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Slide #2
The Beauty of The Cross
James R. Davis
Slide #3
Galatians 6:14 But God forbid that I
should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the
world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (NKJ)
Introduction:
Slide #4 The cross has become a
Christian symbol ... a thing of beauty.
Slide #5 Buy them to wear around
neck. You can buy them
... sterling silver, 14k gold, or crusted with diamonds and rubies.
Jewelers can make them beautiful. But there was nothing beautiful, about
the cross on which Jesus of Nazareth died. First century equivalent of
an electric chair or gas chamber.
The Biblical accounts of crucifixion
told simply and in few words.
“There
they crucified him.”
Original readers of the
gospels needed no elaboration, for they were familiar with the horrible
details.
Slide #6 No death was more dreaded by
criminals. None so
painful or humiliating. So inhumane, Roman law did not permit a citizen
of the empire to die by crucifixion.
The cross was an obstacle to Faith.
Jesus dying by crucifixion was a great obstacle to the conversion of
both the Jews and Gentiles.
Slide #7 1 Corinthians 1:22-25 22
For Jews request a sign, and Greeks seek after wisdom; 23 but we preach
Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks
foolishness, 24 but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks,
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 Because the
foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is
stronger than men. (NKJ)
Jews looked for Messiah to exert his
power among men but could not be subjected to humiliation.
The Greeks thought it absurd for the
Christians to preach Jesus as Savior; one who died so ignoble a death
could not be worthy of adoration.
Slide #8 Anti Christian graffiti was
found in the late 2nd Century.
In his book The Jesus I Never Knew,
Philip Yancey notes that other world religions are known for their
brightly painted images and gilded statues. At the center of
Christianity, however, rests a cross—simple, stark, and solitary. “What
possessed Christians,” ponders Yancey, “to seize upon this execution
device as a symbol for faith? Why not do everything within our power to
squelch the memory of the scandalous injustice? . . . Why make it the
centerpiece of the faith?” Of all the symbols of hope and triumph, the
cross is, indeed, the most ironic.
We’ve
looked to the virgin birth, miracles of Christ, the matchless life of
Christ, the great sermon he preached, but the cross is the central event
... Paul said,
Galatians 6:14 But God forbid that I
should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the
world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. (NKJ)
The day Christ was crucified has become
the greatest day in history. The Cross has become the highest symbol
that men have ever looked upon. The influence of the cross has become
the mightiest power in the entire world.
1 Corinthians 1:27-29 27 But God has
chosen the foolish things of the world to put to shame the wise, and God
has chosen the weak things of the world to put to shame the things which
are mighty; 28 and the base things of the world and the things which are
despised God has chosen, and the things which are not, to bring to
nothing the things that are, 29 that no flesh should glory in His
presence. (NKJ)
Slide # 8 Ugliness of sin reveals the
beauty of the Cross.
Murder
Neglect
Abandonment
Christians see the cross as the
ultimate expression of hope.
For us, it means victory snatched from the jaws of defeat. We easily
forget that Christ’s death is the most graphic of all pictures of
humiliation and loss, of weakness before one’s enemies. The first
response—and the most human—is to flinch in its presence. The suffering
Savior is truly, as Isaiah said, “like one from whom men hide their
faces” (Isaiah 53:3).
It’s understandable how someone just
considering Christ is taken aback by the cross.
Its message confronts our most cherished notions of success and
self-assurance. It always has; it always will. The Apostle Paul said it
simply: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are
perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). It helps me to be reminded of how
fundamentally offensive the cross is and how it symbolizes everything in
life we most want to avoid—weakness, defeat, betrayal, powerlessness.
We’ve seen the cross as a symbol of hope and victory for so long that I
tend to forget the stark reality it embodies.
We must kneel at the foot of the cross
and find its meaning in our hearts.
Slide #9
• You do not understand
Christ till you understand his cross.
—P.
T. Forsyth, The Cruciality of the Cross
Slide #
10 Pictures of Christ Scourged.
I. The Meaning of the Cross
Slide
#11 To our self-asserting age the cross speaks volumes.
The cross is a denial that self-assertiveness can ever be a satisfying
way.
—Leon
Morris, The Atonement
Self-assertiveness is the way of disaster.
1. Lady found in garbage can in bottom
of swimming pool.
2. Lady stabbed and raped this past
week.
3. Man disgruntled with job goes to work
with pistol.
4. Lately, we are reminded of the
Killing Fields in Cambodia.
5. Look at a drunkards home ... wife and
children deprived of necessities of life because of fathers
self-assertion..
6. Newborn baby left in toilet in Disney
World.
Slide #
12 The sad, violent, and
destructive history of the world tells the story of human strength gone
bad. Aryans dominated other races and exterminated millions of Jews (as
well as other “undesirable” populations) because they thought Aryans
alone embodied pure stock. Whites rule over blacks because they think
they are superior to them. One political party mocks or dismisses
another because it assumes it has the edge on truth. The worst cruelties
done in world history have been done in the name of strength, not
weakness.
Slide
#13 Pictures
The cross
exposes the danger of human strength, unmasking it for what it is—an
attempt to thwart God. It was pharisaical religion and Roman law, both
expressions of cultural achievement and strength that sent Jesus to the
cross. Both were the products of enlightened people and sophisticated
culture. The best of humanity, as it turned out, did the worst thing
imaginable.
Slide
#14 The Apostle Paul
describes “the dividing wall of hostility” (Ephesians 2:14) that
separates one person from another, or one group from another. That
dividing wall represents strengths that we use to assert our superiority
over others—our wealth, education, gender, ethnicity, party affiliation,
culture.
The cross
tears down those walls. Christ’s death broke down the wall of hostility
that separated Jew from Gentile. “He abolished the Jewish Law with its
commandments and rules, in order to create out of the two races one new
people in union with himself, in this way making peace.
By his death
on the cross Christ destroyed their enmity; by means of the cross he
united both races into one body and brought them back to God” (Ephes.
2:15–16, TEV). Jewish law made Gentiles outsiders and aliens, an
unacceptable group of people. The cross exposed the vanity and emptiness
of those laws. Peace resulted from the demolition of the wall between
Jews and Gentiles. It does that to all walls.
Slide # 15 Making choices contrary to
God’s
will is no little evil ... sin is the second greatest force in the
world.
The love of God is the only force that
is stronger.
It is in the cross that one sees the
forces of evil and the love of God clash.
Slide #16 Romans 6:23 For the
wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ
Jesus our Lord. (NKJ)
Slide #17 II. Suffering of Cross Reveals
Its Beauty.
In the cross
God is revealed not as one reigning in calm disdain above all the
squalors of earth, but as one who suffers more keenly than the keenest
sufferer—“a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.”
—Oswald
Chambers, The Place of Help
Slide #18
1 Peter 2:24 who Himself bore our sins
in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live
for righteousness—by
whose stripes you were healed. (NKJ)
The
beauty of the cross is not in wearing it around our necks, using it as a
bookmark, or chiseling it on our tombstones.
Conclusion:
Slide
#20 The beauty of the cross is that it opened a door.
The beauty of the cross in not in
wearing it around our necks, using it as a bookmark, or chiseling it on
our tombstones. Its beauty lies in the fact that the death of Jesus
Christ on a Roman cross nearly twenty centuries ago has opened the path
to eternal life for all who believe in him.
The cross is
not simply the means of our salvation, although it is that to be sure!
It is also the means of our transformation. It is the way of life we
must follow if we want to close the gap between who we are in Christ (as
His redeemed children) and how we live from day to day (as sinful humans
in the world).
The cross
brings good news on two levels. It promises to redeem us; it also
promises to change us. Such change is bound to produce pain. It is
painful to die to self, to embrace suffering, and to reconcile with
opponents and enemies.
Since Christ
accepted the thief on the cross just as he was and received Paul after
all hisblasphemies and persecutions, we have no reason to despair . . .
What do you think it means that He has given His only Son? It means that
He also offers whatever else He possesses. —Martin Luther
Almighty God,
whose most dear Son went not up to joy but first He suffered pain, and
entered not into glory before He was crucified; mercifully grant that
we, walking in the way of the cross, may find it none other than the way
of life and peace; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord.
—Book of
Common Prayer
