“I’d reached a point in life”, the man shared, “where I no longer wanted it to continue.” He was not a religious man, but nor did he deny the existence of God. He said to me “That night, as I prepared to bring things to an end, I prayed for God to take my life. As it turns out, he did.”
This man’s story is a moving testimony of the power of Christ’s cross. After he prayed, he went to his bedroom, opened his bible, and read the story of Christ’s crucifixion. As he did, God opened his eyes to the fact that on the cross, his life–with all its failures & burdens–had been taken by Jesus, and replaced with a new one.
There is nothing more confronting for the human soul than the cross of Christ, yet neither is there anything more comforting. When we come up close and personal with the story of Christ’s death and all that surrounds it, we’re compelled to ask why. Not simply why the authorities saw fit to execute this punishment on him, but why this death has had such an extraordinary impact on human history. Why has this death impressed its significance on so many in so many places for such a long time? Why does it matter to the world, to society, to politics, to family, to me?
To trivialise the cross of Christ by dismissing it as just another chapter of human history is to offend the very endeavour of history. More significantly, however, when we fail to engage in what the cross communicates to us, we rob ourselves of the life-changing opportunity it offers. No event in human history has had such a far-reaching impact on the world, and no event has the potential to impact your life more than Christ’s death.
Why? Because when you take more than just a cursory glance at the cross of Christ, and when you begin to consider it more fully, you are confronted by a variety of things. You are confronted with the torturous execution of a faultless man. You observe an unspeakable horror of unadulterated and unmerritted suffering. The more you examine it, the more the cross exposes the reality of your sin as you witness God himself receiving into his own being what you, in your rebellion against him, deserve.
Putting this another way, if you truly absorb what the cross shows you, you experience love in its purest form as the toxicity and corruption of your sin and its effects are thoroughly dealt with, expunged from the eternal record. Here in the cross of Christ, you see your life being taken into his. You see a king giving himself for his people, redeeming them for God and reconciling them to him, fully and freely. And when you see that, your greatest needs are satisfied and your greatest fears are eliminated. The gates of eternal glory are open for you, with no fear of consequence.
A true understanding of the cross simultaneously shows you the atrocious nature and awful consequences of your sin, but also the full abolition and atonement of it. And so as much as it is extraordinarily confronting, it is all the more comforting.
How good it is for our Lord to take our life in this way, and to re-invigorate us with his own.