Looking to Jesus

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life.” (John 3:14–15, ESV)

A slimy trail of evil defiles the path to and from the human heart, that despoiled monument of Adam's treason. Like a cockroach crawling across a baby's pacifier, sin slithers its way through the soul. Nothing is clean. All is dirty. It's easy to forget this, prone as we all are to believe our own publicity. If others like us, maybe we are not that bad? Such sweet conceit inveighs strongly against self-examination. It is hard to see what  self-respect demands that we don't

Such delightful illusions, however, cannot survive a second at the foot of the cross. Here, the hymn writer tells us, we see sin in its true colors.

Ye who think of sin but lightly
Nor suppose the evil great
Here may view its nature rightly
Here its guilt may estimate
Mark the sacrifice appointed
See who bears the awful load
'Tis the Word, the Lord's Anointed
Son of Man and Son of God

Look at the blood and gore of Golgotha. "Mark the sacrifice appointed, see who hears the awful load."  "Who is He on yonder tree, Dies in grief and agony?" "'Tis the Lord! Oh, wondrous story. 'Tis the Lord, the King of Glory!"

Few English writers capture this spectacle as well as R.A. Finlayson in his delightful little book, "The Cross in the Experience of our Lord!"

"So the representative and substitute of the sinner and the rebel, the sinner that created dispeace and anarchy, must meet with justice, stern and unrelenting. There can be no favourites with heaven when justice is being meted out. And so the representative was struck by the rod of chastisement. Can we understand a thousandth part of what it meant for the heart of a beloved Son to be so stricken? If he felt the taunts and mockery of men till he could cry, 'Reproach hath broken my heart', even when the witness of his soul testified to his innocence, how much more was he hurt by the imputation of his God! The imputations of men could be denied and repudiated, but the imputation of God must be accepted as his portion. True, the sin imputed to him was not his own, and he could never know self-accusation, or remorse, or despair. Remember this when you sing 'In every pang that rends the heart, the Man of Sorrows had a part'. But the agent in that affliction was his Father, now his Judge. When God, through Zechariah, gave the command to the sword to awake, the sword that gleamed of old outside the gate of a Lost Paradise, it was Jehovah himself who answered: 'I will smite the shepherd'. He, the final exactor of justice, takes the sword, as it were, out of the hands of the underlings who had wounded him, and he struck the righteous soul of the one that was his fellow and his equal. And this fact that the just exactor is the Father adds pain and anguish unspeakable to the blow, and as he reels under the shock, he cries in agony of dismay, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' 'He was chastised for our peace.' Chastisement is a strong word here, but an appropriate word when dealing with truants and rebels. It gives a new penetration into the sufferings of our Lord. He endured the chastisement for the family; he met with the criminality of sin, not only of guilt, but high treason against the throne of God. When the first Adam had sinned, God broke the silence by the cry, 'Where art thou?' There was no response from man. Man's voice was stifled by guilt and shame; and as the long, silent years had passed into centuries and millenniums, still man found no voice, no plea, no sponsor, no intercessor. The second Adam took up the case for man. He heard the call of God, and he found a voice with which to respond. And in responding he was bringing the truant and the exile back, but at a price – that he himself must be deserted and forsaken! And the cry in Eden of old found its echo on Calvary, and its response in the anguish of his soul, 'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' That was man brought back in the agony and chastisement of the second Adam, the Lord from heaven."

In the Garden, then, God asks man, "Where are you?" On the cross, Jesus answers, "Here I am!" He was despised and rejected because, as the sin-bearing Scape God, He ought to have been. There is life for us in His death. And as He is thrust out, we are gathered in. In the time of Moses, the gospel of the Bronze Serpent was quite simple: "Look and live!" At the Cross, the logic is no different, and the outcome just as certain-- Hallelujah, what a Savior!