Why the cross

Dude’s son dying on the Cross for sin sounds kind of bad to me not good.

Yes Jesus was Gods Son but he was also God here, paying the price for sin so there would be no more separation and Sin could be beaten for ever.

John Scott wrote, “I could never myself believe in God i it were not for the Cross. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it.”

In every sin the cost must be bore by someone.

Forgiveness means bearing the wrong for another instead of demanding payment of a wrong.

Real Sin has real consequences. Only God can deal with them and he does that via the Cross

1 peter1:21 Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.

The New International Version Chapter 1

21 Through him you believe in God, who raised him from the dead and glorified him, and so your faith and hope are in God.

The first thing we need to think about is the cost of forgiveness. Is it possible to simply say you’re forgiven and leave it at that? Let me suggest that real forgiveness costs. If someone runs into my car I could forgive them. I could tell them to forget about the damage they’ve done, but would that solve the problem? Well, no, it wouldn’t. My car needs to be repaired and we all know how much that’s going to cost! Either he or I have to absorb the cost. It won’t just magically go away. So I can only forgive the person if I’m prepared to bear the cost of the repairs.

My Motorcycle and gas testimony

And what about the sorts of injuries that people cause that are hard to quantify: emotional and psychological injuries that cause loss of happiness, or reputation, or confidence, or trust in others. Someone saying “I’m really sorry” doesn’t take away the pain, does it? It doesn’t heal the scars or repair the damage to our confidence or our trust. If we’re to forgive those sorts of hurts we have to be prepared to deal with the injuries ourselves. We have to be prepared ourselves to bear the debt that person owes us for the damage they’ve caused.

So how do you deal with this sort of loss? How does the other person repay the ‘debt’ they owe you?

One way people deal with it is to seek revenge. I heard someone the other day talking about his 18 year old son being murdered. And he said all he wanted to do afterwards was to get hold of the murderers and make them suffer. But would that have solved the problem? Well, not really. It might have made him feel a bit better for a while, but in the end it would have left him as another perpetrator of evil. When someone hurts us we could go around telling everyone how terrible that person is, damaging their reputation and that might make us feel better for a while. But it wouldn’t solve the problem.

You see, the problem with vengeance as a way of collecting on the debt is that in yourself you become harder and more bitter. You may become hostile towards anyone who’s like the perpetrator - men, women, other races, teachers, police officers. And from the other person’s point of view, they or their friends and family may then feel justified in seeking vengeance against you. And so the process begins to snowball, to spiral out of control. So instead of the evil being removed it escalates and spreads, including into you and your own character.

The alternative is that you choose to forgive, to absorb the pain and suffering into your own being. You choose to forgo the opportunity of repaying evil for evil and instead take the suffering on yourself. The irony is though, that this acceptance of pain leads in the end to life; to the end of bitterness and blame. When we find we can forgive someone of the pain they’ve caused us, we take away from them the victory they’ve had over us and replace it with our own freedom of choice. This isn’t a process without cost but it is a rewarding one in the end.

Still you say, shouldn’t wrongdoers be held accountable? Yes, of course they should. In some cases that’s the job of the police and the courts. In other cases it’s appropriate for us to confront them, but only if we’re first ready to forgive them. It’s only when our motivation is love that the outcome will be positive. Otherwise the desire for accountability is simply a desire for revenge, in disguise. And it’ll have the same consequences.

The Forgiveness of God

But what about God’s forgiveness of us. Let’s go back to the question we started with. Why couldn’t God just forgive us, cancel the debt? Why did he have to send Jesus to die?

So what does God do? He could leave us to die or he could bear the cost himself. Remember that Jesus is God. This is not the case of a wrathful God demanding that someone else’s blood be spilt to satisfy his anger. Nor is this just a needless example of sacrificial love.

No, Jesus had to die because there was a debt to be paid if justice was to be upheld. God himself takes human form so he himself can bear the cost of our sin by his death on the cross. He fulfils his desire for both justice and love at the same time and in the process destroys evil without destroying us, the perpetrators of that evil. On the cross he substitutes himself for us.

Real Love is a Personal Exchange

John Stott puts it like this: “The essence of sin is us substituting ourselves for God while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for us. We ... put ourselves where only God deserves to be; God ... puts himself where we deserve to be.”

Christ’s death, changing places with me, has made a fundamental difference to who I am. It’s brought me back to life and made me ready to sit with God in his throne room. I’ve been brought into the life of God. I’m there already. Wow! Was the cross ever worth it!