In death, is life!

In the previous post, I suggested that the Cross is all around us.  This picture is exactly the kind of thing to which I was referring!  The sign, of course, gives it added value!

The Cross of Jesus was not something that began in the minds of men, but was conceived and enacted in the very heart of Almighty God in eternity.  When God laid down the broad beams on which He built the very structure of the universe, those beams were stained red with the blood of the atoning sacrifice of the only-begotten of the Father - for He was, as we noted, "the Lamb, slain from before the foundation of the world."

This means that the Cross is not only written into the text of the written Word of God - the Bible - but is also ploughed into the very texture of the universe itself!  We may discern this everywhere - no life without death.  As Spring approaches, gardeners will be sowing their seeds.  Jesus said: "... unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." (John 12:24).  The seed must die to produce the life that produces the fruit!

The Cross is not some bizarre absurdity that occurred on the first "Good Friday" - it has been in the whole of life from the very beginning!  The sublime act of the death of Yeshua HaMashiach (Jesus, the Messiah) on that hilltop outside the wall of the city of Jerusalem, some 2,000 years ago, focuses in a ,moment of time something that is actually timeless!  It is a mystery - but a wonderful mystery. Over the next few posts, we will try to understand it better - approaching it with reverence, and awe.

Come with me on this journey of discovery - it could change your life, not only for time, but also for eternity!

At the Cross

A reminder, from my favourite vocal group, that it is at the Cross of Jesus - and there alone - that salvation, and true happiness, are found.

He became sin

 It wasn't so very long ago that I was reading, in my personal 'Quiet Time', in Paul's second letter to the young church in Corinth.  At the end of what we know as chapter 5 (although, of course, Paul didn't write his letters in chapters and verses any more than you or I would!), I read, "For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God." (v.21; RSV).

It was those words "... made Him to be sin ..." that suddenly jumped out at me.  Paul is telling us that, when He hung on the cross, Jesus, the sinless, holy, perfect and without blemish Lamb of God, did not merely take my sin upon Himself, and pay the penalty that I owed.  He says that He became the very essence of sin.  He didn’t just die for my sins; He became all that sin is – all the ugliness, and blackness, and virulence, and bitterness, and maliciousness, and pollution, and poison, that is sin.  Was that what Isaiah saw as he was allowed to look over the horizon of time and get that glimpse of Calvary centuries before the event?  “He had no form or comeliness that we should look at Him, and no beauty that we should desire Him.” (53:2).  No wonder that, for a brief moment of human time, the Father could not even look upon the Son, causing Jesus to cry out, in anguish, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?” (Matt.27:46; Mark 15:34)

And He did all of that; He became sin; for you, and for me!  The hymn-writer didn’t quite get the message when he wrote “O help me understand it, help me to take it in; what it meant to Thee, the Holy One, to bear away my sin.” (K.A.M.Kelly).  H.G.Spafford was closer when he wrote “My sin – oh the bliss of this glorious thought – my sin, not in part, but the whole is nailed to His Cross, and I bear it no more; Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul”

I thought of all of that when I watched the video below - posted on Facebook by my good friend Margaret Ollivier, a GLO missionary in Quimper, France.  I found it to be both beautiful, and powerful.  I trust that you will find it to be the same.