The Gracious Power of the Cross 3. Saves Believers Isa 1:10-20; Ps 32:1-5; 1 Cor 1:18-2:5; Matt 6:19-34
Introduction
The title of today’s talk in our series, The Cross Saves Believers, needs to be interpreted carefully. As a very young Christian I was exposed to teaching on faith that always left me feeling bad for not having enough faith. This was because it was teaching that centred on us rather than Jesus. The pioneering missionary to China, Hudson Taylor helpfully said, “You do not need a great faith (in God), but faith in a great God.” Our God is as great as the height, breadth, length and depth of his love revealed (Eph 3:18-19) in Christ.
Some years ago, against my own wisdom, I providentially came into possession of a book whose teaching about Jesus and our salvation had a revolutionary impact on my thinking (Richard Gaffin, Resurrection and Redemption: A study in Paul’s Soteriology). Even though this teaching goes against the grain of how we usually think, your thinking can be transformed as well.
Any series on the cross has to be a series on Jesus. “Jesus Christ is atonement” (Barth) “he/Jesus is our peace” (Eph 2:15). As far as salvation is concerned, Peter preaches, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” (Acts 4:12). [His very name means “Saviour” (Matt 1:21)] Behind this claim of salvation in Christ is the conviction that Jesus is the first and most saved person in history. This is not to say that Jesus was a sinner who deserved to die under God’s just judgement, but it is to say that Christ so totally identified with our lost condition on the cross that he needed to be “saved” that we might share his salvation. Does this idea even make sense?
Saved
Firstly, the words used for salvation are very broad (e.g. Joshua 10:6; Judges 6:14; Acts 27:20, 31) and cover notions like space (Heb yasha), rescue, heal etc. (Greek sodzo). So when in Hebrews it says, “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.” (5:7) we readily understand salvation to mean “deliverance”.
Of much greater importance is how Jesus saw his own need to be “saved”. Jesus’ prayers on the cross are highly illuminating in this regard. His cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 1:34) is a quote from the first part of Psalm 22:1, which immediately is followed by “Why are you so far from saving me” cf. v.21. Similarly, as Jesus was dying he cried out, “Father, into your hand I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46), this repeats the words of Psalm 31:5 which go on to say, “you have redeemed me, O Lord, faithful God.” The intimate relationship between the psalmists’ desperate need for salvation and the prayers of Jesus testifies that Christ had fully identified with the depths of our lost human condition and was unembarrassingly crying out for deliverance. On the cross he bore the state of misery reflected in our readings today, of groaning in pain beneath God’s judgment Psalm 32(1-5) or carrying the “worries of the world” in Matthew 6 (25-34)
I am not saying that Jesus needed to be saved from any personal sin, guilt or wrath of God. Just the opposite, but that as personally free from all of these ailments (John 14:30; 2 Cor 5:21; Heb 4:15; 7:26) he could endure all that we deserved and liberate/save us from the bondage of our own lost condition (Rom 7:24).
The Salvation of Jesus Christ
Scripture gives us various indicators of what Jesus had to suffer in our place in order to be delivered for us. In Romans 6 Paul teaches, ““We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. 10 For the death he died he died to sin, once for all, but the life he lives he lives to God.” (vv.9-10). By a free loving choice (John 10:17-18) Jesus had put himself under the dominion/rule/power of death. In a biblical framework this meant he placed himself under the power of the devil. Hebrews is quite clear about this, “Now since the children have flesh and blood…Jesus also shared in the same nature, so that through his death he might destroy the one holding the power of death—that is, the devil— 15 and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.” (Heb 2:14-15). Jesus placed himself under the power of Satan by taking on the status of a law-breaker. To do this, God in Christ (2 Cor 5:19) needed to take on a weakened mortal nature, “For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin,3 he condemned sin in the flesh, 4 in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us” (Rom 8:3-4). Most seriously, when Christ died on the cross he died as though he was a wicked person. Paul pronounces, “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21 cf. Gal 3:13; 4:5).
This language of righteousness is in the New Testament related to the vocabulary of “justification”, being declared right with God at the great Final Judgement. (If in the Spirit we get inside the death-and-resurrection of Jesus we can have a revelation of this wonderful truth.) In a creed like statement in 1 Timothy 3:16, Paul says about Christ’s resurrection, “he was vindicated/justified (Greek: edikaioo Paul’s usual word for justification) in the Spirit”. Since the Father always saw his Son as perfectly righteous (Acts 3:14; 7:52; 22:14; 1 Pet 3:18 cf. 1 Cor 1:30) what sense does it make to say Jesus was “justified” in resurrection (cf. Rom 4:25). The key is found in Romans 4:5, which says that God “justifies the ungodly/wicked” (cf. Isa 53:9). But in what sense was Jesus wicked?? The truth is so confounding that without divine revelation we can never believe it.
Let me quote some profound words by Martin Luther about the cross, “All the prophets of old said that Christ should be the greatest transgressor, murderer, adulterer, thief, blasphemer that ever was or ever could be on earth. When He took the sins of the whole world upon Himself, Christ was no longer an innocent person. He was a sinner burdened with the sins of a Paul who was a blasphemer; burdened with the sins of a Peter who denied Christ; burdened with the sins of a David who committed adultery and murder…In short, Christ was charged with the sins of all men, that He should pay for them with His own blood.”
Jesus so thoroughly identified with sinners so that by the highest of human courts,[Jewish and Gentile (Acts 2:23), he would be condemned as if he was a sinner, in order that for our sake he could be manifested and declared in resurrection as a perfectly righteous human being. To put this in the simplest way, if the cross is the Father’s “NO!” to the sin of the world on Christ (John 1:29) the resurrection is the Father’s “YES!” to Jesus. We might say (Barth) that the through resurrection, at least in the experience of the Son of God, Jesus is transferred from a state of wrath to a state of grace. Our salvation is a sharing in this transfer.
There is a way to sum all this up that relates to the essential [eternal] identity of Jesus as the Son of God. When Jesus cries out in desperate prayer language from the cross, our language, we may be familiar with, but which he never used, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34), he has no connection with his heavenly Father. For our sake, Jesus endured what seemed impossible for Israel in her everlasting covenant with a faithful God (Rom 9:4; Ex 4:22), he lost connection with every reality of his eternal sonship. Christ personally entered into the experience of which he spoke with such prophetic pathos in the parable of the prodigal son, he has “become” the son who went into the far country and feels, “I am no longer worthy to be called your son” (Luke 15:13, 19). The resurrection however turns everything back to where it should be, God’s “Son…descended from David according to the flesh 4…was declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by his resurrection from the dead, Jesus Christ our Lord” (Rom 1:3-4; cf. Acts 13:33). Paul boldly applies adoption language to the resurrection of Jesus because if the cross stripped away the visible traces of Jesus’ [all-obedient] Sonship the resurrection restored his human nature to eternal glory John 17:5; Acts 2:36; Rom 6:4).
Summing up, the resurrection of Jesus is his salvation and redemption whereby he has passed beyond the power of sin, Satan, death, the Law, and the flesh. He is our new creation (2 Cor 5:17). Hence the triumphant proclamation, ““Death is swallowed up in victory.” 55 “O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?” 56 The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. 57 But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” (1 Cor 15:54-57)
Salvation in Him
The New Testament language of salvation in Christ is unambiguously clear, there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”” (Acts 4:12). What God has done in raising Jesus he will surely do to us through our union with him; as Jesus took on a lowly body (John 1:14; 51-56) like ours, overburdened as we are by anxieties, fears, feelings of failure, guilt, sickness, aging and death and exchanged it for a glorious immortal life (2 Cor 5:21; 8:9), he will do the same for us. “we await a Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, 21 who will transform our lowly body to be like his glorious body, by the power that enables him even to subject all things to himself.” (Phil 3:20-21). When Paul describes Jesus as “the firstfruits” and goes on to speak of our resurrection (1 Cor 15:20, 23) he means that] the transformation that has happened in Jesus will be identically be ours. [It happened to Jesus, because he deserved it, he simply did not belong to the grave so “death could not hold him down” (Acts 2:24), it will happen to us, because of the grace of God in our union with Christ. There are no limits to what this will mean.
As I mentioned the other day, many children are being crushed by the burden falling on their shoulders of saving the planet from the extinction of global warming, the scriptures testify that the regeneration that has happened for us personally through Jesus’ resurrection from the dead (1 Pet 1:3, 23 cf. Tit 3:5) will in the End regenerate all things (Matt 19:28). This is the hope of the world.
As in going to the cross Jesus fully consecrated himself to the Father on our behalf (John 17:19) so the time is coming in him when once for all time we will be separated from every evil power (Acts 2:32; 26:18; 1 Cor 1:2; 6:11; Eph 5:26) and share in the Lord’s glory (1 John 3:2).
Conclusion
Paul summarises the gospel by stating, Christ was “handed over to death for our sins and raised to life for our justification” (Rom 4:25). In eternal love (John 3:16; 1 John 4:10) God gave Jesus over to the power of evil men, sin, Satan and death (Isa 53:6, 12) so that he might return to the infinite greater power of his Father’s all healing eternal LOVE for us.! The Victory of God is complete and the challenge we face is to believe in it.
In a very real sense, the language of salvation has been trivialised by the Church because our view of who Jesus is and what God has achieved in him has been far too small. When Paul starts his greatest writing, Romans, by saying, “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is ethe power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.” (Rom 1:16), he has in mind the power which will heal/restore all things (Acts 3:21). In Jesus’ resurrection, God has said an unlimited “YES” to humanity and its future which can never be undone.