57. The Cross a Divine Transaction

The Cross a Divine Transaction

There is a divine transaction being deliberately carried through by the Triune God. When Christ says that He has the authority to lay His life down and to take it again, and that in doing so He is acting on a commandment He has received from His Father to which He is voluntarily obedient, it indicates, if such language means what it says, that there is here a divine free will at work, wholly apart from anything His crucifiers knew. He submitted Himself to their will, and yet His death was independent of their will. For when, with a loud cry, He yielded up—sent away—His spirit, He was sovereignly dismissing Himself from His body. Indeed, could He have died at the hand of man—a sinless divine Being upon whom death could have no claim—if He had not done this?

He died, therefore, not primarily because His life was taken from Him by man, but because He deliberately became “obedient unto death” (Php 2:8). Not, obedient to his Father until death, nor obedient even though He died for it, but obedient to death itself. Death commanded, and by a deliberate choice of His free will He obeyed.

Yet this was not suicide, but the very opposite. For when one suicides, he thrusts himself unbidden into the presence of God, having no right to take his life because he cannot bring it back again. But Christ yields His life by the action of His own will, not only because He can take it again, but because in taking it up out of the grave, He is thus forging the last link in the chain by which He will forever bind him who has the power of death, on behalf of every one who is willing to receive life at His hands. If anything completely voluntary ever happened on this earth, it was the death of Christ. So he qualifies at this point, for He Himself is not injured.

Coming to the fourth requirement of a substitute, Christ has the inherent right thus to dispose of Himself, provided He is Creator and not creature. No creature, not even the highest and greatest of the sinless angels, has any right over his own life. It belongs to, and is therefore wholly at the disposal of, the Creator. No creature could qualify under this requirement, for none has the right to lay his life down.

Moreover, if God should grant any sinless creature that right, and he should lay his life down for us by the permission of God, here then would be God giving a creature instead of Himself, and this would wholly remove Him, and therefore His love, from the transaction. For love is self-giving, it is not the giving of someone else. God could never show His love without giving Himself.

Indeed, if God should permit a creature to die for sinners, He would thereby be laying the most perfect plan to rob Himself of the sinner’s love. For when a sacrifice is made on our behalf, our love goes out to the one making the sacrifice, not to someone else. And so if He who died on the cross was a creature, His death could never draw our love out toward the Creator.

If Christ, therefore, is not actually God Himself, manifest in the flesh (1 Timothy 3:16), He was but a creature, and as such, wholly unable to qualify at this point.

Moreover, if this was the case, then reason must put God under eternal indictment for sanctioning such suffering and sacrifice for nothing, for it would then have to be declared that all hope of salvation is blotted out for the whole race forever. The logic of all the facts, however, compels the conclusion that Christ does perfectly qualify under this requirement, for only as Creator can He dispose of His life as this Man disposed of His, because then alone would there be no injury to any one else. And certainly, if Christ was not God, then God Himself must be indicted again for the injury He does the whole race in raising confidence in that which does not exist, and building false hopes that can never be fulfilled.