Friday Thoughts

Though assigned a cross centered text for his Good Friday message, the preacher got up and said, "No one wants to talk about the cross when Easter is so close so let's start celebrating Easter early," and with those words he began a Easter morning message.  Not even on Good Friday does anyone want to talk much about the cross.  The cross is bloody.  It is painful and full of suffering.  It is about darkness and dying.  It is also about sin.  Put all those things together and it is no wonder the church has such an aversion to the cross.  It is the message that the "make me feel good" crowd does not want to hear.   

What is most problematic for folks today is not the suffering part of the cross, but the part that points to it being God's solution to our sin.  If death is a word to be avoided, sin is all the more a word to be avoided.  No one wants to talk about sin and no one wants to talk about Jesus dying on the cross to save us from our sin and its consequences.  The wages of sin may be death as the Bible says, but today's Christian is more into grace abounding more than enough to cover all our sin.  What we want is a painless way of dealing with sin.  The cross says dealing with sin is not anything but painless.    

The gospel tells us that Jesus willingly went to the cross as an act of antonement for the sins of all of us.  It was God's plan to which Jesus was obedient.  No one took His life from Him, He gave it.  He gave it because of His love for us, but make no mistake, it was hell on earth on Golgotha, but Jesus went there that there might be a way for us to live as those forgiven for our sins.  What we deserve for our sins, He took upon Himself that we might not forever be separated from God because of those sins.  All we can do is by faith accept the sacrifice He made for us and then to live as those who have been changed from within by the knowledge that divine shed blood makes our living now and in eternity possible.  Anything less is blasphemy.