The Cross: Making Us Right With God

A woman walks into a church. Her cheeks are streaked with tears, her mascara running. The strain of fear is written all over her face. She has been suffering from terrifying nightmares for months—in her recurring dreams a disembodied face hovers above her, pinning her arms, trying to possess her body. She is dealing with an evil spirit.

The woman turns to her religion for answers, but answers are not there. Her priest gives her detailed instructions—rituals to perform, certain prayers to say, sacrifices to offer to her gods. But nothing works—her visions grow worse, her situation more hopeless. She cries out to her gods for help, but her gods are silent and powerless to stop the haunting.

She talks to a friend, a Christian friend, who gives her a Bible and suggests that when the trouble starts, she make the sign of the cross, hold the Bible close to her and call out the name of Jesus. The next time the evil spirit comes, she tries it. It works. Whenever she crosses herself with the sign of the cross, the spirit disappears, the nightmare ends. But it always comes back againt.

Desperate for answers, she tries the church. By now she knows that the sign of the cross gives her temporary relief from the evil spirit, but there is something missing. She needs to know the power and the person behind the cross; she needs to know the God of the cross.

That’s why she walks into the church. She’s there because she needs to know Jesus.

A strange story, you say—perhaps something you’d hear from the mission field in Asia or Africa? It isn’t so strange. It happened right here in Mississauga, right here in this church just this past week. A person under the power of the enemy reached out for help from the God of the cross, and that person was delivered.

We have been thinking about the cross. In the weeks leading up to Easter, we want to know “Why the Cross?” Why did Jesus die on the cross? Why is the cross so central to all that we know about him? Why has the cross become the emblem of Christianity?

Turn in your Bible to Romans 5 (page 1181). This is one of the great passages of the Bible that explains the significance of Christ’s death on the cross. If we could sum it all up in one phrase, it would be that Christ’s death on the cross makes us right with God.

His death on the cross…

1. Covers our sin

2. Cancels our guilt

You say: Why do we need that? How could we be so far wrong with God that we would need God Himself, in the person of Jesus, to die for us? Let’s think about that for a moment.

In the news recently, we heard the name of a notorious criminal—Karla Homolka. She is continuing to serve her prison sentence and has been denied early release. I’m sure that many Canadians regard Karla Homolka, and her partner, Paul Bernardo—because of the horrendous crime they committed—to be some of the worst human beings to have ever lived on this planet. Indeed, many Canadians think them worthy of death.

I want you to imagine a picture in your mind’s eye. Picture Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo standing before a judge—and not just any judge, but the greatest judge in Canadian history. He sits on the bench, resplendent in his judicial robes and listens sadly to the case as it unfolds.

The prosecution has assembled all the evidence against these two, and it is both horrendous and overwhelming. As the trial unfolds, there is virtually nothing that can be said in the defendants’ favor. The jury hears the evidence and deliberates for just five minutes before coming back with a guilty verdict. It is an open and shut case.

And as those proceedings unfold, that judge has sat on the bench, and heard it all. He knows all the gruesome details of what the perpetrators did. He knows they are guilty, and he knows that the law calls for a mandatory death sentence in cases as grievous as this.

The defendants appear in his courtroom one last time for sentencing. In solemn tones, the judge pronounces the death penalty against them and there is an awful hush in the courtroom.

But then the judge stands up, steps down off the bench, and comes around to where the defendants are standing before the bar. Everyone wonders what he is going to do. He meets Homolka and Bernardo there, in front of the bar, and he says to them “I am going to take your sentence for you. You are hereby pardoned and you are free to go.”

There’s a gasp from the audience. People can hardly believe their ears. Pandemonium erupts in the courtroom. The defendants stand there in a daze as the bailiff takes the handcuffs off their wrists, the shackles off their legs, and puts them on the judge instead. There he stands, shackled and bound, in his dignified judicial robes. He watches steadfastly as the defendants walk out of the courtroom to freedom. Then the bailiff leads the judge away to death row, where his execution is already scheduled.

What happened in that imaginary scene is the first thing that the cross is all about. The root idea behind it is that although we are guilty of sin, God has stepped in to take our penalty for us. He stepped off the bench to be our substitute.

Look at Romans 5:6…

Romans 5:6-8 You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

If you look back a couple of pages at Romans 3, you will find a definition of sin.

As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.”

And then verses 13-18 give us a fuller description of that sin. And verse 23 explains the universality of that sin…

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

So as human beings, as free moral creatures who stand before God, we are guilty of breaking his law. You say “But I’ve never done anything as terrible as a Karla Homolka.” Undoubtedly not, but you have broken God’s law nonetheless. Whether our sin is great or small, we have all fallen short of the glory of God; we have missed his mark. And in spiritual terms, the penalty for sin—all sin, whether great or small—is death.

It is death because by sinning, we cut ourselves off from the presence of God and from the life of God. When we sin against God, whether in large ways or in small ways, we are literally turning our backs on the Author of life, and we incur a judicial penalty that now must be paid.

The message of the cross is that it has been paid. Jesus paid the penalty by dying in our place, as our substitute. And when Jesus died on the cross as our substitute, God’s justice was met. God’s character was preserved. Look at Rom. 3:25…

Romans 3:25 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.

Because of the cross, our sin has been covered, and our guilt has been cancelled. Colossians 2:13-14 says…

Colossians 2:13-14 When you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your sinful nature, God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross.

Jesus death on the cross makes it possible for our legal status before God to be changed from “guilty” to “innocent”. But notice that the word “faith” appears twice in Romans 3:25-26…

• “through faith in his blood” (v. 25)

• “those who have faith in Jesus” (v. 26)

In dying on the cross, Jesus has provided the only way for us to be justified before God—the only way for our sin to be covered and our guilt to be cancelled. But faith is the key that unlocks the door. We must believe, we must trust, we must have faith in what Jesus did in order for it to do us any good.

Let’s go back to our imaginary courtroom. The judge is standing beside the defendants. He says “You are guilty and you are sentenced to die. But I will pay your penalty for you.”

Q. What do the defendants need to do at that point to go free?

A. They simply need to accept the judge’s offer.

But what if they don’t accept? What if they stand there and start arguing: “Well, judge we appreciate your offer, but there must be another way. Perhaps we should embark on a campaign of good works, and we’ll try to work our way out of our predicament by behaving better from now on.” Would that get them off?

Or maybe they could say “Well, we’re going to try to find another judge who will dismiss the charges against us.” The only problem with that is that there is no other judge.

Or maybe they could say “We don’t believe that there is any such thing as a moral law in the first place, so how could you declare us guilty?” Would that get them off?

You see, the point I’m trying to make is that there is no other way. The cross of Jesus is the only way. And we’ve all got to decide whether we’re going to believe it or not. Whether we’re going to trust in Jesus’ way or some other way that we’ve cooked up.

If we choose to believe, God does some remarkable things for us.

• Credits righteousness to us

• Brings us peace with God

• Places us under His grace

Someone has said that when you are justified, it is just as if you’d never sinned. But does that mean that when God looks at you, he somehow forgets that you are a sinner? Not at all. It’s just that when he looks at you, he sees that by faith you have been united with Jesus Christ, and he credits Christ’s righteousness to your account. It works something like this…

Imagine for a moment a young woman who has been very careless with her personal finances. She’s gone on too many shopping sprees at the mall. She has charged her credit cards up to the limit. She’s two months behind on her car payments. She has defaulted on the rent for her apartment. Her liabilities are greater than her assets.

But then suppose she meets, and falls in love with a nice young man who happens to be very wealthy. He comes from a family that is fabulously rich. Their romance blossoms and they end up getting married. Now what is her financial status?

Because she and her husband are now one, their assets are combined. And his financial assets are more than able to make up for her liabilities. So she goes overnight from being in the red to being well into the black, thanks to her union with him.

That is a picture of what happens to us when we put our trust in Jesus to be our Saviour. When we repent of our sin and place our trust completely in him, we don’t turn into perfect people. We don’t gain a righteousness of our own. But the Bible says that our faith unites us with Jesus so that, in the sight of God, his righteousness becomes our righteousness. His assets become our assets.

Romans 3:22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe.

Because of the cross, and because we put our trust in the one who died on the cross, we go from having no righteousness before God to having the righteousness of Christ.

We also go from being at war with God to having peace with God

Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ

There is a little, remote island in the Philippines called the island of Lubang. On March 10, 1974, something very remarkable happened there. That was the day that a solitary soldier of the Japanese Imperial Army walked out of the jungle and surrendered.

The Second World War had ended on September 2, 1945, when the Japanese government officially signed a surrender document aboard the battleship Missouri anchored in Tokyo Bay. On that day, the gunfire stopped, the troops laid down their arms. The bloodshed was over. But for Lt. Onoda on the island of Lubang, the war went on.

He refused to believe the reports of the surrenderr that he heard on his radio. He thought it was all an American trick to lure him into a trap. So he continued his one-man war for the next three decades. He simply refused to surrender.

The Filipino Army tried to find his hideout. But they could never track him down. He was as elusive as a shadow. He became an expert in jungle survival. Every day, he would climb a tree and scan the horizon with his binoculars to see if the Japanese Navy would return and help him to recapture the Philippines. But finally, after 28 years of disappointment, Lt. Onoda simply gave up.

The war had been over for almost three decades, but that stubborn soldier didn’t benefit from that fact. To finally be at peace, he first had to believe that a peace treaty had been signed. Second, he had to personally accept it by laying down his arms and giving up his life of resistance. It took him twenty-eight years to finally get to that place.

Spiritually speaking, Lt. Onoda’s experience is similar to many people’s relationship to God. When Jesus Christ died on the cross on Good Friday in the year 30 A.D., his death was the peace treaty between God and man. The Bible says so.

But Jesus’ death on the cross doesn’t bring us peace with God until we personally believe that it is true, and accept it as personally applying to us. That’s the choice that only we can make. We can choose to go on fighting God or running and hiding from God like fugitives. Or we can lay down our arms and accept the peace.

When we put our trust in Jesus Christ we go from being at war with God to being at peace with God.

Canada and the U.S. are at peace, and the border between our two countries is the longest undefended border in the world. We travel back and forth between the two countries routinely, and at will.

But have you ever crossed a border between two countries that were not friendly? I have. In 1989, I went into Eastern Europe, which was still under Communist rule at the time. I crossed the border from Austria into Czechoslovakia. I saw the guard towers along the Danube River, and the barbed wire, and the machine guns in the hands of the border guards.

Then, as I traveled further into Eastern Europe, I crossed the border between Hungary, which was a relatively open country, and Romania, which was still under the yoke of a fanatical Communist dictator. At that border, I had a submachine gun pointed in my face. I heard the mean snarl of the guard dogs outside the train I was riding on. The air was thick with fear and tension.

Which would you rather experience in your relationship with God? You see, for a person who hasn’t yet put his trust in Jesus, God is a very fearful person. God is holy. God is just. God hates sin. And as sinners, we instinctively know all those things.

So we shy away from God. We’re afraid of God. We don’t want to think about God, or get very close to God. Remember how Adam and Eve ran and hid from God in the Garden after they sinned? There’s no peace between God and ourselves when we are sinners. A state of hostility exists. The Bible says that our sin makes us God’s enemies.

And that spiritual warfare that exists between us and God has tremendous ramifications for our relationships with other people. Because we are not at peace with God, we cannot be at peace with our fellow human beings.

In 1965, the Secretary General of the United Nations asked some haunting questions to the assembled delegates: “What element is lacking so that with all our skill and all our knowledge we still find ourselves in the dark valley of discord and enmity? What is it that inhibits us from going forward together to enjoy the fruits of human endeavor and to reap the harvest of human experience? Why is it that, for all our professed ideals, our hopes, and our skills, peace on earth is still a distant objective seen only dimly through the storms and turmoils of our present difficulties?”

The answer is that there will never be peace on earth until there is peace in the hearts of individual men and women. And there can never be peace in our heart unless we have peace with God. No amount of education, agitation, manipulation, or legislation is ever going to give us that kind of peace. It can only come through the cross.

Colossians 1:20 tells us that God has reconciled us to himself and has made peace through the blood of Jesus shed on the cross.

It is as though the cross was the pen, and the blood of Jesus was the ink that God used to write the peace treaty between to end the war between us and him.

The cross of Jesus does something else: it places us under God’s grace.

Romans 5:1 Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

A few years ago when I lived in NY City, I had the privilege of attending a special air show put on by the U.S. Navy in Pensacola, Florida. We flew down to Pensacola for the day in a private jet. I was in a party of V.I.P’s who had been invited to attend that air show. (I was not a V.I.P., but I was with V.I.P’s) There were television personalities there, and major players in the aviation industry and from Wall Street and the military.

When we flew into Pensacola, they gave us a police escort though the front gates of the great naval training facility there—the Cradle of US Naval Aviation. They gave us each a special nametag and a ticket that said “Distinguished Visitor”.

When we got inside the gates, I found that there were thousands of other people at that air show. It was to be the last air show of the season for the Blue Angels. There was a large area set aside for the general public. There were concession stands, where you could buy souvenirs and hamburgers and so forth.

But everyone in my VIP party went through a little gate. There were a couple of U.S. Navy corpsmen standing there checking credentials. So I just flashed my card that said “Distinguished Visitor”, and that let me into a special roped off area right up at the front, right next to the runway, where I had a completely unobstructed view.

There were already rows of chairs set up so that we could sit comfortably while we watched the Blue Angels perform. The general public had to stand. There was also a large tent in our VIP area. Inside the tent, was all the food you could ever want spread out on tables. And it was free for the taking.

Now the point I’m trying to make is this: When I went through that special VIP gate, I was being ushered into a place of privilege and favor and honor.

The other guests in the VIP party got all of that special treatment because in some way or another, they deserved it. They were there because they were important people; people who had value to the U.S. Navy.

But I was there simply because I was fortunate enough to have been invited. I was simply the friend and pastor of the man who had organized the whole thing. I hadn’t done one single thing to deserve being there; I had rendered no service to the U.S. Navy. I was just there because I had been invited.

That’s exactly the way it is in our relationship with God. When we put our trust in Jesus, we go from standing under God’s wrath to standing under his grace. Not because of anything we’ve done. Not because of any merit. Simply because Jesus Christ, by dying on the cross, has given us access into that grace in which we now stand.

Would you like to stand under God’s grace? Would you like to have peace with God? Would you like to have the righteousness of Jesus credited to your account? Would you like to have your sins covered and your guilt cancelled?

You can, right now, by putting your trust in Jesus.