Cross, along with the Resurrection, is “of first importance”—it is the core message of the gospel—God’s offering salvation through the death of Christ. Salvation is why the Cross really matters.

The New Testament uses several terms and concepts to express the significance of the Cross. Of these terms, salvation is the broadest and most comprehensive. It is used in the New Testament primarily to indicate two types of deliverances: deliver- ance from sin and final deliverance at the Second Coming when the redeemed enter fully into eternal life (Titus 2:11-14). “So great a salvation” (Hebrews 2:3) is made evi- dent through many facets such as calling, faith, repentance, justification, regeneration (new birth), adoption, sanctification, and glorification. All these wonderful blessings are based in the Cross and flow from it. All of us who have experienced God’s grace, manifested in the saving power of Christ’s death, know something about the supreme importance of the Cross. This knowledge should inspire us to teach and talk about it frequently in our Christian education classes and from our church pulpits, to tell others about it through writings and publi- cations, and to carry the salvation message into the marketplace.

The Cross as a Sacrificial Offering

Sin has plagued humanity since the Garden of Eden. Adam’s disobedience cut him off from fellowship with God. In the Old Testament, God made provision for sinners in order to secure pardon for their sins, and He put in place many forms of sacrifice for various purposes, with certain sacrifices for removing guilt caused by sin. The idea was that the sinner confessed

his sin to God and offered an animal sac- rifice. God then accepted the death of an animal instead of the death of the repen- tant sinner, but animal sacrifices proved to be insufficient—the blood of bulls and goats could not remove the guilt of sin (Hebrews 10:4).

In New Testament times sin remained a problem. Like all humankind since Adam, God saw that we too would be tainted with sin and in desperate spiritual trouble. As a result, none of us would be able to open the door to fellowship with God. But God made a way for us to know His love and at the same time for Him to judge sin. God sent His Son into the world to die for our sins. Through the Cross, God revealed both His love and justice at the deep- est level—His love in giving His Son, and His justice in the penalty of the

“GOD ON A CROSS, GOD ON TWO PIECES OF WOOD, STAGGERS THE HUMAN MIND. AT CALVARY

GOD WAS RECONCILING THE WORLD TO HIMSELF AND DEALING WITH THE PROBLEM

OF SIN. WHAT GOD DID ON THE CROSS WAS NOTHING LESS THAN A PURE MIRACLE.”

death that His sinless Son bore. From my perspective, none of us can fathom the depths of this relationship between His love and His justice. But I do know that not one of us deserves love like that. We come in the world to do what- ever our “hand finds to do” (Ecclesiastes 9:10 NKJV), but Christ came specifically into the world to die for us. The cradle in Bethlehem was the beginning of our Lord’s humiliation. The decisive step had been taken at His birth that would lead to suffering and death. During His life on earth, Jesus Christ’s laying His hands on children and on the dead and taking

the paralytic by the hand showed that He was identifying with our weakness, illness, and death. Christ went beyond these miraculous healing actions. He took the consequences of our sins upon Himself so completely that Paul describes Him as being “made sin” (2 Corinthians 5:21). Paul’s choice of the words “made sin” is a way of reminding us that the debt of sin—created by our withholding from God the obedience that was rightly His—was placed on Christ’s account and He paid all our debt at the Cross. All of us have drawn on Christ’s bank account, not ours, if He is our Savior. When we come to faith in Him, He blots out the debt against us in God’s book. There is no fic- tion about the real- ity of the Cross. In Gethsemane, Christ’s commitment to the way of the Cross became clear.

Scarcely had He entered the garden when He began to be sorrowful and very heavy to the point of death (Mark 14:33-34). As some translators put it, “He wrestled with death.” His sweat became as great drops of blood. Christ’s emotional and physical anguish was a struggle with the powers of hell. Try as we may, none of us can fully grasp the weight of Christ’s burden and penetrate the mystery of Gethsemane. This much is clear: On a cross, Jesus willingly drank the cup that was given Him and faced the powers of darkness. No doubt, the Sanhedrin and men like Pilate, Herod, and the Romans had a hand in Christ’s death, but His sacrifice at Calvary was absolutely voluntary. Jesus says in John 10:18 that no man takes His life from Him but He lays it down Himself. Men did nail His body to a cross, but they did not

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