The resurrection is the keystone of the arch on which our faith is supported. If Christ has not risen, we must impeach all those witnesses for lying. If Christ has not risen, we have no proof that the crucifixion of Jesus differed from that of the two thieves who suffered with him. If Christ has not risen, it is impossible to believe his atoning death was accepted.
And in the article of death, as He saw the last fold of the grand design unrolled, He passed out of the world with the cry on His lips, “It is finished!” He uttered this cry as a soldier might do on the battlefield, who perceives, with the last effort of consciousness, that the struggle in which he has sacrificed his life has been a splendid victory. But the triumph and the reward of His work never come to an end; for still, as the results of what He did unfold themselves age after age, as His words sink deeper into the minds of men, as His influence changes the face of the world, and as heaven fills with those whom He has redeemed, “He shall see of the travail of His soul, and shall be satisfied.”
One of the questions people spend their lives trying to answer is: Am I wanted? We often try to answer it with what we do (I know I did). We try to do what we think everyone else wants from us, and if we do them well, they’ll want us. We try to do what we think God wants from us, and maybe if we do it well, He’ll want us. The Cross shows us we are already wanted. Jesus didn’t want to go to the Cross. He endured the Cross because He wanted us.
The Cross is not the appeasement of an angry and retributive God. The cross is not where Jesus saves us from God, but where Jesus reveals God as Saviour. The cross is not what God inflicts upon Jesus, in order to forgive. But what God in Christ endures as he forgives. The cross is where the sin of the world coalesced into a hideous singularity, so that it might be forgiven, en masse across. The Cross is where the world violently sends its sins in the body of the Son of God, and where He absorbed it all saying, “Father forgive them.” The cross is both ugly and beautiful. It’s as ugly as human sin as beautiful as divine love, but in the end, love and beauty win.
Freedom is not free—it cost God the death of His Son. This truth motivates us to protect and value our freedom for the precious gift that it is. As God’s children, servants, and friends, we are not free to do whatever we want; rather, we moderate our freedom to protect our connection with Him and with one another.
Because Jesus fully satisfied the justice of God toward our sin, God no longer counts it against us. But what about our struggles with persistent sin patterns, when we are tempted to feel that we have exhausted the patience and forgiveness of God? We should still bring that sin to the cross with an attitude of repentance and contrition knowing and believing there is no sin that is beyond the cleansing power of the blood of Christ as God said in Isaiah 1:18 “Your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow. Though they are red like crimson, they shall become as wool.” We cannot resist the power of remaining sin in our lives if we have not first dealt with its guilt. And the only way to do this is to continually go back to the cross and see Jesus bearing that sin, and paying its penalty through His death. We truly are new creations in Christ.
Christ’s cross is the sweetest burden that ever I bore: it is such a burden as wings are to a bird, or sails are to a ship.
Jesus was the perfect offering for imperfect humans. The best thing to offer to the Father is his Son. In any other religion, people make sacrifices to God, but in Christianity God made the ultimate sacrifice to us.
Before the triumph, before the crown, before the kingdom, before the victory, there had to come the suffering. Before you can share in Christ’s victory, before you can have a new life here and now, before you can go to heaven, before you can claim the promise that we shall someday reign with Christ, you, too, must come to that same cross. You, too, must come in simple faith and stand at the foot of that cross and receive the Saviour who was willing to go to the cross.