The Cross of Christ: God Instead of Us
The following is an excerpt from Trevin Wax’s Blog, Kingdom People. To see this post in its entirety, you can find it here.
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But though Adam rebelled against the command of God, and Israel did not live up to the righteousness, love and faithfulness God demanded, Jesus submitted perfectly to the Father’s plan.
A life of perfect obedience.
A death of perfect submission.
Where we as humans failed in our task to reflect God rightly and where Israel failed in her task to shine God’s love to the rest of the world, Jesus remained faithful. He accomplished God’s will completely.
Jesus not only fulfilled the Law of Moses; he revealed the heart of God. He showed us God’s intention of the Law. Jesus announced the arrival of God’s Kingdom; he demanded allegiance and obedience; he taught how living God’s way turned human wisdom on its head.
Now, the time had come for his life to be given as a ransom for many. And on that fateful day in Jerusalem, he lived out his own teaching for the whole world to see, perfectly fulfilling the Law of Moses – and even his own Sermon on the Mount.
If someone strikes you, turn to him the other cheek… The Roman fists had already bloodied and bruised Jesus’ face, but he did not strike back.
If someone asks you to go one mile, go with him two miles. From Pilate’s courtyard to Calvary’s hill, he had carried his cross, walking miles on that dusty road for you and me.
If someone takes your tunic, give him your cloak as well, Jesus had told his followers on the mountainside. Now, on the hill of Golgotha, just below the cross, his enemies were mockingly casting lots for his clothes.
And finally, on the cross, almost completely unrecognizable, Jesus lived out one last part of his teaching.
Love your enemies… Pray for those who persecute you… Forgive… In a moving display of divine love, Jesus prayed for the forgiveness of those who had tortured him.
“Father, forgive them,” he had said. Luke uses a verb that implies Jesus was repeating the phrase over and over again.
Enduring the painful insults and humiliating spit of Roman guards… Father, forgive them…
Being lied about and falsely accused in Caiphas’ court… Father, forgive them…
Surviving the vicious torture of Roman scourging… Father, forgive them…
Hearing the taunts being hurled at him from below the cross… Father forgive them…
Here is Jesus – living out the total summation of his message of forgiveness. He is not a hypocrite like the rest of us. He is truly and fully God. God being who God is. God doing what God does.
Jesus’ proclamation of forgiveness to those who despised him can break the heart of stone. Because of hislife in our place, and his death in our stead, we are freed from our sins, and also from the Law. Horatio Spafford’s song, “It is Well with My Soul” includes the beautiful lines:
My sin – O the bliss of this glorious thought –
My sin, not in part but the whole
is nailed to the cross and I bear it no more,
praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
When the Romans crucified criminals in the first century, it was customary for them to nail an accusation list to the cross. The list informed people why this person was being crucified. When Jesus died, God took the accusations that Satan brings against us – all our failures and mistakes, our willful rebellion and our constant inability to keep God’s law – and God nails those accusations to the cross of his Son. So Jesus Christ died there on Calvary, bearing your sin and mine; the accusations that should be hurled against us were hurled against him instead.
Trembling Joy: Emotional Paradox in the Christian Life
The following post comes from Brian Borgman @ The Gospel Coalition Blog. I’ve been wrestling with the nature of joy and this post was very timely and helpful to me. I hope it is to you as well.
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For I’ve beheld with trembling joy the sight of Calvary’s Scarlet Rose,
For You have captured me. -Steve and Vikki Cook
We have all heard that the word “blessed” means “happy.” True enough. But the kind of happiness that “blessed” conveys is something that transcends the typical American definitions of happiness. It communicates a satisfaction and contentment that is firmly settled in the soul. It isn’t touched by the trivial. It communicates a sense of joy that more often than not is expressed by tears rather than laughter. It isn’t inspired by jokes.
Oftentimes in Scripture this kind of happiness or blessedness is strangely combined with emotions that we intuitively think are contrary or opposite. For instance, in the Beatitudes, Jesus says, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 5:3). Even more striking is, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4). Those who feel their own poverty, their own helplessness and moral and spiritual bankruptcy are in a state of happiness. Those who mourn over their sins are in a state of contentment and peace. Strange? Not really. What these paradoxes demonstrate is that there is joy that Christians experience when they embrace reality and truth about God and themselves.
Job experienced something like this. After besmirching God’s character time after time, Job is finally confronted by God in Job 38. God gently rebukes His servant: “Who is this who darkens counsel?” (Once God is done with Job in His two speeches, Job repents 42:2-6). Job, in the words of Francis Anderson, “is at once delighted and ashamed.” Here he is, contrite, humbled and yet he is awestruck with things too wonderful for him to understand (42:3). He loathes himself but is overwhelmed with God (42:5-6). After all his suffering, all his misery, Job is both joyfully in awe and mournfully contrite. This sounds like “Blessed are the poor in spirit,” and “Blessed are those who mourn.”
In the final chapter of Isaiah we are told that God looks with favor on those who are humble and contrite in spirit and who tremble at His Word (Isa. 66:2b). The one who knows he has nothing to offer, who sees his own sin and that he really needs help, this is the one God looks on with favor. The next description is he trembles at God’s Word. He who sees the awful majesty of God in the Word and his own sin in light of that majesty, the one who is cut deeply, wounded and humbled under the Word, this is the one to whom God says, “I am pleased with you.”
The Word comes to each of us and there is either pride that sits over the Word with a critical spirit, or there is humility and brokenness that responds with contrition and trembling. The broken, contrite trembler is described by Jesus as poor in spirit and mourning and hungering and thirsting for righteousness. What is his ultimate condition? Blessed! Truly happy.
The one who trembles at the Word joyfully finds refuge in Christ. To be humbled and trembling is incredibly sweet. There should be no place we would rather be than flat on our face before a holy God, trembling at His majestic Word and realizing that in that Word we do hope and in that Word is our salvation and in that Word our righteousness is revealed in Jesus Christ. It is in this “unpleasant” position of trembling that we find the greatest joy.
B.B. Warfield knew of the paradox of joy and misery:
The attitude of the “miserable sinner” is not only not one of despair; it is not even one of depression; and not even one of hesitation or doubt; hope is too weak a word to apply to it.
It is an attitude of exultant joy.
Only this joy has its ground not in ourselves but in our Savior.
We are sinners and we know ourselves to be sinners, lost and helpless in ourselves.
But we are saved sinners; and it is our salvation which gives the tone to our life, a tone of joy which swells in exact proportion to the sense we have of our ill-desert; for it is he to whom much is forgiven who loves much, and who, loving, rejoices much.
The Relaxation Inspires the Effort
The following comes from Dane Ortlund’s blog, Strawberry-Rhubarb Theology. I’ve said this before, but both Dane’s blog and his dad’s blog (Ray Ortlund Jr. – Christ is Deeper Still) are encouraging everyday.
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The man who is relaxed because of what God has done for him will through that relaxation lose his preoccupation with self and forget himself, and be prompted into fruitfulness. . . . It is precisely the relaxation that inspires to effort. . . . Only he who no longer needs to serve himself with his works is able, since he is now free from himself, to do really ‘good works,’ works that mean something for the Other and the others.
–Hendrikus Berkhof, Dutch theologian who died in 1995, in Christian Faith: An Introduction to the Study of the Faith (trans. Sierd Woudstra; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 453; cf. 473
Come Thou Fount and Sufjan
Words by Robert Robinson (1758):
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of Thy redeeming love.
Sorrowing I shall be in spirit,
Till released from flesh and sin,
Yet from what I do inherit,
Here Thy praises I’ll begin;
Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Here by Thy great help I’ve come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood;
How His kindness yet pursues me
Mortal tongue can never tell,
Clothed in flesh, till death shall loose me
I cannot proclaim it well.
O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let Thy goodness, like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
O that day when freed from sinning,
I shall see Thy lovely face;
Clothed then in blood washed linen
How I’ll sing Thy sovereign grace;
Come, my Lord, no longer tarry,
Take my ransomed soul away;
Send thine angels now to carry
Me to realms of endless day.
The Living and Dying of Christ For us
The following comes from the blog, Of First Importance:
“The gospel is saying that, what man cannot do in order to be accepted with God, this God Himself has done for us in the person of Jesus Christ. To be acceptable to God we must present to God a life of perfect and unceasing obedience to his will. The gospel declares that Jesus has done this for us. For God to be righteous he must deal with our sin. This also he has done for us in Jesus. The holy law of God was lived out perfectly for us by Christ, and its penalty was paid perfectly for us by Christ. The living and dying of Christ for us, and this alone is the basis of our acceptance with God”
- Graeme Goldsworthy, Gospel and Kingdom, p86
Because He Loves Us
“Christians don’t think God will love us because we’re good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”
C.S. Lewis
HT: @CSLewisdaily (Twitter)
He Loves Us Because He Loves Us
The following excerpt comes from a great article in Christianity Today by Mark Galli (entitled, Love Needs No Reason):
Time after time, God’s mercy and love are not prompted by our intrinsic worth or value or potential, but by love without reason—”great love.”
What we discover in God is that love is not love in the deepest sense if it is motivated by anything intrinsic in the beloved—another’s worth, value, gifts, or potential. If our actions are motivated by such things, it is not love. We are merely giving people their due, obligated by some value in them to honor and respect them. Love is not love unless freely given, given for no reason at all but merely out of that “great love.” Love needs no reason and has no reason. Love is its own reason.
It may seem circular, but such is the nature of the gospel. God loves us because he loves us. It doesn’t get any simpler, or more profound, than that.
Have mercy on me, O God,
according to your steadfast love;
according to your abundant mercy,
blot out my transgressions. (Psalm 51:1)Help me, O Lord my God! / Save me according to your steadfast love! (Psalm 109:26)
But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved. (Eph. 2:4-5)
A Great Relief
The moment in my life where I most acutely experienced the rest and peace of Christ was when I first believed that God’s benevolence towards me was entirely rooted in the finished work of Jesus. Whether I’m doing very good or very bad, God feels the same way about me as He does about His only Son. I came across a quote from Brennan Manning’s The Signature of Jesus that speaks to this end:
Probably the moment in my own life when I was closest to the Truth who is Jesus Christ was the experience of being a hopeless derelict in the gutter in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. In his novel The Moviegoer, Walker Percy says: “Only once in my life was the grip of everydayness broken: when I lay bleeding in the ditch.” Paradoxically, such an experience of powerlessness does not make one sad. It is a great relief because it makes us rely not on our own strength but on the limitless power of God. The realization that God is the main agent makes the yoke easy, the burden light, and the heart still.
Always on His “Blood and Righteousness” Alone That We Can Rest
The following post comes from Justin Taylor’s blog, Between Two Worlds. It is unbelievable!
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If you don’t have time to read this right now, clip it and save it for later. And if you read it now, commit to rereading it. Then read it at least one more time.
It is rich, wise, and timely for all of us. It’s a quote from the great Lion of Princeton, B.B. Warfield (1851–1921), from his essay, “’Miserable-Sinner Christianity’ in the Hands of the Rationalists,” in The Works of Benjamin B. Warfield, vol. 7, pp. 113-114.
(HT: Ryan Kelly)
We must always be accepted for Christ’s sake, or we cannot ever be accepted at all.
This is not true of us only “when we believe.”
It is just as true after we have believed.
It will continue to be true as long as we live.
Our need of Christ does not cease with our believing; nor does the nature of our relation to Him or to God through Him ever alter, no matter what our attainments in Christian graces or our achievements in Christian behavior may be.
It is always on His “blood and righteousness” alone that we can rest.
There is never anything that we are or have or do that can take His place, or that can take a place along with Him.
We are always unworthy, and all that we have or do of good is always of pure grace.
Though blessed with every spiritual blessing in the heavenlies in Christ, we are still in ourselves just “miserable sinners”: “miserable sinners” saved by grace to be sure, but “miserable sinners” still, deserving in ourselves nothing but everlasting wrath. That is the attitude which the Reformers took, and that is the attitude which the Protestant world has learned from the Reformers to take, toward the relation of believers to Christ.
There is emphasized in this attitude the believer’s continued sinfulness in fact and in act; and his continued sense of his sinfulness. And this carries with it recognition of the necessity of unbroken penitence throughout life. The Christian is conceived fundamentally in other words as a penitent sinner.
But that is not all that is to be said: it is not even the main thing that must be said.
It is therefore gravely inadequate to describe the spirit of “miserable sinner Christianity” as “the spirit of continuous but not unhopeful penitence.” It is not merely that it is too negative a description, and that we must at least say, “the spirit of continuous though hopeful penitence.” It is wholly uncomprehending description, and misplaces the emphasis altogether.
The spirit of this Christianity is a spirit of penitent indeed, but overmastering exultation.
The attitude of the “miserable sinner” is not only not one of despair; it is not even one of depression; and not even one of hesitation or doubt; hope is too weak a word to apply to it.
It is an attitude of exultant joy.
Only this joy has its ground not in ourselves but in our Savior.
We are sinners and we know ourselves to be sinners, lost and helpless in ourselves.
But we are saved sinners; and it is our salvation which gives the tone to our life, a tone of joy which swells in exact proportion to the sense we have of our ill-desert; for it is he to whom much is forgiven who loves much, and who, loving, rejoices much.
The Fallacy in Your Mind
The following comes from The Ragamuffin Gospel by Brennan Manning. I read this book 8 years ago and thought it was fresh and different than most of the things I had read or come across, and now am re-reading it and am blown away and extremely encouraged by Manning’s clarity on the gospel of grace. I highly recommend this book as well as another book of his entitled The Furious Longing of God (and everything else that he’s written too 
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The portrait of Peter, the rock who proved to be a sand pile, speaks to every ragamuffin across the generations. Lloyd Ogilvie notes: “Peter had built his whole relationship with Jesus Christ on his assumed capacity to be adequate. That’s why he took his denial of the Lord so hard. His strength, loyalty, and faithfulness were his self-generated assets of discipleship. The fallacy in Peter’s mind was this: he believed his relationship was dependent on his consistency in producing the qualities he thought had earned him the Lord’s approval.
“Many of us face the same problem. We project into the Lord our own measured standard of acceptance. Our whole understanding of him is based in a quid pro quo of bartered love. He will love us if we are good, moral, and diligent. But we have turned the tables; we try to live so that he will love us, rather than living because he has already loved us.”
