The Power of the Cross

I had a conversation with a really bright young person not too long ago, and she said to me, “My question is why do Christians believe that in order for God to forgive guilty people, Jesus had to die on a cross?”

She said, “I get the idea that we’ve done stuff wrong. God might need to forgive us. I get that, but why couldn’t he just forgive us, just say, ‘I forgive you’? Why would it be helpful to crucify an innocent man, sacrifice his life? Why would that be necessary to forgive guilty people?”

Sometimes people will use the analogy of, “We all owe a debt, so he was paying that debt,” but being executed is kind of different than just paying a fine.

Sometimes people will talk about how God wanted to forgive us, but there was a law that said someone has to be punished, so Jesus had to be punished to satisfy that law. And that makes it sound like there’s a law that’s way above God.

This is a real important question that’s not clear for a lot of people.

So all I want to do today is try the best I can to talk about the story of the cross. It’s a story. It’s not a formula — it gets put that way sometimes. It’s not a theory.

Someone asked the writer Flannery O’Connor one time. They said, “I don’t want to have to read through the whole story you wrote. Just give it to me in a nutshell.”

Flannery said, “If I could put it in a nutshell, I wouldn’t have had to write the story.”

The story of the cross is a story. But it’s haunted the human race for a couple thousand years.

And I want to talk about why because it says our lives, the universe, is a story. It’s not just a meaningless collection of events, and it still changes lives.

And it could be part of your story.

Now to understand it, we have to go back earlier on in the story, because it’s a story we talk about forever and never get to the bottom of it.

In the Old Testament (if you study the Bible, you may have noticed this), back in Israel in the ancient days — there were some real bad things happening to animals. Have you ever noticed that when you’re reading through the Old Testament?

They’re getting slaughtered, blood is getting sprinkled on furniture, and fat is getting burned on an altar.

This is the kind of stuff the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals would never stand for. That’s what’s going on back in the Old Testament.

We look at that and say, “What’s up with that?”

This is a really important dynamic you might not know about. In the Bible, Moses is the one who gives instructions about sacrifices and how to offer them, but people are actually sacrificing animals way before Moses comes along.

Abraham lived long before Moses. He is offering sacrifices. Jacob is. Cain and Abel are. People in other countries are.

The point is — the writers of Scripture did not actually invent the idea of animal sacrifice.

Animal sacrifice was actually a universal practice in the ancient world. All people in all cultures in the ancient world practiced animal sacrifice.

And that looks very odd to us. We think, “Well, maybe they were just dumber than we are. Maybe we’re just way more enlightened.”

There actually are a couple of ideas that are expressed in the notion of sacrifice that I want to unpack for a moment.

One of them is — in the ancient world, there was this general belief, “We need help. Human beings need help. We’re not masters of the universe. We’re not in control.”

Now of course you and I are really smart, and we know with technology and education we actually are in control. We are masters of the universe. We’re running this ship.

But in the ancient world, they didn’t know that.

They thought there was mystery to life.

They didn’t know meat was something you could get in cellophane packages at Whole Foods.

They looked at birth and death, and there was wonder to it. It was bloody, and it was painful.

We’re insulated mostly from all of that, but really in ways that are misguided and quite illusory.

Maybe we’re the ones who think we don’t need help — and that’s an illusion.

When our first child was born (I’ve told a lot of you about this), we went through the Bradley method, which is a husband-coached, natural birthing process. The focus is on relaxing so your body can do what it’s naturally supposed to do without medication.

This was 19 years ago.

In what I read at the time, they discouraged using the word pain when you were talking about what was going to happen when the delivery would take place, especially for husbands who were going to be coaching our wives.

They said, “Your wife may experience some discomfort.”

We don’t like in our world to think about pain.

At about five hours of experiencing excruciating labor, I said to Kathy as empathetically as I could, “Honey, are you experiencing some discomfort?”

I’ll just leave that story there. You can imagine what happened next.

In the ancient world, they knew in ways that we tend to quarantine ourselves off from — we’re born in blood and pain, and we die in blood and pain.

There’s this mystery about it, and we need help.

They noticed this strange rhythm in life, that life seems to come out of death.

When a meal comes, it’s because a plant has been harvested or an animal has lost its life. If there’s meat involved, every time there’s a meal, blood has been shed. Life is lost. Life comes from death.

There was something amazing, mysterious, awful, and wonderful about this.

To the ancient world, you see, every meal was sacred. There was a mystery and meaning to it. That’s why sacrifices were part of what meals were about. Every meal!

It’s a little bit like in our day we might say a prayer of blessing over the food — there’s a sacredness to it.

That leads to another idea in this whole sacrificial system.

They believed in the ancient world there’s another realm beyond this world.

They weren’t smart like us, and they thought — what you can see, taste, touch, feel and hear is not all there is. There’s another realm. In fact, sacrifice was an important part of connecting with that realm.

William Gilders, a scholar who focuses on the significance of sacrifice and blood rituals, write about how in our day, we think differently of the word sacrifice. We think to sacrifice something is to lose it. Sacrifice a car or money or a limb, and it’s gone. You’ve lost it.

In the ancient world, when they thought sacrifice, they didn’t think lose. They thought to transfer. To sacrifice something was to transfer it from the everyday human realm into the realm of heaven.

The word sacrifice itself (sacri-fice) is to make sacred. That object may still be here, may still be usable on earth, but now it is present, it is available, to heaven.

You’ll see a phrase in the Bible a lot that talks about this when it comes to sacrifices being offered — “As an aroma pleasing to the Lord, offer a burnt sacrifice.” Or, “It was a burnt offering, a pleasing aroma.”

A food offering presented to the Lord — they noticed there was this aroma thing.

Do you ever notice what happens when you put a steak on a grill and that aroma goes up?

That’s a wonderful thing isn’t it?

The idea is now, of course, the meat is still here. It’s going to be eaten by people, but it’s now in the presence of the divine. It’s now available for the use of the divine.

So sacrifice (we’ll come back to this) could be thought of as the great transfer. It’s human, it’s earthly, it’s ordinary, but it’s not.

That’s all part of the way they looked at life. There was a wonder and a mystery to it. “We need help, and we’re not alone.”

There were other aspects of sacrifice in the ancient world God was going to have to change to teach people (Israel).

In the ancient culture Israel was formed in, there was this idea that the gods created human beings to make food for the gods because the gods were hungry.

The gods were thought of as kind of more powerful versions of just people. They could be weak, and they could be weird. They were needy, so they made people to create food for them.

Then if people would do stuff for the gods, the gods would do stuff for people. There was like this great quid pro quo in the ancient world.

The gods needed a place to live, so people built them temples. Gods were hungry, so people would sacrifice food and offer that to the gods. Then the gods would be happy. That would be a meal that would make the gods happy, so they would make people happy.

You would offer this to the gods, and then they would give you whatever you wanted (wealth, health, prosperity, fertility, or whatever).

In the ancient world, basically priests, among other things, were what we think of as butchers. And temples were restaurants.

If you were poor in the ancient world, probably the only time you would have a meal that had meat was when you went to a temple.

Remnants of this are still around in our day. There are certain restaurants that will feature golden arches, just like a temple would, and Happy Meals to make those little pagans happy when they have them.

That’s all part of what was going on in the ancient world.

And God now had to teach Israel that there were not a bunch of gods and the sacrifices were not fulfilling their needs.

He has to teach Israel some truths about himself, change the sacrificial system.

He does that by teaching two primary ideas I want to talk about today.

1. There is one God, and he is all-loving and supremely good.

Now this is why in Israel, there is only one temple.

Every other country, every other culture, there are a lot of tribal gods. There are altars and temples all over the place, because all those gods need places to live.

In Jerusalem in Israel, there is only one temple. Why? Because there’s only one God, and he doesn’t actually need a house.

It’s expressing a spiritual truth. God wants to live with you if you’ll let him. Your heart, your life, your body can be the temple, the home, of God’s presence on earth. This is an amazing possibility for you.

Then God had to teach people that he didn’t make us because he needs us for something.

2. God made human beings because he has so much love.

He is so full of life that he wants someone to pour love out on.

You see this, for example, in Psalm 50 and many other places in the Old Testament.

This is why these words were written. God says:

I have no need of a bull from your stall or of goats from your pens,

I don’t need this stuff, because

every animal of the forest is mine… If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it. Do I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats? (Psalm 50:9-13)

Now why would those words be there?

It looks weird to us, but they’re there because in the ancient world that’s what people thought.

See, the idea that there’s one good God who doesn’t exist in neediness is an idea that had to be taught to the world. It came through Israel, through the Bible.

By the way, lest you think ancient people are just dumber than us — people offering their lives, people offering sacrifices to idols, did not end with the ancient world.

A woman gets hooked on gambling, and she ends up throwing away, sacrificing, everything in her bank account and her whole financial well-being just for one more thrill she is not going to get.

A guy goes into the office really early, stays there really late, spends his life trying to climb a golden ladder, sacrifices his relationship with his kids, his health, his well-being, and his emotional vibrancy on the altar of a god called success.

Athletes inject their bodies with horribly destructive things because they’re sacrificing themselves to a god called winning.

People with fabulous lives before them throw it away for a god called alcohol or a god called drugs.

A husband gets up in the middle of the night, goes to a computer, clicks onto an adult website, does this day after day, week after week, sacrifices his self-respect, his sexual integrity, his marriage, for a thrill that will never satisfy him.

You see, offering sacrifices to idols did not end with the ancient world. We all carry little idols with us.

This leads to another idea that God is going to have to teach the world about that he is going to do with Israel in this whole sacrificial business.

There is one great intractable human problem, and it’s not out there somewhere.

See, part of the appeal of idolatry is the worldview of idolatry is quite convenient. It’s like, “I just need more money or better health or better crops. So I try to manipulate the powers that be that are out there somewhere to get me what I want.” That’s the way idolatry works.

God says, “There’s a problem, but it’s not out there. It’s in here.” Something is wrong not just with the world but with me.

Problems are not just about my circumstances; they’re about my soul.

Now this is going to have to be taught to the human race.

The psalmist who was realizing this says to God:

You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings.

Now again, this is a fundamental difference in understanding the character of the one true God. People in the ancient world just thought, “Well, the gods just want sacrifice. I don’t have to be ethical. I don’t have to be good. I don’t have to be transformed. I don’t have to be self-controlled. I just have to give the gods stuff.”

The psalmist says, “No, it’s not that way. God, you don’t delight in sacrifice. I’d bring it. That would be easy. You don’t take pleasure in a burnt offering. I could do that.

My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise. (Psalm 51:16-17)

“Oh God, there’s something wrong with me.” Who wants to hear that? Who wants to do that?

We resist that. It offends us. We don’t want to hear it. It’s not good news.

I had to go to the dentist a few weeks ago to get my teeth checked. Does anyone ever go to the dentist and get a little embarrassed about what’s going on inside your mouth?

The hygienist is cleaning my teeth and I can feel the judgment about the condition of my teeth.

She asked me questions like, “How much coffee do you drink?”

I said, “Just one cup a day. It’s a rather large cup, often gets refilled, but just one.”

She asked me, “How much do you smoke?”

“I don’t smoke! I’m a pastor.”

Then she said, “How often do you floss?”

Okay, just a question. Does anyone here ever lie about how often you floss to your dentist? Am I the only one?

Apparently she was teeth shaming me. That’s what she was doing. She was teeth shaming me. Apparently, there are problems going on inside my mouth I don’t know about.

All we like teeth have gone astray.

You see, the problem isn’t just out there. The idols get it wrong.

The editors at the London Times about a hundred years ago asked a few great writers to write an essay in response to the question, “What’s wrong with the world?”

Now this is a fundamental human question. We can’t evade it.

In the ancient world where Israel lived, what’s wrong was the gods were needy. The gods were angry. “We’ll give them something to make them happy, and then they’ll give us what we want. That’s what’s wrong with the world. It’s out there.”

God is going to teach something fundamentally different.

The great Christian writer G.K. Chesterton, a brilliant, very witty guy, wrote a very brief response to this question — “What’s wrong with the world?”

Dear sirs,

I am.

Yours,
G.K. Chesterton.

What’s wrong with the world? I am.

What’s wrong with the world is not just out there. It’s this thing the writers of Scripture talk about as sin. But that’s a word that has been kind of clichéd or distorted in our day.

A lot of people when they hear it, they just think of certain rules, mostly about sex or pleasure, that we’d be better off if those rules didn’t exist.

See, sin is a real deep thing. It’s when I take something that is not worthy and cannot save, and I give it my ultimate allegiance.

Sin is when I sacrifice my life for what is not worthy. Sin is this brokenness inside me that I don’t understand and that I mostly don’t even see that makes me deceitful, makes me hurt people I’m supposed to love, makes me get apathetic where there are little children dying and I could do something, but then I don’t.

Then I don’t think about the fact that I don’t, and I continue to think about myself as a generous person.

It allows me to betray my values and try to promote myself all the time and turn everything into a service of my ego and just mess up. That’s what’s wrong with the world.

When we’re really quiet or when something we didn’t want to get public becomes public, we know.

After there had been enough time for some people in this little community of Israel to absorb all of this — “We need help, and we’re not alone. There’s one good God, and there’s one big problem,” he sent his Son Jesus.

God came to the earth in human flesh with a message of hope, with a new opportunity.

This is available now for you.

Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the good news, the gospel of God. — “The time has come. Waiting is over. Here it is. The kingdom of God has come near. Repent and believe the good news!”

That language “kingdom of God” means the possibility of living life together with God, being loved by God, in God’s presence, with God’s power and God’s favor — it’s available to me. It’s possible now here on earth.

In Jesus, the great transfer has begun, not because we have to take stuff from down here up there but because in Jesus, God came from up there down here. He says, “Now this is available to you.”

One way of thinking about the kingdom of God is it’s simply wherever God’s will is being done.

The kingdom of God is wherever God’s will is being done, starting with my life, with my body.

But here’s this problem. There are a lot of other kingdoms in this world.

There are a lot of other wills in this world that are opposed to the will of God. And Jesus met them.

The religious leaders, a guy named Herod, a guy named Pilate, a guy named Judas, you and me.

We all have this problem of we don’t always want God’s will for our lives. We want our will for our lives.

There’s this battle. There’s God’s kingdom, God’s will, and there’s every other will on the planet.

Now with human kingdoms when they meet opposition, they seek to overcome them by force. — “We will overpower you. We will destroy you.”

But Jesus would not do that. Jesus could not do that because what he wants to win is not just a battle of power. He wants to win our hearts, and you can’t win someone’s heart by overpowering them.

Jesus says, “I’m going to win this battle.”

Our universe is a story. It’s not meaningless.

“It is a battle between good and evil,” and Jesus says, “I’m going to win it, but I’m going to win it by loving. I’m going to win it by being merciful.”

So you hit me in my face, and instead of hitting you back, instead of hating you, I will turn the other cheek. I’ll keep loving you.

You ask for the shirt off my back. I’ll offer you my coat as well.

You force me to go with you one mile. I’ll ask you, “Would it be helpful to you if I gave you another mile? I’ll do that if that would be helpful, because I’m going to keep loving you.”

Bless those who curse you.

Pray for those who despitefully use you.

Love your enemy.

Do you understand?

These are not rules; this is a battle plan. Jesus said, “I’m going to take on all of the evil and hate in the world, and I will show them they cannot overpower love.”

This put him on a collision course with all the powers, with all the wills, with all the kingdoms, including mine.

He knew that would happen.

And that’s what leads to the cross.

See, it’s very much like when Jesus was born. Somehow in his body we’re able to see God made visible.

On the cross, we’re able to see the battle between good and evil that has been going on since the fall. We are able to see it made visible on the cross (love in the face of hate, good in the face of evil).

No one… no one… could have dreamed God would deal with evil, violence, and hate by subjecting himself to it on the cross and saying, “Whatever you do, it will not make me stop loving you.”

No one dreamed of that!

We have these amazing words and understanding of what was happening, what this story is.

This is how the apostle Paul put it. I know this is quite dense, but it’s just too rich not to live in.

God forgave us all our sins

He didn’t destroy us, didn’t judge us. He forgave us.

having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Colossians 2:13-15)

In the cross, he turns everything upside down and inside out.

See, in the cross, that’s where the powers and authorities — Rome and the religious leaders and everyone opposed to Jesus — thought they defeated Jesus. That’s where they thought they were making a public spectacle of Jesus, that’s where they believed they were triumphing over Jesus: on the cross.

The cross is where Rome put failed messiahs to die so Rome would show, “We have triumphed over them. They lost. They’re failures. They’re losers.”

Paul says what’s going on is the cross (where they thought they were triumphing over Jesus) is where Jesus triumphed over them by saying to them, “Go ahead. Do your worst to me. Go ahead. Mock me, abuse me, and kill me. You cannot keep me from loving you.”

It’s kind of a strange analogy for this one, but it was really striking when I thought about it a couple weeks ago when George Foreman died.

Several decades decades ago, there was a boxer named Muhammad Ali, and he had a fight against George Foreman.

Foreman at that time was young, undefeated, the strongest guy in the world. He just brutalized everyone. By his own admission, he was filled with hatred. He just lived to hurt people.

Ali was kind of an old man for a boxer by then. He realized he wasn’t going to be able to outpunch George Foreman.

The fight starts, “The Rumble in the Jungle” is what it was called.

Ali does something that shocked everyone. He leans against the ropes and puts his arms up and basically says, “Go ahead, George. Do your worst. Hit me. Hit me again. Hit me again. I can take it.”

Foreman just pounds him minute after minute, round after round, until eventually George Foreman has nothing left to hit with anymore, and Muhammad Ali wins the battle.

The name Muhammad Ali came up with for his strategy was the “rope-a-dope” strategy — he used the rope, and Foreman was the dope.

There’s this great battle, and Jesus has this strategy no one would have thought of where instead of coming in power and blowing everyone away, he goes to the cross, and he says, “Go ahead. Do your worst. Hit me again. Is that all you got? Really? Is that the best you can do, evil? Is that the best you can do, darkness? Is that all you have, hell? Come on! Hit me again! You can’t make me stop loving you. You can’t get to the bottom of my grace. You can’t exhaust my mercy. You cannot empty me of love.”

When he died on the cross, he was defeating sin, guilt, death, racism, injustice, violence, neglect. You name it. They were being defeated, and they didn’t know it, because Jesus was showing love is stronger.

That’s why Paul writes these amazing words.

None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. (1 Corinthians 2:8)

None of the powers of this world (injustice, racism, sexism, greed, materialism, narcissism, egomaniacal power grabs) have known this wisdom of sacrificial, suffering love.

If they would have known, they never would have crucified the Lord of glory, because it’s at the cross where Jesus looked like he was losing but he won. It had to be at a cross, had to be the shedding of his blood, because forgiveness always means costly suffering for the one who forgives.

Forgiveness always means a willingness to bear suffering when you could inflict pain.

George Foreman, again, by his own account was living a terrible life. He had a ton of money but he was miserable. He hated people. He just lived to inflict pain on people.

His life was all about him. He had five sons, they were all named George.

A couple years after that fight with Ali, he lost another fight. He was in a locker room. He was deeply depressed. He was afraid he was going to die, and he had this amazing encounter with the crucified Christ.

He gave his life to God. He surrendered his life. He offered his life a living sacrifice.

If you know anything about George Foreman, he actually become a preacher. He would preach the gospel, raise money for underprivileged kids. He became one of the most loving and joyful people to be around.

So how about you? Have you come to the cross?

There’s a book written by Tom Wright about the cross. It’s an amazing book.

He writes about an archbishop. This archbishop tells about these three boys who decide they’re going to give a priest a hard time. So they go into a confessional, and they just make up all these crazy, outlandish sins that of course they were way too young to have committed.

Two of them run away, but the third kid is with the priest, and the priest says, “I’m going to give you a penance. I want you to go to the crucifix (go to the cross) and look Jesus in the eye and say to him, ‘I don’t give that for what you did for me’ three times.”

The boy goes to the cross, and he looks Jesus in the eye.

He says, “I don’t give that for what you did for me. I don’t give that for what you did for me. I…” He gets all choked up, and he can’t say it a third time.

The archbishop says, “I know about that story, because I was that boy.”

It’s a funny thing. We worship God in the manger, and we rejoice in God at the empty tomb, but we meet God at the cross. We meet him at the cross.

The main reason we exist as a church is to help people to help all people to help any people to help you meet God at the cross. I wonder if you’ve done that.

I want to invite you to do that today if you haven’t. It’s a really simple thing. People do this all the time.

I was talking to a friend recently, and he was telling me how it happened for him.

Someone asked him, “Have you given your life to Jesus? Are you a follower of Jesus?”

He said, “No.”

He asked him why, and he said, “Well, I feel like I’m not good enough. I think about people where I think that’s what they do. It’s the same reason why I don’t go to the gym. Everyone in the gym is in such great shape, and I’d be embarrassed. So I feel like I would have to get in shape first before I go to the gym, but the whole reason to go to the gym is to get in shape, so I can never get there.”

He said to him, “Okay, let me explain to you how it works, because you don’t have to get in shape first. It’s not going to the gym. You don’t have to get yourself ready for this. You don’t have to be good.”

He drew an illustration on a napkin.

A person is on one side of the napkin. God is on the other side. And there’s a gap in the middle.

So there’s this gap between God and my friend. Just like there was a gap between God and me. And God and you.

We all know this is the great problem. I can’t stand before God. I’ve messed up stuff. I’ve betrayed my values.

I have kids, and I love them more than anything, and I’ve messed them up. I’m not the man I want to be or the dad I want to be.

Then he drew the cross in that gap.

And the way it works is it’s like the cross is the way I get to God.

I come to him not because of anything I’ve done, not because I’m good, not because of how I stack up against anyone else, not because I’ve given a certain amount of money or I’ve done a certain number of good deeds or I attend church or I embrace certain beliefs. None of that.

It’s just the cross. It’s just all the cross.

“God, I come to you because you love me, because love is stronger than hate. Good is stronger than evil.”

Forgiveness is stronger than guilt, and I know this is true because it happened at the cross.

That battle has been going on a long time, but in some way, it all got encapsulated, it all got expressed, it all got lived out in its ultimate intensity at the cross, and love won.

“God, here I am at the cross. I offer my life as a living sacrifice to you.”

I want to give you the chance to do that right now. Would you bow your heads and close your eyes?

If you’ve never done this, I want to invite you to pray these words right now. This can be your moment at the cross.

Now, heavenly Father, I confess my sin to you. I know what’s wrong isn’t just out there; it’s in me. I confess my guilt, my greed, my pride, my resentments, my pettiness, things I’m ashamed of. I lay them down at your cross, God, and I ask you to forgive me and to accept me, not because I’m so good, not because I’m better than anyone else, just because of your love and just because of your grace and just because of your mercy which was poured out for me through the life and death of Jesus on that cross.

Now, God, I want to be a person of the cross. I want Jesus to be the forgiver and the leader of my life. I want him to be my Savior. I want to know for sure that I’m your son or your daughter. I’ll live with you every day of this life and then forever in the life to come.

And I pray this now in the name of Jesus, Amen.