The Cross: Making God Right With Us

There once was a brilliant man named Sir Alister Hardy, who was a professor of zoology at Oxford University. Along with being a biologist, Hardy was also an expert on world religions. He spent much time investigating the teachings of the various world faiths.

In the year 1965, Hardy gave a series of lectures in England. In those talks, he expressed his own skepticism about the Christian message of the cross. Hardy said that he doubted very much if Jesus were alive today, that Jesus Himself would be a Christian.

“I feel certain that Jesus would not have preached to us of a God who would be appeased by the cruel sacrifice of a tortured body. I cannot accept…that the appalling death of Jesus was a sacrifice in the eyes of God for the sins of the world, or that God…tortured himself for our redemption. I find such religious ideas to be amongst the least attractive in the whole world. To me they belong to a different philosophy—a different psychology—from the religion that Jesus taught.”

Is Sir Alister Hardy on to something here? Is he correct when he assumes that the message of the cross is somehow alien to the true spirit of what Jesus taught? Has the church over the centuries imposed a barbaric crucifixion message over top of the true message of Jesus?

As we have been approaching Easter, we have been considering the message of the cross. Is it really central to Christianity? Is it essential to our understanding of what it means to be a Christian? Is the cross fundamental to the way that we relate to God? Is the cross really why Jesus came?

Two weeks ago, we discovered how the cross indeed is central to the message of the NT. It is mentioned in virtually every book. We saw that Jesus taught his disciples extensively that the purpose for which he had come into the world was to die on the cross. When the disciples fanned out from Jerusalem into the Mediterranean world with the message of Jesus, it was a crucifixion Gospel that they preached—a Gospel about the cross.

Last week, we examined what the Bible says about how Jesus’ death on the cross makes us right with God. We saw that when he died, he was doing so in our place, as our substitute. And his death has several results…

1. covers our sin

2. cancels our guilt

3. credits us with a righteousness that we ourselves do not have

4. creates peace with God

5. conveys us into a relationship where we stand under the grace of God rather than under the wrath of God

And that just touches on the surface of how the cross makes us right with God. I don’t know whether Sir Alister Hardy read any of those Scriptures, or if he did, what he understood by them. But it is impossible to deny that the New Testament places a huge emphasis on the cross and its absolutely centrality to our relationship with God.

Now I’ve entitled today’s talk “The Cross: Making God Right With Us”, and I admit that it is a rather poor title. There is nothing wrong with God that needs to be made right. But there is something wrong with our relationship with God that needs to be made right, not just from our side of the relationship, but from his standpoint, too. And what Jesus did on the cross addresses that. The cross not only solves all of our problems, it satisfies God’s nature as well.

So as we think about the cross today, we’re going to try to think about it from God’s point of view. And that’s not easy, because God is different from us.

Let’s begin with a question: When someone does something wrong to you, to hurt you, what is your Christian duty toward that person?

A. It’s to forgive him`, isn’t it? Forgiveness is one of the cardinal virtues of Christianity.

The Apostle Peter said “Lord, how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Up to seven times?”

Jesus answered “No Peter, not seven times. Seventy times seven times. In other words, forgive without limit, and don’t keep score.”

Carry that thought into our relationship with God. The Bible says that we have all sinned against God.

Romans 3:23 For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

Isaiah 53:6 All we like sheep have gone astray, we have turned every one to his own way.

We have turned our backs on God. We have broken his standards. We have ignored him and tried to live our lives as though he didn’t exist. These are all symptoms of that deadly disease that the Bible calls sin.

Now at that point, you might say, shouldn’t it be God’s duty to forgive us? If God is going to be a good Christian—if he is going to practice what he preaches—shouldn’t he just forgive us our sins and be done with it? After all, that’s what he tells us to do when we’ve been wronged.

Why all this agonizing and heavenly hand-wringing over a debt that has been incurred and a penalty that needs to be paid; a substitute that needs to be found and a sacrifice that needs to be made?

Why can’t God forgive the way we do? Because he’s God, that’s why.

Last week, a Palestinian terrorist walked into a bus stop in Israel with a load of TNT and a bag of nails strapped to his body. He detonated it and blew himself and at least two Israeli schoolchildren to bits. Dozens more were injured. But as grievously as those individual students suffered and will continue to suffer from that attack, they were not the primary targets. The primary target of that Palestinian’s act of terrorism was the State of Israel.

It’s somewhat similar in this matter of sin. When someone sins against me and does something to hurt me as a human being—as wronged and as victimized and as violated as I feel, and as painful as that is for me to bear—I am still just a bystander.

Even though it may feel like I am the victim of that person’s wrongdoing, I am not the primary target of his sin. I am not the ultimately offended party. God is. Because God is the source and the author of the moral law that governs the universe—the very law that that person has violated by sinning.

That is why King David, after committing adultery with Bathsheba, after arranging for her husband to be eliminated, cried out to God in an awful agony of realization “Against Thee and Thee only have I sinned.” All sin is ultimately sin against God.

God is where the moral buck for our sin stops.

As human beings, when we forgive those who trespass against us, we are acknowledging this fact. When someone hurts me, I find within myself a tremendous urge to take judgment into my own hands. I want to get back at that person. I want to enact vengeance on him for what he did to me.

And I can find a multitude of ways of doing that—everything from ignoring him to attacking him. But all of these responses are ultimately self-destructive and harmful to me. Because I was never meant to be the judge of another person’s sin—even when his sin hurts me. When I become the judge of another person’s sin, I’m stepping into God’s place. And I don’t belong there!

But if I forgive that person who sins against me, I literally release him from my little personal “petty claims court” because I’ve come to the realization that only God is able to properly judge him for what he did. So it’s as though I’m delegating the responsibility for judgment upward, to God.

And if that person who sinned against me stands before the bench in God’s supreme court, guess what? He’s standing there right next to me because that’s where I find myself standing too. I’m a sinner just like him. Our sins may be different, but we have both, in our rebellious way, violated God’s law.

That’s what human forgiveness is all about. It’s about me bumping the judgment upward. And that’s why human forgiveness is fundamentally different from God’s forgiveness. God is the Chief Justice of the universe, and all of our sin is on his docket. He can’t bump the judgment upward, because He’s at the top. The buck stops there.

Now let us not think that God—because he is the Chief Justice of the universe—finds himself in a moral dilemma. We may think that He loves us, he really wants to find a way to let us off, to forgive us, but there’s this confounded Law that has to be satisfied. And the Law is demanding that there is a penalty to be paid for our sin.

The problem with that way of thinking is that it makes the Law into something separate from God himself…

• Here’s God

• Here’s us

• Here’s the Law – something separate from God that He has to adhere to in all of his dealings with us.

But that view is faulty. God IS the Law. The moral law of the universe is the expression of God’s character. It isn’t separate from him, it IS him. The Law isn’t something that God could choose to ignore, or re-write, the way that perhaps a judge might do here in an exceptional case. If God did that, he would be going against his own character, and he would cease to be God. The moral law of the universe is perfectly consistent with God’s character—they’re not at odds.

So when you look at it that way, you start to realize that the problem of our sin and God’s forgiveness is a lot bigger and tougher than most people think. That’s why theologian Emil Brunner said “Forgiveness is the very opposite of anything which can be taken for granted. Nothing is less obvious than forgiveness.”

That’s why Anselm, the great theologian of the 11^(th) century said “If anybody imagines that God can simply forgive us in the same way that we are to forgive others, he has not yet considered the seriousness of sin.”

The problem, from our viewpoint, is that God has two parts of his nature that seem to be in conflict. On the one hand, we know that God loves us. He’s told us that over and over again in the Bible. He keeps saying things like “I love you with an everlasting love.” The Bible even says that God IS love.

But on the other hand, the Bible makes no bones about the fact that God hates our sin, because as we’ve seen, our sin is alien to his character, to his nature. When you take the sum total of all that God is—all of his character, all of his attributes—we call that his holiness. The word “holiness” means “other-ness”. It’s the best way we can find of saying that God is totally different from us. He is other. He is not like us.

And our sinfulness is completely at odds with his holiness. God’s holiness cannot co-exist with sin. It is God’s nature to lash out at sin, to eradicate it, to eliminate it from his presence. This is what the Bible calls the wrath of God. When we think of the wrath of God, we must not think that God is angered or annoyed by our sin, the way that we may be annoyed by some of the irritating things that people do to us. No, the wrath of God is much more profound than that—it is that God abhors sin. It is alien to his nature.

So we have a major problem here, because we are sinners. Sin is inherent to our nature. And if we are ever to have any hope of having a relationship with a God who is holy, then something’s got to be done about our sin.

But how’s God going to deal with it? He can’t just ignore sin and pretend it isn’t there. If he did that, he would stop being God; he would stop being himself. He has to deal with it in a way that is consistent with his holiness and his character, and yet deal with it in a way that doesn’t end up destroying the sinner.

God’s wrath against sin and God’s love for the creature who has become sinful have to be brought together in some way. And the way that God has found to do that is through the cross.

The cross enables a holy God to judge sin without destroying the sinner by taking the punishment for that sin and placing it on an innocent substitute who is able to bear it and is qualified to be a stand-in. And there’s only one person in the universe who can do that—and that is God Himself. So that is why he substituted himself, in the person of His Son Jesus Christ, to take our penalty for us.

Romans 3:25-26 God presented (Jesus) 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.

Now it is vitally important here to remember who Jesus is. The Bible tells us that Jesus is God himself become a man. He is one person with two natures—a divine nature and a human nature. Why is that important?

It is important because if Jesus were not truly a man, he would not have been qualified to serve as our substitute, to stand in our place as our representative on the cross.

And if he were not truly God—if he were just a man—his death on the cross wouldn’t have been sufficient or satisfactory for us. He would have been dying for his own sins and only his own sins. But the fact that he is God gives him the ability to die for the sins of all mankind.

So you see, it is essential that both man and God were one in Jesus when he died on the cross.

And his death

1. satisfies the justice of God

2. is consistent with the holiness of God

3. yet is the expression of the love and mercy of God

There is much that I don’t understand about the cross. But this I do understand: only God could have come up with something like this. Only God could have formulated an equation in which 1 cross plus 3 nails equals 4 given.

1 John 4:10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.