The Blood of the Cross

The Lord Jesus had to bring to naught the power of sin.  He could do this only in His own person.  Therefore He came in the closest possible likeness of sinful flesh; in the weakness of flesh; with the fullest capacity to be tempted as we are.  From His baptism with the Holy Spirit, and the temptation of Satan which followed, up to the fearful soul agony in Gethsemane, and the offering of Himself on the cross, His life was a ceaseless strife against self-will and self-honour; against the temptations of the flesh, and of the world, to reach His goal – the setting up of His kingdom – by fleshly or worldly means.  Every day He had to take up and carry His Cross, that is, to lose His own life and will, by going out of Himself and doing, and speaking nothing, save what He had seen or heard from the Father.  

… But His supreme power to remove guilt and the curse did not lie merely in the fact that He endured so much pain and suffering of death, but that He endured it all in willing obedience to the Father, for the maintenance and glorification of His righteousness.  It was this disposition of self-sacrifice, of bearing the Cross willingly, which bestowed on the Cross its power.  – Andrew Murray from The Blood of the Cross (Christian Literature Crusade, 1968 edition, pp. 27-28)

It is a sad day.  We learn that Britain’s Iron Lady – the last of the Triumvirate of the 1980s, has passed on to her reward.  On perhaps a smaller stage, Friday night, Rick Warren’s youngest son, Matthew, committed suicide at age 27.  I have very little direct knowledge about what Rick Warren believes, having never read any of his books or heard him speak.  He has always elicited a surge of utter indifference in me.  However, even if I hated him and thought him the worst heretic in history, I would grieve with him and his family today.  As Someone said, So whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

I think sometimes that I have it rough.  And maybe I do.  Sometimes.  Jesus never got a day off.  Not His whole life.  Every morning when He woke up, He faced the same set of tugs and impulses that you and I face.  Probably He often heard a voice saying, “You know You don’t have to put up with all this.”  There had to be times when He was thinking, “If Peter goes off just one more time …”, when He wanted to grab some smug Pharisee by the throat.  OK, maybe not.  Maybe that’s just me. 

But what He did want to do in His love and compassion was to give a broken people the Messiah they thought they had been promised, to give them a King and a throne forever, and to do it right then and there without the pain, suffering, and death of the Cross.  It wasn’t just Himself that He would have spared.  He could have saved His people from loss, terror, destruction, and exile – except that it would not have worked.  All that had to go on the Cross.  To say that it is beyond my understanding doesn’t even come close.  It is beyond my misunderstanding and the most fantastic reaches of human imagination.

While we live in this world, we are offered the same choice Christ had.  We can live our lives to ourselves.  A little better, we can live it to our families, our clan, our community, our church, maybe our nation.  We can really expand out and live for humanity.  I have always found it odd, though, that those most dedicated to the cause of humanity are frequently the ones most willing, and even happy, to kill humans in the process.   Be that as it may, while we may call the last more noble than the first, our only true choice is between the flesh and the spirit.  Are we going to live for and to the flesh, or are we going to live for and to God the Father?  By going to the Cross, Christ broke the chains that held us in bondage to the flesh.  He made the right choice, and, by doing so, by living His entire life in obedience, He made it possible for us to follow Him in that choice.  

We like to tell ourselves that technological advances are the same as human improvement.  We like to think that better drugs and a better understanding of genetics, not to mention Science!  are making or will make us better people.  We prefer to ignore the evidence that technology has always been a way to further destruction, to deliver death wholesale, to build better traps and shackles.  The flesh always ends the same way, in bondage and madness, violence and blood and horror. 

There is, in the end, only our way or God’s way.