Scandal of the Cross

This blog is designed to give people an inner look at a devotional life. Taking time each day to spend time with the Lord. The hope is if you travel on this journey with Rev. Jacob Shaw, you may be more inclined to spend time with the Lord as well. I encourage the use of a devotional, a scripture reading and prayer, then finally some form of artistic mark to tie it all together. 

Today's devotional is taken from: Zacharias, Ravi. The Logic of God: 52 Christian Essentials for the Heart and Mind. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2019. [E-Book] Chapter 43: Scandal of the Cross

Opening Thought: I always enjoy when things seem to reappear or repeat, like a thought or item being brought to your attention again and again, which gives the look of Godly intervention. A few days ago I spoke about the movie the Passion of the Christ, (click here to read devotional https://devotional-reverend.blogspot.com/2021/05/man-of-sorrow.html), and here in today’s reading Ravi Zacharias brings up the same movie. Zacharias speaks about the movie because he is making the point that for some people, throughout history, the fact that Jesus ended up on the cross is a barrier for them to come to know him as God. This happened at the time of the early church, as Paul notes in 1 Corinthians 1:22-25, which we will read in a moment, and it also is a major barrier for other today. Zacharias notes how Muslims will find the cross as a barrier:

May I add that for this among other reasons, our Muslim friends consider the cross a sign of weakness and hence bearing no resemblance to power. “How can the God of all creation be so humiliated?” a Muslim questioner once asked me. Yet, when the Mel Gibson film The Passion of the Christ was shown in the United Arab Emirates to packed audiences, many would walk out wiping away tears and saying, “We had no idea how He had been treated.”

Should that not give us pause? … This was the path Jesus chose with which to reach out for you and for me.

This is not to say, go watch the Gibson movie and you will become a believer, rather that agony and humiliation is the result of humanities disposition towards sin. Jesus ending up on the cross, is not about Jesus’ failure or humiliation, it is about ours. The cross becomes an amplified choir, exposing our sin, when humanity not only falls to our sin, but we take it out of God Himself. We will take Perfection, we will take Love, we will take Righteousness and destroy it before we will all take pause and humble ourselves before God and own up to our sin. 

Many Christian will focus on the mercy element of the cross, which is apart of the larger conversation for sure, but the cross does not just speak to the ultimate mercy from God, but also the ultimate sin we produce against God, again and again. Jesus says in the Gospel of John, chapter fifteen, our greatest sin, our underlying sin is our refusal to believe in God, to believe in Christ.

If we cannot come to terms with the fact that we would sacrifice God, the Christ and the Spirit to serve the self, we cannot become humble enough to praise God, welcome Christ and walk with the Spirit upon our heart.

The cross is only humiliating for humanity, not Christ.

The devotional begins with: 1 Corinthians 1:22-25

Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

Second Thought: I never knew how much pride I had until I found myself defending my own childish behaviour. It might seem strange to hear those words coming from the blog of a church minister. But it is true, when I was a young adult, I went through a bit of an existential crisis. Who I wanted to be and where God was calling me towards were at odds with each other. When I went to college, I found myself suddenly immensely popular, it would be a weird night if my phone was not buzzing endlessly for me to be invited out on dates or go to parties. I had always been a very dedicated person, to a few friends, one girlfriend, one path in life, I had never felt this kind of pull in many different directions. The calls in many different ways made me so stressed, I began to make bad choices. This was also the time I began feeling my call to ministry, in addition to my call from God to be Christian. So, the pressure cooker in my brain was revving up, and unfortunately, I found it easier to hang my Christian faith in favour of the frivolity all around me. By the end of my first few years in college I didn’t even recognize myself anymore. My moral compass had shifted, and I could not cope with that. I ended up drowning my inner turmoil in beer and pizza, quite literally, I gain a crazy amount of weight. It wasn’t until I had destroyed many friendships, my grade point average, and my health that I felt like I had no where to turn but back to God.

I knew I had been continually nailing him to the cross, through the people I hurt, to the assault on myself, body and soul, and with the stupid risks and carelessness I would often take. It took me many years to begin healing from my young adult life, but it was taking ownership of my behavior which really helped me the most. It started with shame, then guilt, and then longing to restore and apologize, and then rebuilding, and forgiveness to the self and finally acceptance to the fact that what sin had done to me was not what I needed to define myself as, that like Christ, I could come back from the humiliation caused by sin, through Christ I could do this.     

Continual Work: Where are you in your life? Are you still sinning? We all sin, but are you sinning in a way that you know you should stop today! Put steps in motions to change your behaviour and pray right now, ask God to help lift you from the humiliation of sin and bring you up in the glory of the resurrection.

What Rev. Jacob is Working On: One phrase I despise is “live with no regrets”. I hope it is clear as to why I would despise this phrase. Sometimes regrets are what build you towards a better, healthier, and more righteous way of living. A better phrase may be, “regret, so you can live to regret no more”.

Prayer for your day: God, show us the clarity of the Cross, that you went willingly to be tortured, betrayed, and executed in a way that should make us uneasy in our skin, in our very being. Let this unease be like a sounding call, reminding us that if we do not come to humility, and own our part in Your crucifixion, we beg to repeat it again. In Christ’s name, Amen.  

Artistic Close: I am a product of the protestant church, but one of the things I have always thought strange is that we tend to use a cross rather than a crucifix in our churches, and other worship centers. The reason for this is that a cross without Jesus to me in just a torture device, but with Christ it is so much more. I do also like crosses don’t get me wrong, there is an artistic beauty to a barren cross, but the crucifix speaks a little more to me.

 

Wooden crucifix with figure of Jesus laying on a dark table. Original public domain image from Wikimedia Commons