Speaking Well of God
Presentation 6. Why did God go to the Cross?

[Edited transcript. This article preserves aspects of a spoken delivery]

I can’t believe we’re at the last night already.  I want to thank you again very, very deeply for this incredible privilege of sharing together with you.  I already feel like we know each other very well.  I’ve been able to have conversations with quite a few of you and I would like to be able to speak some more, especially if I spoke better Portuguese!  I hope this will not be the last time that we see each other.  I think I could probably come back here and spend a year, Pastor, and I’d be quite happy.

Pastor Conrad:  No, when you come you will speak fluent Portuguese.

Jonathan: Exactly, after a year I’d have to!

I also want to thank the young lady who sang for us just now.  I’d like to suggest to you that you continue to dedicate your voice to God.  May God bless you and your fellow musicians in bringing glory to God. 

And again, I want to thank our minister of music for the beautiful theme song that we’ve sung, and your Pastor here for all that he has done.  I’d also like to recognize our Conference President who’s also here us—I’m so delighted to meet him.  Then of course, the biggest thank you goes to the gentleman to my right, because he has the hardest job.  He has to take my words of English and turn them into beautiful Portuguese, so thank you so much my good friend, for doing that.

Pastor Conrad: It’s a pleasure.

Okay, we go to our last presentation in our time here in Barra de Tijuca…  I’ll be able to say it right at the end, won’t I? 

I have a hat to wear and I know it’s not normally the custom to wear a hat in church, but this is just for an illustration.  So maybe I should just check with some of the elders that it is okay.  Is this okay?  Just for an illustration… 

This is a hat that says FOTAP on it.  What do you think FOTAP might stand for?  This is, of course, in English, FOTAP is the initials of a phrase.  It stands for: Fallacy Of The Assumed Premise.  In other words, if you have the wrong assumption then you get to a wrong result.  I want to suggest to you that sometimes in our ideas about God there is a fallacy of the assumed premise, because if the fallacy of the assumed premise is true, then you are going to end up with a fallacious result.  So let us make sure that our assumed premises are correct.  I can take this off now.

Our subject for this evening is why did God go to the cross?  Might there be some assumed premises regarding that subject?  I think, clearly, there are many, and some are fallacies.  Let me illustrate. 

I was talking to a pastor friend of mine about the cross.  He wanted to emphasize to me how he viewed the death of Christ and what it achieved.  He was arguing with me back and forth, and at the end he said,

“Christ could have been crucified on the other side of Jupiter and the result would have been the same.  God just needs the blood, without blood God can’t forgive.”

Then I asked him,

“What would have happened if when Jesus came to this world everybody had accepted Him?”

He said to me,

“Oh, that’s very clear.  The type has to meet anti-type.  The Chief Priest would have taken Jesus in to the Holy of Holies, and he would have slit Jesus’ throat to give us the blood sacrifice of atonement, to propitiate the wrath of God against sinners.  The penalty had to be paid.”

I would suggest to you that there are some assumptions in what he told me.  In fact, quite often, we seem to be speaking well of Jesus but not speaking quite so well of the Father.   Some of the things we say about God are clearly not good things; they are things which are not true about God the Father.  In Malachi 3:13 God says,

“You have said terrible things about me.”

What do you think God might mean?  I can give you many quotations from some of the scholars and theologians of the past.  For example, Martin Luther.  I don’t think I’m going to read the whole quote here, Pastor, because otherwise we could be here for a long time.  He talks about Jesus coming to help us escape the unendurable wrath of God.  Then there’s John Calvin says this:

“God in his character of judge is hostile to us, expiation must necessarily intervene.  God could not be propitiated without the expiation of sin.”

We give tribute to these reformers, Calvin and Luther.  But we should note that they still brought over many errors in their theology.  So let me turn to a more modern commentator.  His name is William Barclay, and you may even have heard of him because he did a long series of commentaries on the Bible, Barclay’s Commentaries on the Bible.  He talks about his own experience and understanding of the meaning of the cross.  He says that he grew up with this idea that on the cross Jesus bore the agony, the pains and the penalty that we should have borne.  Now this is really very significant so please pay close attention to what he says.

“Brought up in that view, very early while still a boy, I began to feel there was something quite desperately wrong with it.”

And then he says,

“I thought there were two things that were wrong.  The first that it implies that Jesus changed the attitude of God, that God’s hand was posed to strike, his condemnation poised to obliterate, and Jesus came and begged us off, as it were, by taking it upon himself.”

Now I’m going to “translate” what he just said which was,

“Somehow or other, Jesus changed God from a wrathful, angry God into a gentle God.”

That’s the key point there.  And then he says,

“I went to the New Testament and I could find no evidence for this at all.  Jesus did not change the attitude of God; Jesus shows what the attitude of God is like.”

We can think of many texts in the Bible that would indicate that.  For Jesus did not come in order to persuade the Father to love us, but because of God’s great love…

Then he says there was something else—the second thing that came to him was this:

“It was supposed to be for the sake of justice that God punished Jesus.  To satisfy God’s justice, someone has to take the punishment, and that someone was Jesus.  It came to me, while I was still young, that this means that in order to satisfy His justice, God had to do the ‘unjustest’ thing that this world had ever seen.”

At the end, this is what he concludes:

“I began to feel I could not believe in a God like that, or trust a God who did such a thing.  For a while I was out of Christianity all together, completely.”
I’ve spent some time with this quotation because I think it illustrates the experience of many as they think about “why did God go to the cross?”

So let us think on and ask ourselves, making sure we don’t have some false assumptions—we don’t have the FOTAP— questions regarding God and the cross.  Why did Jesus die? 

First, and the simplest answer is this, we killed him.  That’s the quick answer.  We put him on a cross.  He was killed by the Jewish leaders for threatening the religious system.  He was killed by the Romans for threatening the political system.

You remember that when they met together in the council, the religious leaders and the Pharisees, they asked themselves:

“What shall we do? If we let Him continue, everybody’s going to put their trust in Him, and then the Romans will take away our religious system and our nation.”

And what did the High Priest, Caiaphas say?

“You don’t understand a thing.  Don’t you realize that it is better for you that one man die for the people so the whole nation is not destroyed?”

So Jesus is rejected by his people.  And they cry out, “Crucify him!  Crucify him!”

Pilate asks, “You want me to crucify your king?”

What do the people say? “Our only king is Caesar.”

They have given up, even, saying that God is their king.  Above the cross, Pilate puts a sign, you remember? 

“The King of the Jews.”

That sums up both the religious and the political charges that lead to Jesus’ death.  So why did Jesus have to die, first answer?  He has to die because he’s not the God we want, and he’s not the king we want. 

Second answer and this is the philosophical one.  Because his way of thinking, His philosophy, is completely opposed to our philosophy.  He doesn’t care about using power for Himself.  We do.  He doesn’t look at life in a self-centered way.  But we do.  He doesn’t seek wealth, or fame, or status.  But we do.  His life philosophy is so different, that once it’s revealed, he has to die.  His very presence here is a perpetual rebuke to us. 

Sometimes people say, “Well Jesus, yeah, he was a great man, a wonderful philosopher, a wonderful moral teacher.”

But his philosophy is one that comes from God.  This is God speaking.

As C.S. Lewis argued, you cannot believe in Jesus simply as a moral teacher. I have a quotation here from him where he says Jesus didn’t leave us the option of calling mim a moral teacher.  Either he was completely mad or he was God himself, as he said. 

Theological answer; number three.  Jesus dies on the cross to show us what God is truly like, and what kind of God he is not.  Let me give you a few answers that we have given, thinking about this theologically, why did Jesus have to die?  Some of them you may agree with, some of them you may disagree with.

To accept the punishment for sin.

To exchange sinner and sinless.

To provide a perfect sacrifice to avert wrath.

To win the victory over sin, death, and the devil.

To trick the devil out of his property.

To ransom us from the kingdom of darkness.

To pay the price demanded for sin.

To exert a moral influence on us.

To answer the devil’s charges.

To explain the true nature of God.

To witness for the truth.

To win us back to love and trust.

To convince the universe about God’s nature.

Pastor, do you think we’ve got time for the rest of the list?  There’s about another hundred.  Maybe not.  We have at least, illustrated the many answers that we can give.  Let us go to some of the scriptural answers.  Here again we’re going to have to go through this very quickly because time is going.

2 Corinthians 5:21. Maybe you could look it up in your version there, Pastor, because I have three different versions here and they all say different things, so maybe just read it in the Portuguese and we see what we get. 

“He was made to be sin who knew no sin so that we might become the righteousness of God” approximately.

In one version it says, “An offering for sin.”  In one version it says that “God made him share in our sin.”  So it’s clear that the translators are having a little trouble with this verse. 

Anyway, what it’s saying, literally in the Greek, is that God made Christ, who did not know sin, to be sin.  Now think about that for a little bit.  Can you change and exchange sins?   Can  I take  my sins from here and move them to Robert.  Is that possible?  Can you transfer sins?  What is sin?  Sin is a broken relationship.  Can you transfer broken relationships?  Is sin an object, can you weigh it by the kilo?  No, it is something that is to do with the way that we relate to each other and the way that we don’t relate to each other, in the case of sin.  We don’t want to say that Jesus became sinful either, do we?  He doesn’t take on a sinful nature.  What God does is allow Jesus to experience the consequences of sin.  So we see what sin does.  There on the cross we see what sin does.  What does sin do?  It kills.  Sin pays a wage, the wage is death.  Sin is that broken relationship, and Jesus cries out in anguish, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?  Why have you given up on me?”

Do you remember right back there in Genesis chapter three what the devil said? “You will not surely die.”

When God says, “You will die.” On the cross God shows he was not lying.  He shows us that he was telling the absolute truth, that sin will kill you.  There are so many things that we can see, that Jesus shows there on the cross.  But let’s look at another part that is a wider aspect of the whole of the great controversy…

Colossians 1:20: Because it was not just for this little world alone that Jesus came, and to show us God, and to die at our hands.  In this translation of Colossians 1:20 it says this, “Through the son then, God decided to bring the whole universe back to Himself.”

This is the big picture, this isn’t just the world; this isn’t just planet Earth.  God wants to win back the whole of the universe.  Now test of the verse that we have here: “God made peace through His son’s blood on the cross, and so brought back to Himself all things both on Earth and in Heaven.” In fact, that probably could even be better translated, “Both those on Earth and those in Heaven.” Because you don’t need to bring things back to yourself, you need to bring beings back to yourself.  And you say to me, “Just a moment, I didn’t think there was any problem in the rest of the universe.” 

We have the universe watching, however.  They are looking to see whether God truly is trustworthy.  They need to see that God truly is trustworthy and always does tell the truth.  Even when Jesus speaks these words in John 12:32, he’s looking beyond this world.  He says, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.”

So why did Jesus then, have to die?  Some Biblical texts. 

To show us God as He truly is, John 14:9. 

To reveal the full extent of His love, John 13:1. 

To unmask and destroy the devil and his lies, John 13:2, and other verses. 

To destroy death, 2 Timothy 1:10. 

In the Gospels, in all the crucifixion accounts, to reveal the totality of evil. 

To prove that God is trustworthy and true, 1 Corinthians 1:18. 

To demonstrate that God tells the truth, that sin kills, 2 Corinthians 5:21. 

To demonstrate God’s mercy and forgiveness, Luke 23:34.

To show the lengths that God is willing to go to set us free, Ephesians 1:7.

To bring reconciliation to the whole universe, Colossians 3:20.

And to convince those who doubt of the truth, John 20:26.

There are many, many other texts that we can put in there to give us some more answers to the question, ‘why did Jesus have to die?’  But I believe one of the most beautiful pictures that we have of what God is trying to achieve through the cross is there in the story of the prodigal son.  The son takes the money and goes; he takes his inheritance, which is really saying, “My father, I wish you were dead.”

And he goes and wastes all his money in what the old version used to say “riotous living”—let’s not go into detail.  He only comes to his senses when he’s sitting there in the mud of the pig pen.  Can you imagine living with the pigs? 

He says, “I am so stupid.  I’m eating pig food.  Even the servants in my father’s house eat better than this.  I will go back home and I will say to my father I’ll be one of his servants.”

He prepares a little speech.  He starts on his way home.  And when he’s still a long, long way away, his father sees him coming.  The father has been watching ever since he left for his son to come home.  When he sees his son coming down the road, he runs towards him.  Now in the society of that day, an older man never ran to meet a younger man, it was not part of that culture.  But the father doesn’t care, he runs to him, he goes over to him, he hugs him, he embraces him, and he takes him home.  They’re home, and the son starts to give the little speech about wanting to be a servant to his father, but the father says, “No, you’re my son.  Let me put the cloak on you and the ring on your finger and we’re going to have a big feast because you’ve come home.”

We call this the story of the prodigal son, but it’s all about the father.  It’s about how God welcomes us back home.  I’m sure when the boy was giving his speech about being a servant, the father is saying, “Oh, forget about that.  You’re my son, you’re welcome home.  I forgave you the day you walked out the door.  And now you’re home, my family is together again.  I am healed, you are healed—the family is healed.”

This is what God is doing for us through the cross, through the resurrection, too, because without the resurrection the cross is pointless.  And we will be home with God forever.  Revelation 21:3 says this, “Look, God’s home is now among His people.  He will live with them and they will be His people.  God Himself will be with them.”

There’s a German philosopher, theologian, from many centuries ago who said this.  His name is Meister Eckhart. He said this: “What our Lord did was done with this intent and this alone that He might be with us and we with Him.”

For me, that is the best answer to why did God go to the cross?  That He might be with us, and we with Him.  May this be true for each and every one of you.  Let us pray.

Heavenly Father, we close now with the thoughts that we’ve just read that you went to the cross so that you could be with us and we could be with you.  There’s much we do not understand, but we are so delighted that we will spend eternity looking at this very subject.  Let us not say terrible things about you, but let us speak well of you, our Heavenly Father.  You, who at such great cost, made it possible for us to home with you.  For God so loved the world that he gave his only son.  Thank you for your gift of yourself to us to win us back to love and trust.  We trust in you, we hope in you, we look to you to be our savior.  May this be true now and forevermore, amen.

-end-