The Cross and the Resurrection

[HKHaugan]

The Accomplishment of the Cross and the Resurrection

Rarely, if ever, do you hear a sermon about God’s wrath. This is the ‘feel good’ age when we look for love and happiness without accountability. If anything was obvious to the people of God in the Old Testament it was the fury and wrath of God against sin and evil. Everything physical was read as having God’s hand in it in some way especially when it came to weather, prosperity and disease. Good crops, healthy children and successful business were seen as blessings while sickness, disease, famine, war and storms were interpreted as judgment from God for sin. Increasingly the prophets began to rail against the kings and the nation of Israel for their stiff-necked faithlessness and haughtiness. When the nation repented, God relented.

But that spiritual cycle increased until the time of Jesus when Israel was but a spiritual shadow of its former self, a scarecrow on history’s horizon. A once mighty nation under Moses, David and Solomon had become lost in idolatry, legalism, compromise and identified only as a minor nuisance in the eyes of the then mighty Rome. Mankind seen in the majesty of Rome had reached the height of pride and arrogance. Rome was the devil’s playground of spiritual rebellion against God, a new tower of Babel, projecting sin’s thumb into the eye of God. Its emperor considered himself to be a god, its citizens superior and the state divine, all satanically urged. Physical conflict was minor because Rome had the military power to squelch hostility. Under Rome peace was understood as the absence of conflict.

However, slavery, both voluntary and involuntary, was part of the social order. Only Roman citizens enjoyed a limited sense of freedom. Life was harsh and opportunity limited. Underneath all of this the hearts of men were restless. There had to be more. There had to be a definition of man, a life that was different, a way to think and act that gave the individual significance, purpose and a destiny.

The wrath of God was boiling against mankind. He had given mankind every chance to change. He had chosen a people to be His witness but they failed. Because He had already promised He would not destroy the earth by flood as in Noah’s time, He had to do something so completely different that the hearts of men would be changed and would turn to Him to be identified, loved and share who He was. He wanted to embrace all people everywhere.

But God had a problem. If He came too near them His Holy Presence would incinerate them. Remember the warning He gave Moses when He called Him up on the mountain, that the people were not to come near the mountain or they would be consumed? In Leviticus God declared that only a blood sacrifice would atone for the sins of the people because life was in the blood.

It was clear only God could present the kind of a sacrifice that would satisfy His wrath. The whole sacrificial system was designed by God to prepare the way for the ultimate perfect sacrifice of His Son’s perfect blood.

The prophets talked about the wrath of God being contained in a cup that would have to be drunk (Isaiah 51:17, Jer.25:15 and Ezek.20:8). Jesus asked the disciples if they could drink the cup that He would drink of but they couldn’t understand it at that point. So God sent His Son to drink the cup of His wrath against sin and evil. What Jesus did on the Cross was to be our substitute, to absorb the wrath of God by becoming sin for us thus taking the full brunt of the wrath we deserved.

Hear Paul’s words, “God presented Him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in His blood. He did this to demonstrate His justice, because in His forbearance He had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished---He did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus (Rom.3:25-26).” God is just and has to have His justice satisfied. By faithful obedience to His Father Jesus met the just requirements of God’s Law and through faith in the Just One, Jesus, we are justified, made right before God, justified, made right in our hearts and free to be justified before God in the world. Here are Paul’s words, “He was delivered over to death for our sins and raised to life for our justification (Rom.4:25).” Our justification is practiced in our obedience through the Word before God toward others.

This is how Jesus was right with His Father and showed us by His faith how our faith in Him makes us right with God and right in our mind and heart. That makes every self-conscious moment a Cross-moment wherein we choose to identify as a child of God or be our own god, to choose to let Jesus be Lord or the devil as leader and to choose to keep in step with the Holy Spirit or live apart from God. Our cross is believing Jesus in the mind which is the vertical beam, trusting Jesus in the world which is the horizontal beam and faith in Jesus in the heart which is where the beams intersect. This is how we are justified by grace through faith and restored to God and one another.

Next---The Resurrection---Stay tuned.