvation, our hope of glory. Christ died. How did He die? Why did He die? Did He die like Socrates, drinking the hemlock, a martyr to philosophical truth? Did He die like Julius Caesar, a hero in the senate before the cruel daggers of Brutus and Cassius? Did He die like the Agamemnon in Aeschylus carrying out the heroic assignment of the Greek nation against the Trojans? Did He die like Shakespeare’s tragedy of King Lear? Did He die like Abraham Lincoln under the assassin’s bullet in Ford’s Theater in Washington? How did He die?

We know from the Word that there is a divine meaning in the death of Christ. This is God’s plan for our salvation. There is no pardon and peace apart from atonement. There is no remission of sins apart from the shedding of blood (Hebrews 9:22), and there is no reconciliation without the payment of death. This is our atonement, our propitiation, our sacrifice for sin. This is our means of reconciliation to God. The cross to the Apostle Paul and to us is the same thing as the brazen serpent raised in the wilderness was to Moses and the children of Israel. It is a sign of universal love, mercy, forgiveness, and healing from the hands of God.

The cross is a sign of our atonement. It is a sign of our forgiveness, once and for all. It is a sign of God’s inviting love, His invitation to pardon and forgiveness. It is an invitation to life. The cross has an upraised beam. Raised toward the sky, it points toward God in Heaven. It has a lower part that touches the earth. God, reaching out His loving hand, extends it down even to us. It has crossarms and they go in either direction as far as the East goes East and as far as the West goes West (Psalm 103:12). The arms of the cross are extended to the limits of the earth. It is the open invitation to all men everywhere to find life, liberty, forgiveness, mercy, and salvation in the atoning love, sobs, tears, suffering death of the Son of God. We are all welcome.

The arms of the cross extend to all mankind, to the Greek and to the Barbarian, to the Roman and to the unsophisticated, to the Jew and to the Greek, to the bond and to the free, to the lettered and to the unlearned, to the rich and to the poor, to the wise and to the unwise, to the old and to the young, to the near and to those who are far off, to the good and to the not so good, to all of us does God extend wide His invitation. The world could never be the same again because our Lord died in it. It was this planet upon which Jesus spilled His sacred blood.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture Reference: Galatians 6:11-14

The Cross – Speaks of Man’s Universal Depravity

Second, the cross is a sign and an emblem of the universal depravity of the human heart. If one would see what humanity is really like, look at the cross, cruel and merciless, dark and sinful. The Lord was born in Bethlehem. The gift of God in love to the world came in that little town of David. When the gift was made the angels sang and the stars were lowered like golden lamps from the sky. The shepherds worshiped and eventually the wise men came and brought their gifts. Just five miles away is Jerusalem. Thirty-three years later the human family, humankind, gave back the gift of God’s love in Christ Jesus on the point of a Roman spear. Who did that, who crucified the Lord? Who is responsible for His shameful, indescribably shameful and humiliating death? Who did that?

Well, there could be many answers. Some say it’s God’s fault, that God did it. The wife of Job said to her husband, “Curse God and die” (Job 2:9). There are others who say it is His own fault. He should have been a better manager and a better planner, and He should have been shrewder. There are those who say that the Jews did it. There are those who say that the rulers did it. Some say Judas Iscariot did it. He sold Him. There are those who say Pontius Pilate did it—the weak, vacillating procurator who looked upon the miscarriage of Roman justice. There are those who say the soldiers did it. They braided the crown of thorns and they nailed Him to the tree. Who did it? Pontius Pilate washes his hands and says, “I did not do it. I am innocent of the blood of that just man” (Matthew 27:24). The Roman soldiers say, “We did not do it!” Who did it? Who slew the Son of glory? Who nailed Him to the cross? It must have been that we all had a part. The truth of it is that we all did it. Our sins nailed Him to the tree and our sins pressed upon His brow the crown of thorns. We all did it.

There’s a story often told of a man who at one time said:

“In a dream I saw the Savior. His back was bare and there was a soldier lifting up his hand and bringing down on His back that awful scorpion of nine tails, that awful cat-o-nine tails with its leather thongs and its pieces of iron woven into the leather. In the dream I rose and grasped his arm to hold it back. When I did, the soldier turned around in astonishment to look at me, and when I looked at him I recognized myself!”

Who slew the Son of glory? Again, we all did it. Our sins crucified the Prince of Heaven. Therefore, there is no doubt that the cross is a sign of universal human depravity and sin.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture Reference: Galatians 6:11-14

The Cross – An Emblem of the Christian Faith – Continued

The cross of Christ is not a mythical, romantic idea, symbol, or story. It is historical and factual. If we think of the reference to Christ in Josephus as an introduction, there are just two early first-century references to the Lord Jesus. They are found in Suetonius and Tacitus, Latin historians, and in both instances they refer to the crucifixion of our Lord. The historical reference was occasioned by the burning of Rome. When the people began to point their fingers at Nero as having done it, in order to obviate the suspicion, he said the Christians did it. Now that necessitated the early Roman historian to describe who the Christians were, for it was a strange, unusual, and unknown sect. So both Suetonius and Tacitus say that the Christians were followers of a felon who was crucified in Judaea under Pontius Pilate.

The cross is the crudest instrument of execution that the human mind has ever devised. No Roman citizen could be crucified. Death by crucifixion was reserved for felons, insurrectionists, criminals, and murderers. It was especially offensive to the Jews. The Apostle Paul in Galatians 3:13 quoting Deuteronomy 21:23, quotes Moses as saying, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.” In the story of the crucifixion of Christ we are told that when the even was come, the day the Lord was crucified, the Jews went to the procurator and asked that the crosses be taken down, for the pilgrims were coming into the city for the sacred Passover and the ghastly sight would be offensive to them.

But as horrible as it was to the Romans and as unthinkable as it was to the minds of the Jews, think of the shame that it bore to the pure, holy, undefiled, sinless Son of God. In crucifixion our blessed Lord was humiliated in two ways. One, they crucified Him naked. He was exposed before the whole world. The artists have been kind in drawing pictures of the Lord. Always they clothe Him, but actually He died naked. They gambled for His garments at the foot of the cross. Second, He was crucified between two malefactors, both of whom were insurrectionists and murderers. In His life He was known as a friend of publicans and sinners, and in His death He was crucified with one on either side. In our Savior history and prophecy met, for the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah said that He would be numbered with transgressors. He became sin itself.

This was no ordinary crucifixion. There were thousands of Jews who had been crucified under the Roman emperors. The historians suggest that in the forty years between Pontius Pilate and Titus there were more than thirty thousand Jews who were crucified. When the Lord was eighteen years of age, in a village near Nazareth the Romans came to burn the town and to crucify everyone in it because the citizens had been accused of harboring zealots and insurrectionists. Jesus being nearby must have seen those crosses raised against the sky. It was a common sight in Palestine to see a Roman crucifixion. But the crucifixion of Jesus was not the same. The Roman centurion under whose surveillance the execution was carried out cried, saying, “Truly this man was the Son of God!” (Mark 15:39).

The cross is most definitely a sign of the Gospel of the Christian faith.

To Be Continued

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture taken from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®, ESV © 2016 by Crossway Bibles.
Used by permission. All rights reserved.