Elements of the Cross

Who is a God like unto Thee, who pardoneth iniquity,

and passeth by the transgression...(Micah7:18a)

Thousands of rams and

Ten thousand rivers of oil for

Four thousand years

Then came the Scandalous Night...

Only the Body and Blood Satisfied

 -Angels & Demons kneeled

-Justice and Mercy kissed

In God’s Majestic Glory!

PICTURING THE PASSION

Mel Gibson’s use of sustained, graphic violence in The Passion, as one critic rightly said, has ‘turned Jesus as a gold medalist in the Olympics of Suffering’. The Romans, who perfected the art of slow torture, view the cross as a sign of shame (Gal. 3:13). The Jewish attitude was worse. They saw crucifixion not only as a social stigma but as a divine curse (Deut. 21:23). But the writers of the Gospels choose to depict it differently. Instead of evoking empathy, as another critic said of The Passion, they invite us to grateful, respectful awe, because they had different understanding of the meaning of his suffering.

The evangelist Reinhard Bonke has a marvelous picture of this:

The Cross of Jesus consists of two beams, one vertical and one horizontal. Those crossed timbers are twin symbols of human misery and God’s salvation. The horizontal beam is like a dash, the very sign used for minus. And that is the human story. We were born a minus, a deficit, a void. Sin has destroyed something. That something is missing, but people are at a complete loss to know what it is. They talk about their search for truth, but they don’t even know what they mean by truth. They are like Pontius Pilate who, standing before Jesus, nearly fell over The Truth asking, “what is truth?” That is man’s minus outlook.
But Jesus came, and outside Jerusalem, a vertical timber was raised which crossed through our minus sign. Jesus hung there on that upright, and He turned our minus into plus. The Romans thought the Cross was just an instrument of execution, but it was God’s plus sign for minus minded mankind.
Indeed, give the cross a second look, and it is even more than a plus---it is a multiplication sign. (EVANGELISM BY FIRE)

The focus was not even on his humiliation but on his victory. They saw calvary as a truth-telling place and not a killing field.

The Perfect Penitent

One only Word has come to men,
And was incarnate and had hands
And feet and walked in earthly lands
And died, and rose. And nothing more
Will come or ever came before
With certainty. And to obey
Is better than the hard assay
C.S. LEWIS, Narrative Poems



There is a book that I always love to give during the Lent. Sleek and beautifully written, Jesus on Trial is one of the few that focuses on the astonishing events of Jesus' trial. After reading it for the nth time, two staggering questions pop-up in my mind – How could a holy God, if He is all-powerful, have permitted the existence of sin? Is there alternative to the giving of God’s only-begotten Son and his being crucified on the cross? No, don’t rebuke me for the ingratitude and ungraciousness of my thought. As J. Gresham Machen puts it:

God has told us much. He has told us much even about sin. He has told us how at infinite cost, by the gift of His Son, He has provided a way of escape from it. Yes, God has told us much. Is it surprising that He has not told us all? I do not think so my friends. After all, we are but finite creatures. Is it surprising that there are some mysteries which God in His infinite goodness and wisdom has hidden from our eyes? Is it surprising that there are some things in His counsels about which He has bidden us be content not to know but instead just to trust Him who knows all? (The Christian View of Man)

Further, C.S. Lewis may be right that “…God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is (if at this moment the night sky conceals any such).”

As to the connecting question, Paul insisted somewhere in his letter to the Galatians that if justification could have been secured by any other method than that of faith in Christ, by that method it would have been. There is no other alternative.