Exaltation of the Cross Yrs 1 2 3 2025

Title

Trust in the One on the Cross

Outline

It’s a familiar story

Grumble, complain, reject the provision of God and suffer consequences. But this time the salvation is different: the image of the source of suffering is “lifted up” and all one had to do was to trust God’s provision by looking at it and one was delivered. The consequences were not irrevocable.

Paul says Jesus became the image of our suffering

That is, he was in the image, morphe, of God and took on the morphe of a slave and went even lower to death, death on a cross, becoming the image of the consequences of our evil hung up before us. Therefore, he was most highly exalted so that “every tongue [would] confess that Jesus Christ is Lord [the name of Yahweh] to the honor of God the Father.”

Jesus himself puts this in a cryptic narrative

No one climbs to heaven, but the Son of Man comes down from heaven and is lifted up on a cross “so that everyone who trusts in him may have eternal life.” The image of death becomes the means of life. The lifting up on the cross is the means of glorification.

The author of the gospel comments on this by stating that God loved the world - everyone - by giving his Son to take our perishing on him so that we might have life. The Son was not sent to condemn - we were already condemned by our deed - but to deliver.

The cross is then the exaltation of Jesus

It is the ladder of life that we climb by trusting in Jesus. It is where Jesus in union with his Father exchanged our perishing for his life, and in so doing destroyed death and its author and, because his life is infinite and our perishing is finite authored with his Father his resurrection and ours.

This most shameful death is taken on willingly reversing the tables of shame and honor so that Jesus becomes most honorable and the Father is glorified. The tree of death became the glorious, exalted cross because of him who hung on it.

That is John’s glorification theme that we saw earlier in Paul. And if it does not blow our minds and turn our upside down world rightside up, we need more meditation on it.

In fact, we can never get to the depths of this exaltation of and on the cross. We get to start now and we will continue throughout the timeless eternal.

Praised be to God for the cross of Christ