The Cross of Christ

by John R.W. Stott

A second interpretation, which is a modification of the first, is to understand the shout of dereliction as a cry of loneliness.

A third quite popular interpretation is to say that Jesus was uttering a cry of victory, the exact opposite of the first explanation, the cry of despair.

The fourth explanation is simple and straightforward. It is to take the words at their face value and to understand them as a cry of real dereliction.

emphasize both the truth that Jesus experienced ‘not merely a felt, but a real, abandonment by his Father’ and ‘the paradox that, while this God-forsakenness was utterly real, the unity of the Blessed Trinity was even then unbroken’.33

Almost immediately after the cry of dereliction, Jesus uttered three more words or sentences in quick succession.

First, ‘I am thirsty’,

Seco...

‘It is fin...

th...

‘Father, into your hands I commit...

It is not men who have finished their brutal deed; it is he who has accomplished what he came into the world to do. He has borne the sins of the world.

All this presents a coherent and logical picture. It gives an explanation of the death of Jesus which takes into proper scientific account all the available data, without avoiding any. It explains the central importance which Jesus attached to his death, why he instituted his supper to commemorate it, and how by his death the new covenant has been ratified, with its promise of forgiveness. It explains his agony of anticipation in the garden, his anguish of dereliction on the cross, and his claim to have decisively accomplished our salvation. All these phenomena become intelligible if we accept the explanation given by Jesus and his apostles that ‘he himself bore our sins in his body on the tree’.

the cross enforces three truths

First, our sin must be extremely horrible.

Secondly, God’s love must be wonderful beyond comprehension.

God could quite justly have abandoned us to our fate. He could have left us alone to reap the fruit of our wrongdoing and to perish in our sins. It is what we deserved. But he did not. Because he loved us, he came after us in Christ. He pursued us even to the desolate anguish of the cross, where he bore our sin, guilt, judgment and death. It takes a hard and stony heart to remain unmoved by love like that. It is more than love. Its proper name is ‘grace’, which is love to the undeserving.

Thirdly, Christ’s salvation must be...

The crucial question we should ask, therefore, is a different one. It is not why God finds it difficult to forgive, but how he finds it possible to do so at all.

At the cross in holy love God through Christ paid the full penalty of our disobedience himself. He bore the judgment we deserve in order to bring us the forgiveness we do not deserve. On the cross divine mercy and justice were equally expressed and eternally reconciled. God’s holy love was ‘satisfied’.

The emphasis of Scripture, however, is on the godless self-centredness of sin.

Once we have seen that every sin we commit is an expression (in differing degrees of self-consciousness) of this spirit of revolt against God, we shall be able to accept David’s confession: ‘Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight’ (Ps. 51:4).

Why is it that people do not come to Christ? Is it that they cannot, or is it that they will not? Jesus taught both.

the self-righteous world, whose knowledge of God’s law may be either in the Scriptures (Jews) or in their hearts (Gentiles). In either case they do not live up to their knowledge (2:1–16).

We vigorously deny, however, that it is the church’s role to ‘make’ people sick in order to convert them. Instead, we have to make them aware of their sickness, so that they will turn to the Great Physician.

For if there is ‘false guilt’ (feeling bad about evil we have not done), there is also ‘false innocence’ (feeling good about the evil we have done).

A full acknowledgment of human responsibility and therefore guilt, far from diminishing the dignity of human beings, actually enhances it. It presupposes that men and women, unlike the animals, are morally responsible beings, who know what they are, could be and should be, and do not make excuses for their poor performance.

Christians do not deny the fact – in some circumstances – of diminished responsibility, but we affirm that diminished responsibility always entails diminished humanity.

To say that somebody ‘is not responsible for his actions’ is to demean him or her as a human being. It is part of the glory of being human that we are held responsible for our actions. Then, when we also acknowledge our sin and guilt, we receive God’s forgiveness, enter into the joy of his salvation, and so become yet more completely human and healthy. What is unhealthy is every wallowing in guilt which does not lead to confession, repentance, faith in Jesus Christ and so forgiveness.

We must watch our presuppositions, therefore. It is perilous to begin with any a priori, even with a ‘God-given sense of moral justice’ which then shapes our understanding of the cross.

It is wiser and safer to begin inductively with a God-given doctrine of the cross, which then shapes our understanding of moral justice.

some of the early Fathers were extremely injudicious in the ways in which they represented both the devil’s power and how the cross deprived him of it.

they made three mistakes.

First, they credited the devil with more power than he has.

Secondly, they therefore tended to think of the cross as a divine transaction with the devil; it was the ransom-price demanded by him for the release of his captives, and paid to him in settlement of his rights.

Thirdly, some went further and represented the transaction in terms of a deception.

of permanent value in these theories

first

they took seriously the reality, malevolence and p...

sec...

they proclaimed his decisive, objective defeat at the cross...

Consequently, any notion of Christ’s death as a necessary transaction with, let alone deception of, the devil is ruled out.

I am not wanting to disagree with this language, and indeed I continue to use it myself. It has, in fact, good scriptural warrant.

They rightly emphasized that Jesus Christ’s personal submission to the law was indispensable to our rescue from its condemnation. They also taught that his submission took two forms, his perfect obedience to it in his life and his bearing of its penalty in his death.

the first his ‘active’

the second his ‘passive’ ...

We cannot think of God as caught in a technical legal muddle of this kind. Nor is it wise to liken God’s moral laws to his physical laws and then declare them equally inflexible.

The real reason why disobedience of God’s moral laws brings condemnation is not that God is their prisoner, but that he is their creator.

early Greek Fathers represented the cross primarily as a ‘satisfaction’ of the devil,

the early Latin Fathers saw it as a satisfaction of God’s law,

Anselm of Canterbury in the eleventh century, who in his Cur Deus Homo? made a systematic exposition of the cross as a sat...