Why does such a barbaric act lie at
the very heart of the Christian message?
Why every time you see a church, do
you see a cross?
Why does Paul, writing in the New Testament,
say, they may never boast except in the
cross?
Why boast about such an evil act?
Crucifixion was a particularly terrible way to die.
It's a form of capital punishment invented by
the Phoenicians and then later adopted by the
Romans as their means of putting to death
slaves and the lowest types of criminals, though
very rarely a Roman citizen, designed to be
slow, designed to be painful.
The victim of crucifixion ultimately, or usually, died
of exhaustion eventually.
Sometimes ropes, in the case of Jesus, nails
secured him in place.
The nails in Jesus' hands, more likely his
wrists and his feet, would be careful to
avoid any major artery as that would speed
up the process of dying.
And the whole point of crucifixion was a
slow, lingering, painful death.
And the weight of the victim's body would
stretch him.
And in order to breathe, he'd have to
pull his weight up with his arms and
push with his feet so that his lungs
could expand sufficiently to breathe.
And then he could exhale and slump back
down again.
And every attempt to breathe would be painful
and draw on his strength until eventually the
strength diminished and a man would die, usually
of asphyxia.
He would simply be unable to breathe anymore.
A strong man could remain many hours, sometimes
days, on a cross.
And to speed up the process, the victim's
legs would be broken, thus preventing them being
able to push, leaving only just a pull
with what was left of the energy in
their arms.
And usually then they would die of suffocation
in a matter of minutes.
There were other factors in crucifixion that contributed
to death, including heart failure, sometimes an excessive
loss of blood, not through the cross, but
through the treatment prior to the crucifixion, where
their body would be ripped through the cross,
whipping and beating.
As it said in the passage we had
read tonight, his appearance was so disfigured beyond
that of any man.
His form marred beyond human likeness.
You had to look twice to know it
was a man on the cross.
What was it all about?
Why does Paul say, I will glory in
such a barbaric act?
Why does he say, I'm not ashamed of
the cross?
You would think that he would be.
You would think that we, the whole of
humanity, should be ashamed of such barbarism.
What actually happened that day outside the city
of Jerusalem?
Well, there'd be many theories as to the
meaning of the cross.
I want to tell you what I find
to be most consistent with the Scripture and
what is most transforming when we understand it.
Read to us so well earlier from Isaiah
53, let me read again some verses written
700 years before Christ was ever born.
When Isaiah writes, surely he took our infirmities
and carried our sorrows.
He was pierced for our transgressions.
He was crushed for our iniquities.
The punishment that brought us peace was on
him by his wounds.
We are healed.
We all like sheep have gone astray.
Each of us has turned to his own
way.
And the Lord laid on him the iniquity
of us.
Oh, did you notice six times there?
He speaks of Jesus as our substitute.
Our infirmities, our sorrows, our transgressions, our iniquities,
our punishment, the iniquity of us all, our
iniquities.
Of course, there were human factors that led
to the crucifixion of Jesus.
We know the factors that built up to
this climax in the days preceding the actual
crucifixion.
But behind all of that was a divine
plan.
God had already revealed it in passages such
as this.
What the cross was about is this.
Two things in the heart of God demanded
the cross.
His justice and his mercy.
God is just.
God is merciful.
The problem with those two qualities are they're
actually incompatible with each other.
You can't be just and mercy at the
same time.
They're in conflict.
If you were caught speeding through Keswick, if
you could manage to pick up enough speed,
and you were brought before the local magistrates
court, the magistrates, understanding what has happened, declares
you guilty, then has a choice of one
of two things.
They can either exercise and fine you and
put three points on your license, or they
can exercise mercy and say, I know you
don't live here, you're a southerner, you're not
used to these kind of roads, you come
from Chichester or somewhere remote like that, I'll
let you go free.
But what the magistrate cannot do is both.
They cannot exercise justice at the same time
extend mercy.
You see, justice and mercy are only compatible
when there's the introduction of a third party
into the scenario.
So someone comes into the court, magistrate, is
obligated to deal with you justly, says I
fine you 100 pounds, three points off your
license.
Somebody comes into the courtroom and says very,
very simple, doesn't do full justice to the
cross, but it's simple and I want to
be tonight.
He comes into the courtroom and pays you
100 pounds, makes a check in his name
on his checkbook, signs his signature, pays it
to the court.
The records of the courtroom say this, gives
your name, the accusation speeding in Keswick, the
result guilty, fined 100 pounds, paid.
You actually walk out of the courtroom having
not paid a penny.
You're the recipient of mercy only because a
third party has stood in your place and
paid your fine.
It's simple to the point of being simplistic,
but it contains truth that lies at the
very heart of the Christian message that Jesus
Christ was your substitute.
God as a holy God, as a just
God declares the soul that sins shall die.
God is also incredibly kind and merciful, but
they're incompatible when a man is found guilty,
when a woman is found guilty before God.
So the Lord Jesus stepped into the courtroom
and his physical death with all its agony
was to some extent symbolic of the real
agony of the cross.
When he who knew no sin was made
to be sin, he endured the consequence of
sin, which is separation, death, separation from the
Father.
He cried, my God, why has that forsaken
me?
Not as a cry of despair.
You see, they didn't have psalm numbers in
those days, they knew the psalms by their
opening line.
The opening line of Psalm 22 is, my
God, my God, why has that forsaken me?
And as Jesus cried that from the cross,
he was saying in effect, Psalm 22, Psalm
22, if anybody had gone away that day
and gone down to the temple or the
local tabernacle, the local synagogue, taken the scroll,
Psalm 22 began to read the Lord, my
God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
Their hair would have stood on end of
what they read.
They would have read this, I'm a worm
and not a man, scorned by men, despised
by the people.
All who see me mock me.
They hurl insults, shaking their heads.
He trusts in the Lord, let the Lord
rescue him.
Let the Lord deliver him since he delights
in him.
I am poured out like water, all my
bones are out of joint.
My heart has turned to wax.
It was melted away within me.
My strength is dried up like a potsherd.
My tongue sticks to the roof of my
mouth.
You lay me in the dust of death.
Dogs have surrounded me.
A band of evil men has encircled me.
They have pierced my hands and my feet.
I can count all my bones.
People stare and gloat over me.
They divide my garments among them and cast
lots of my clothing.
And reading that written a thousand years ago,
you would have said that's exactly what I've
witnessed.
That's today's newspaper record of what's just taken
place.
What was Jesus saying?
My God, why have you forsaken me?
Yes, I'm enduring the agony of separation from
my father, being made sin.
But it is no accident.
It was written a thousand years ago in
Psalm 22.
God in his divine plan was giving his
son.
Because were you and I to pay the
consequence of our own guilt, we would have
no hope, no future, no confidence.
But because he died, the just for the
unjust, he extends mercy.
When you and I come to God in
acknowledgement of our sin, we don't appeal to
his mercy.
Though we are the recipients of his mercy,
we may appeal to his justice.
John writes in his epistle, if we confess
our sins, he is faithful and just and
will forgive us our sins.
Isn't that incredible?
God is just, says John when he forgives
you.
Why?
For the same reason the magistrate could not
come after you and say you didn't pay
for this fine comeback.
No, the penalty is paid by a substitute.
You're free.
That's why to be forgiven by God is
called in scripture to be justified.
The word justified is related to justice.
It's a legal term.
It's to say that men and women, boys
and girls, though by nature and by action
guilty, stand as though they never did it.
Do you know one of the greatest psychological
needs that people have is the need to
be forgiven?
I was driving my car one day down
the motorway listening to a discussion with a
psychiatrist who was the chief psychiatrist of a
hospital in Scotland.
What he said caused me to pull off
the motorway and write down what he'd said
so I wouldn't forget it and lose it.
He said this, if my patients could be
assured of forgiveness, half of them could go
home tomorrow.
It wasn't a Christian speaking, that was a
psychiatrist speaking.
At the root cause of the people with
whom I deal whose lives have broken down,
he says, is guilt.
The marvelous thing is you can come to
the cross of Jesus Christ and be clean.
Many of us are Christians here tonight, of
course.
Do you know one of the biggest needs
amongst Christians is to go on being cleansed
and to know they're cleansed?
I meet so many who live with a
sense of condemnation and guilt because they've done
the same thing again and again and again.
There's some wonderful pictures in the Bible as
to what God does with our sins and
pictures sometimes leave the best impressions in our
minds.
Let me give you some.
Psalm 103, as far as the east is
from the west, so far as he removed
our transgressions from us.
He doesn't say as far as the north
is from the south.
The north and south are fixed points.
If you're to go north in a straight
line, it won't be long before you pass
over the north pole and begin to go
south.
But if you go east, you keep going
around the world, you never begin to go
west.
If you go west, you keep going around
the world, you never begin to go east.
As far as the east is from the
west says David infinity, God removes our transgressions
from us.
He says in Isaiah, you put all of
my sins behind your back.
That's an interesting statement.
If God is omnipresent, meaning if God is
in all places all the time, where is
there such a place as to be behind
his back?
It doesn't exist.
That's where he puts our sins, where they
don't exist.
I love that statement Isaiah 43, your sins
and your iniquities I will remember no more.
It doesn't mean God forgets.
He's not forgetful.
He remembers everything about us.
I mean he doesn't forget anything about us,
but he remembers no more.
I'll never again bring it up, bring it,
bring you to account.
I wish we could really believe that.
I think some of us a bit like
a couple of boys I heard about one
day, a couple of brothers have been fighting
all day and it came time to go
to bed at night and their mother went
to tuck them in, tried to appeal to
the old of the two boys, said you've
been fighting your brother all day today, why
don't you make up with him before you
go to sleep?
He said I'm not going to make up
with him, it's his fault, he hit me
first.
She said but you need to forgive him.
I'm not going to forgive him, it's his
fault, he needs to forgive me.
So she tried to appeal to his sentiment
a little bit and said just suppose if
during the night your brother died, wouldn't you
be sorry in the morning if you hadn't
forgiven him?
So the boy thought for a moment and
said all right, I'll forgive him, but if
he's alive in the morning.
I think sometimes we have this fear, yes
God cleanses, but what about the morning?
Do you know what it says in Romans
8 verse 1?
There is no condemnation to those who are
in Christ Jesus, no condemnation.
Listen, whenever you sense a condemnation for your
sin, it is never God who condemns you,
it is always the devil who condemns, because
we're told in Revelation chapter 12 that Satan
is the accuser of the brethren.
Satan accuses.
You see God speaks about our sin and
the devil speaks about our sin, but there's
a huge difference.
When God speaks about our sin, he convicts.
When the devil speaks about our sin, he
condemns.
Condemnation is like a wet blanket, it sits
on you and you can't move.
Conviction makes us aware of our sin, but
whenever the Holy Spirit convicts of our sin,
he always points us to the cross of
Christ and shows us the way out.
He convicts us of our sin, not to
rub our nose in our own dirt, not
to condemn us, not to humiliate us, but
to liberate us and forgive us.
And it's a marvelous thing to know that
though I don't deserve it, and we don't,
you can say thank you Lord Jesus Christ,
I'm clean.
Despite my past, despite my history, despite the
things that are true of me, thank you
so much, I'm clean.
But it's not automatic.
We have to respond.
The New Testament says the Christian life is
like marriage.
It says that Christ is like the bridegroom
and his church, Christians are like a bride.
And a marriage you see is a mutual
agreement, where the bridegroom and the bride together
submit themselves to one another when a marriage
takes place.
The bridegroom is asked the question, will you
take this woman to be your lawfully wedded
wife to look after and hang on to?
I've forgotten what the words are.
It's 18 years since I last said them,
since the only time I've said them.
And he answers, I will.
Then he turns to the bride and says,
will you take this man to be your
lawfully wedded husband to love and cherish and
so on?
And she says, I will.
And then he says, I now pronounce you
man and wife.
If I can say this reverently, there was
a day when the father looked on his
son stretched out on a Roman cross, his
back whipped, a crown of thorns on his
head, the blood and the spittle trickling down
his face, the hairs of his chin have
been ripped out, disfigured beyond that of human
form, we're told.
And he said, will you take these men,
these women, these boys, these girls in successive
generations?
Will you cleanse them?
Will you give them the gift of your
Holy Spirit to live within them?
Will you give them the assurance of eternal
life and love them?
And from the cross Lord Jesus was saying,
I will.
That doesn't make a marriage.
He turns to you tonight, maybe some of
you here tonight and says, will you take
this Jesus to be your savior?
Will you repent of your sin, your independence?
Will you love him?
Will you allow him to enter your life?
And will you submit to him as your
Lord?
And you say, I will.
And the marriage is enacted.
Is this a key?
The little girl asked her father.
Is this cross a key?
Yes, it is.
It's the key to life.
It's the key to eternity.
It's the key to security.
It's the key to forgiveness.
It's the key to go into bed at
night and put your head on the pillow
and saying, despite my failures, I'm clean.
You ever taken the key?
The message of the cross at Paul is
foolishness to those who perish.
It's foolishness to those who are saved.
It is the power of God.
And I know that most of us here
tonight know the Lord Jesus Christ, but there
will be some of us and you don't
in a personal way.
You may go through the forms, the rituals
associated with the church and those are good.
They're right that they can become a substitute
for the individual submission of your life to
Jesus Christ.
It isn't just a Sunday event, but live
every day in humility and obedience and dependency.
We're going to sing a final song and
I'm going to ask you to make this
your prayer.
We heard it already this evening against that
powerful drama that we saw when I surveyed
the wondrous cross.
That hymn says, see from his head, his
hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow, mingle
down.
Then it responds at the end, love so
amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life,
my all.
Will you sing that in a fresh way
tonight?
Some of you need to come back to
the cross.
You've grown stale and distant.
Others for the first time, we're going to
help you at the end of this meeting.
Just come to the platform and speak to
one of us.
Just help you to be sure of this.
But let's sing this hymn.
I think we remain seated and just sing
it thoughtfully, allowing the words to Become our
words when I survey the wondrous cross.