Yesterday I was going through a stack of articles that I’d tagged to be filed and came across one in which the author was reflecting on the nature of the cross and the atonement — he had been meditating on the “practical outworking” of the atonement, and had come up with three insights (which he expanded in the article; I quote only the key statement):
- The Cross made possible a new intimacy with God.
- The Cross reveals the limits of human achievement.
- The Cross brings to light an unexpected quality of the Godhead: humility.
Superficially, there is nothing wrong with those statements. They are certainly true, and can be affirmed by numerous Biblical passages. They certainly don’t ring aloud with any apparent heresy.
Yet as I reflected on the nature of the gospel that we communicate to unbelievers (I was listening yesterday to one of Keith’s sermons on the content of the gospel), it seems that for a meditation on the atonement, those statements just fall short: where is the reflection on substitution, sin, God’s wrath, imputed righteousness, and atonement? Where are the thoughts of “I deserve hell, and am viewed by God as if I had lived the righteous life of Christ”?
There is actually a subtle implication in each of those statements that suggest a man-centered gospel instead of a God-centered and God-exalting gospel. Intimacy is about me. The cross is about solving “the deepest problems of humanity.” God has come to serve me. “God chose to be hurt [for me].”
Those are true statements — but they must also be balanced by the truth of what happened on the cross and that it is most fundamentally about God and His glory — so that He is revealed and exalted and worshipped. Yes, we receive the benefit of the cross, but we are not the end of the cross. The end of the cross is the glory of God and on the path to that glory, we receive multiplied great mercies from God, including imputation of righteousness, substitution, atonement and redemption, and access.
What a wondrous cross this is, indeed.
Words of Grace 