"The Cross Speaks"

The death of Jesus Christ is not just an act of dying. We need to look deeper. Too many want to dramatize His cruel treatment and emphasize His physical punishment. While it is true that each New Testament writer speaks of His tiral, beatings and crucifixion, we need to look at what was really being taught. The bloody treatment and death of Jesus was all about redeeming and atonement. It was a sacrificial death. How could we know that until God spoke to us in Jesus Christ? It took the revelation of the cross to open the eyes of man to what God's love is toward us. It took God speaking through His prophets that there must be atonement to redeem (buy back) man to Himself. Jesus was that atonement (at-one-ment - think about that) to bring us to God.

We must be careful not to take the love of God for us, cheapen it by our sentimentality. Too many times we compare the death of Jesus to how we feel about our children with all the sugar and spices we put on top. We speak of love, and we should, but the love of God goes much more beyond what is seen and felt in our hearts with our own children (or anyone else). I guess bottom line, we must be careful when we speak of God's love through the redemption and atonement of the dying of Jesus that we reduce it to God being concerned for our happiness rather than our HOLINESS! That's what the death of Jesus is all about...holiness, our holiness.

The center of love is the death of our Lord. His death is about our holiness and that is what redemption and atonement was speaking. The danger becomes when we reduce His love to our happiness and physical well being because that makes His death a self-serving, self-centered passion, bent only on extracting from the relationship our own personal delight. And God sits in His holy love wanting man to realize: "But like the Holy One who called you, be holy yourselves in all your behavior; because it is written, 'You shall be holy, for I am holy.'"(I Pet. 1:15-16) And when we don't take the cross as a holy, redemptive, atoning sacrifice, God steps in with discipline to get us to realize: "...but He disciplines us for our good, so that we may share His holiness." (Heb. 12:10)