THE CROSS OF CHRIST — THE GREAT DIVIDE

The cross of Christ makes a clean-cut cleavage between the two spheres, the sphere of death, darkness, and disorder, and the sphere of life, light, and liberty, and it challenges sinners to decide in which they purpose to live. The cross of Christ is the battlefield on which the conflict between Satan and God over the sovereignty of human lives is being waged, and it compels men to take sides either for or against God. The cross of Christ marks the boundary line between the kingdom of Satan and the Kingdom of God, and it calls subjects in the one to come out and become subjects in the other. The cross of Christ finds men living on the plane of the natural, and it opens a way for them to live on the plane of the spiritual and then appeals to them to enter the open door. The cross of Christ is the Great Divide: it separates men into two classes, the unsaved and the saved.

1 Corinthians 1:18

“For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.” 

THE CROSS OF CHRIST — A DOUBLE EXPOSURE

The cross of Christ is the place of exposure. There, as nowhere else, is revealed the hatred of man for God and the love of God for man. Sin is seen at its worst, and love is seen at its best in the cross. Man’s sin and God’s love both reach a climax on Calvary. There, the hideousness of the one and the glory of the other are brought out into sharpest relief.

Acts 2:23

“Him, being delivered by the determinate will and foreknowledge of God, ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.”

The desperate, despicable wickedness of the human heart is uncovered at Calvary. All the rebellion, self-will, and enmity of the natural man found vent in this one act. In the crucifixion of the Holy One, sin came out into the open and disclosed its inwardness.

“Him — ye have taken and by wicked hands have crucified and slain.” Sin nailed the Savior to a cross and, by doing so, exposed to the world its ugly hideousness. Sinners stained their hands with the blood of their Savior and thereby revealed the length and breadth, the height and depth of the infamy of sin.

However, the sin of man could not outstrip the love of God. Nor could sin defeat God by taking Him unawares. Before that hydra-headed monster had raised its head in rebellion against God, He had accomplished its defeat. ” Him, being delivered by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God.” In the eternal counsels of the Godhead, the cross of Christ was set up in love before man was made or the world was created. In the atoning death of the well-beloved Son on the cross of Calvary, God was fully prepared to assume responsibility for sin and all its consequences. God, the Father, spelled out in capital letters on the cross His unquenchable love for sinners.

The cross of Christ reveals not only the love of the Father but the love of the Son as well. In the lament over Jerusalem, in the parable of the father’s love for the prodigal, in the tender look at the denying Peter, and in the pathetic question to Judas, the betrayer, Jesus Christ showed His sorrow for sin and the outreaching of His loving heart to the sinner. But only in the laying down of His sinless life in death as the sinner’s Substitute do we see the perfect outshining of His infinite, limitless love. With the most perfect apprehension of what the sin of man was on the one hand, and of what the mind of God toward sin was on the other, and of sin’s due from God, there went up from the depths of Christ’s sinless humanity a perfect amen to the righteous judgment of God against sin, and a willingness to bear that judgment.

The cross of Christ is the heart of God broken by sin. It tells you and me that the God who must judge and punish sin will save and forgive the sinner. It discovers to us the unfathomable depths of God’s love.

Romans 5:8

“But God commendeth His love toward us in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”

John 3:16

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.”

Galatians 1:3-4

“Our Lord Jesus Christ, who gave Himself for our sins, that He might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father.”

Source: “Life on the Highest Plane” by Ruth Paxson

Loving God, thank You that through the cross of Christ, we can be delivered out of the Kingdom of Satan and enter the Kingdom of God!