06.01. The Wondrous Cross

Chapter 1 The Wondrous Cross The passing years enhance the preciousness of the cross. We thought we loved it, and, the little hill of Calvary, and the garden with its sweet spring flowers, in those days, now receding far behind us, when we first found refuge beneath its outstretched arms. But as the shadows of life begin to fall, however slightly or evidently from a westering sun, its meaning unfolds itself. There is more than one manner of fruit on the tree of life; more than one point of view from which to behold it; depths as well as heights, lengths as well as breadths. And yet when we speak thus of the cross, we never forget that its value consists in what He was who hung there in dying agony. Not the cross, but the Crucified. Not the tree, but its precious burden. Not the altar, but the Divine Victim who there surrendered Himself without spot to God, as the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but for the sins of the whole world. We use the cross as a comprehensive word for the work which the Son of God accomplished there. The river that flowed through Eden parted into four beds, and the doctrine of the cross may be divided into four great lines of truth, respectively presented by the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews, by the Apostle Peter, by the Apostle Paul, and by the disciple whom Jesus loved. We do not for a moment suggest that any of these writers confines himself to one aspect of the death that Jesus died. Each of them touches at will every note in the octave of Calvary. But each gives his own tone and color to the white ray of divine light as it radiates from the cross of the Saviour of the world. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews was evidently educated amid the sacred associations that centered in the Temple at Jerusalem. With throbbing heart he had mingled in the vast festal assemblies. He had loved those days of exuberant joy; had felt the thrill of psalm and hymn, sung of the choirs of Levites; had realized the privileges of the blood of sprinkling, of altar and priest, of near access to the holy Presence that dwelt between the cherubim.

All these had vanished, as light off the clouds of sunset, when with the rest of his Hebrew fellow Christians he went forth to Jesus, outside the camp. At first they had felt dreary and sad, but suddenly had come to see that in the cross of Jesus they had obtained the spiritual realities of which Leviticus could only give the transient symbols (Hebrews 10:19; Hebrews 12:23-24). And perhaps this is the first aspect in which we view the cross. We account it the brazen altar where Jesus put away the sins of the world. We see there the Lamb of God charged with our guilt and penalty, and bearing it away forever. We have our consciences purged from dead works. We have a right to enter the holy place through His blood. We stand in the presence of the burning glory of the Shekinah, unabashed, unashamed, accepted in the Beloved, and entranced in the music of words that float as music around: "There is no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." The Apostle Peter is deeply sympathetic with this view. He could not be otherwise, with the Hebrew background of his life. And if we may interpret an expression of his literally, he seems to have been an eye-witness of the sufferings of Christ (1 Peter 5:1.). As though he was led by a strange fascination to stand afar off, and see the last sufferings of Him whom, for all that he had denied Him, he loved with all his heart. He repeatedly refers to the sufferings of Christ, and holds them up as our example. But he develops a further view. He speaks emphatically of our redemption (1 Peter 1:18; 2 Peter 2:1). In his thought each disk in the blood of Jesus was a coin of priceless value, purchasing us to be His slaves. As though we had stood in the slave-market of the world, "sold under sin," but He came there with blood as His purchase-money, and bought to make us bond-slaves to Himself. This conception of the death of Christ commonly follows upon that already suggested. We first look upon it as a sacrifice, atoning for our guilt, and bringing us near to God; then we find it to be a masterful argument for consecration of all we are and have. We learn that we are not our own, but bought with a price, and we glorify Him in our body and spirit which are His. But the Apostle Paul lays stress on yet another aspect of the wondrous cross. We have already found there propitiation and consecration; we now find identification (Galatians 2:20; Romans 6:8). His perpetual thought is, that as we were in the first Adam when he fell, so we were, by some mysterious law, in Christ when He died, and rose and ascended into heaven. In Him, our Ark, we crossed the waters of death, from the old world, where sin and lawlessness were rampant, into the new heavens and earth, in which dwelleth righteousness. When He hung in dying anguish on the cross, we were there, though we felt none of the pain; when He descended into the grave, we passed thither also, though we shuddered not with the chill air of the vault; when He arose, we felt death behind us forever, and became citizens of a world where the standards of earth are reversed forever, like reflections in standing water. This thrilled the apostle with ecstatic joy. He was free from the condemnation of the law. Its pealing thunder rolled beneath his feet, reverberating in the dark valleys far below, but he had passed to the upland lawns, the blue of heaven above him, the sense of freedom, joy, hope, buoyant in his breast.

He was also free from the false standards and judgments of the world. The princes of this world had put their Master out of it, as the Gadarenes before had driven Him from their coasts; and the expulsion of the Lord had been the expulsion of His slave. It was not meet that the one should be without and the other within. And the apostle was glad to see the cross, standing with outstretched arms to forbid all commerce between the believer and the world. Not for him its standard of failure or success; not for him its smiles, or baubles, or rewards; not for him its amusements or blandishments. He was crucified to the world, and the world to him, and he glorified that it was so.

He was also free from the dominion of the self-life, to which he so often refers, as "the flesh." This had been his bane, until one day he saw his self-life nailed in effigy to the cross of Jesus (Romans 8:4), as a man may start to see his ugly features reflected from a crystal mirror; and he realized that by the cross of Jesus he had been born into a world where self in every form was under the curse, and where it was replaced by the Spirit of love and life and resurrection. "No longer after the flesh, but after the Spirit."

Thus the Apostle Paul was filled with this great thought of his close identification with the death of the Lord Jesus, by which he had passed into the Eternal and Unseen, the Infinite and Divine; had become a citizen of the new Jerusalem, and a resident in the heavenly places, of which the person of the Lamb is focus and center. His eternity had commenced. He was translated that he should not see death. He had passed into a land with which the old life had no extradition treaty. The Apostle John views the death of Christ as it affects our daily walk and conversation. With him the blood cleanseth from all sin. He never forgot that he saw blood and water come from the wounded side; and that Jesus came not by water only, but by water and blood. He says that Jesus washed us from our sins in His blood; that the blessed saints have washed their robes and made them white in His blood; and that we have right to enter through the gates into the city only when we wash our robes in the precious blood. The robes get sadly soiled as we go through the various demands of daily duty and the scenes in which we have to earn our daily bread, and therefore it is most helpful to learn that there is a provision made in the death of the cross for daily purification. That blood never loses its virtue; and whenever, in our walk in the light, we are sensible of the least soil of evil, we may wash and be clean. Thus we learn to walk with God with an uncondemning heart. Not that we are all we ought to be in His holy sight. Even if we are kept from presumptuous sin, we come short of His glory; but we are constantly sensible of the cleansing grace that purges our conscience from dead works to serve the living God.

Ah, wondrous cross indeed, in thee we find remedy for all the ills of life! Since thou wast cut out of some forest tree, and didst bear thy burden on the place of a skull, guilt and penalty are no more; we are the bond-slaves of the sweetest Master. We have passed as in a new Ark the waves of death, and landed on resurrection soil; and we have learned the secret of walking the world as those who belong to another. An, blessed heavenly ladder by which we have passed into the eternal and heavenly sphere! The tree cast into the bitter Marah waters, which made them sweet to the taste; the slip of wood flung into the river, which caused the iron to forget the attraction of the earth, and swim; the pole on which the serpent of brass was elevated in the view of Israel--all have their counterpart in the wondrous cross on which the Prince of Glory died.