A Crucified God?

“For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” ~1 Corinthians 1:22–24

In a world that values strength, health, wealth, and prosperity, the message of a crucified God will always be challenging. Pliny the Younger, a first-century Roman governor, described Christians as “amentia”–mindless buffoons, a term even more derogatory than “dementia” (a diseased mind). Two thousand years later, it is difficult to comprehend how shameful death on a cross was to the cultured minds of Greeks and Romans. A modern equivalent might be someone put to death for gross child molestation. This is how the Greeks saw Jesus on the cross: a loser, and a wicked one at that.

Even in the Church today, many preachers shy away from the implications of the cross, preferring a message of prosperity and success rather than self-denial and sacrifice. “Follow Christ,” they  say, “and you’ll live your best life now!” Such a message hardly squares with Christ’s call to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow Him. In the strange logic of heaven, we save our lives by losing them. By contrast, trying to save your life, holding on to your ego, and claiming your rights is the sure path to eternal loss (Mark 8:34-38).

From that perspective, the cross of Christ delivers a brutal exposé of our human nature, our own spiritual condition, and the world we inhabit. The Apostle Paul wrote that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are saved, it is the power of God (1 Corinthians 1:18).

The cross of Christ exposes our human nature. What do human beings really think of God? What would we do with God if we could get our hands on Him? We wouldn’t fete Him on our talk shows; we wouldn’t ticker-tape Him on our streets. We would curse Him with our lips and butcher Him with our hands. The cross reveals our depravity–our total depravity. The clearest definition of this term I have ever read flows from the pen of the great theologian and scholar Geerhardus Vos: 

Total depravity, on the other hand, does mean that by nature no love for God is present as the motivating principle of our life: that it does not dwell in us as a disposition and therefore never determines our deeds, thoughts, and words; and, conversely, that in our entire life there is an undertow of hostility toward God that only needs an external stimulus to develop into conscious opposition toward the Lord. There is no spiritual good in us (Geerhardus Vos, Reformed Dogmatics, 2:58).

Golgotha pulls back the curtain on human depravity like no other place on earth, like no other event in history.

The cross of Christ exposes our spiritual condition. As Christ becomes one with us before God and thereby becomes all of us before God, the cross is a mirror. It shows us who we are and what we deserve. Notwithstanding all your prosperity, technological advancement, and nice clothes, the best you can be without a crucified Savior is lost.

The cross of Christ exposes this world system. When the Bible speaks of the world, it describes a culture created by lost human beings, alienated from God, and a place of blindness, where people are unable and unwilling to recognize the light of God (John 1:5). It is a culture characterized by ignorance of God the Creator (John 1:9), a place under the thrall of Satan (John 12:31), and a place under judgment, where men love the darkness and hate the light (John 3:18ff).

The cross of Christ offers a new way to see everything. In the film The Matrix, the rebel leader Morpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers the main character Neo (played by Keanu Reeves) the choice between a red pill and a blue pill. Morpheus says, “You take the blue pill, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you just how deep the rabbit hole goes.” The cross is God’s red pill. Have you swallowed it? Are you living in the real world as God sees it, or are you living in fantasy land, as the devil likes to paint it?

Swallow the blue pill, and the cross will only look like a place of loss, darkness, and death. But take the red cup, and the cross becomes a doorway to life, light, and a ladder back up into the presence of God. Good Friday and the communion supper we drink each new month underscores the old proverb: “You are what you eat!”