Week 26 - Back To The Cross

“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Galatians 6:14)

In 2006, 150 students from the Tertiary Student Christian Fellowship (TSCF) descended on the campus of the Bible College of New Zealand for their seventieth annual conference. The theme chosen for their week-long conference was “Back to the Cross.”

Why the Cross?

The cross stands at the heart of the Christian faith. That the cross is crucial to Christianity has never been in doubt for the believers. The book of Acts tells how the first Christians proclaimed what God had done in the cross of Christ, while Paul brings out the meaning of atonement in his epistles. The cross is also central in all four gospels. They have been described as “passion narrative(s) with extended introduction(s).” The death and resurrection of Jesus take up most of the space and everything is arranged to lead up to the finale — the cross.

Why the cross? It has to do with the fact of sin. Sin separates us from God. It leads to wars, crime, cruelty, selfishness, violence, etc. However, the Bible reveals the good news that in the face of our sin, God keeps loving us and has provided for us a way to return to Him — through the cross.

Picture Words About the Cross

To bring out what the death of Christ on the cross has done, the New Testament writers use picture words, the true meaning of which we may miss since we do not share their thought world.

The most common word is redemption (Romans 3:24 ). Originally redemption referred to the release of prisoners of war. When the Hezbollah militants offered two captured Israeli soldiers as the ransom price for the release of a group of Palestinian prisoners, they were in a sense asking the Israeli government for the redemption of their people. The word came to be used for the release of slaves by payment of a price. Sinners are slaves to sin; they are under the sentence of death. This way of looking at the cross sees it as the payment of the price that brings us freedom.

Reconciliation (Romans 5:11 ) is a word for making up after quarrel. This is brought about by taking away the cause of the quarrel; unless this is done, there can be no real reconciliation. In the hostility between God and sinners, the root cause, sin, was put away by the death of Christ and thus the way was clear for reconciliation.

The word covenant (Mark 14:24 ) mattered to first-century Jews for they saw themselves as the covenant people of God. When Jesus spoke of his blood as inaugurating the new covenant, he was saying that a whole new way of coming to God would be opened up by His death. He was implying that the church was the true covenant people of God.

Justification (Romans 5:9 ) was a legal concept. In the settlement of legal disputes the judges are to “justify” those in the right and “condemn” the wicked. Paul makes extensive use of this picture word. He sees sinners as facing condemnation when they stand before God. However, he also sees God as taking action in the person of his Son whereby all legal claims on those sinners who are in Christ are fully met by His death. There is no further condemnation. They go free.

Sacrifice (Hebrews 10:12 ) was a term that had a universal appeal in the first century. The universal practice in the ancient world (and in some cultures today like the Chinese culture) saw people standing by their altars before the religious ritual that had animals slaughtered in their stead and watching as the offering went up in the fires of the altars to the gods they worshipped. For the Christians, such sacrifices can never put away sins, but they form a clear picture of what Jesus did when He offered himself as a sacrifice.

It was at the cross that the New Testament Christians saw deliverance. Jesus Christ has paid the price and has purchased us with His blood from the slavery of sin. Imagine yourself paying for an item at the checkout counter of an NTUC supermarket, through a NETS transaction. You punch your password into the keyboard and then the word “Accepted” appears on the screen. You have paid the price. Your payment has gone through and you are now the rightful owner of the item.

Christ has paid the price. We have been bought with a price (1 Corinthians 6:20 ). We now belong to God.

Living Under the Cross

The church has been called out from the world by the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ in order to be sent back into it to proclaim the gospel. To live under the cross is to allow Christ to characterise all our relationships. John Stott in his book The Cross of Christ wrote, “To live under the cross means that every aspect of the Christian community’s life is shaped and coloured by it… it also directs our conduct in relation to others, including our enemies.”

We must learn to return to the place where our Saviour died, in order to remember the suffering of the cross and the joy of the resurrection.

And if we have lost that sense of wonder, perhaps it is time to go back to the cross, to learn the story of God’s dealings with us all over again.