THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

The cross in Paul’s letters

Paul could well be called “the theologian of the cross”. He was uniquely positioned for the remarkable ministry God was to give him. A man of brilliant intellect, who had studied at the feet of the most renowned rabbi of the day (Acts 22:3), and at home in three cultures—Hebrew, Greek and Roman—he was ultimately to become the most prolific writer in the New Testament. Thirteen of the twenty-one letters are traditionally attributed to him. Scholars debate his authorship of some of these, though they are in almost unanimous agreement that he wrote seven of them. For the purpose of this study I will assume his authorship of all thirteen. To assume otherwise would have little effect on the results, as his insights into the meaning of the cross are clearly presented in the seven that are universally recognised as having been written by him.

An important perspective on his understanding of the cross came from his religious training. He was, by upbringing and choice, a strict Pharisee. By his own description he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for righteousness based on the law, faultless” (Philippians 3:5, 6). His whole training had led him to believe that one could prove oneself acceptable to God by one’s own moral efforts. If anyone could have made it with God by good pedigree, proper ritual, religious observances, sincere motives and impeccable behaviour, Paul could have done so.

Another factor would have been the views he had initially held as to the nature of the promised Messiah, though he nowhere spells these out. Like many of his day, he had no doubt longed for a deliverer who would save them from the domination of Rome and restore the purity of Pharisaical religion. Surely, such a figure would be widely recognised and respected and receive the nation’s acclaim, at least by its religious leaders. But this man, Jesus, had been humiliated, condemned and crucified. And that between two “bandits” as Mark and Matthew call them, men of violence, prepared to kill as well as steal. A crucified person, as the Romans put it, was damnatio ad bestias, meaning “condemned to the death of a beast”. As Rutledge points out, crucifixion was deliberately intended to be obscene in the original sense of that word. The Oxford Dictionary suggests “disgusting, repulsive, filthy, foul, abominable, loathsome.” The crowds understood that their role was to increase, by jeering and mocking, the degradation of those who had been so designated as unfit to live. They were supposed to curse him, and this they did. Heaping abuse on a crucified victim was part of the ritual, part of the entertainment. The crucified would be mocked, spat upon, beaten nearly to death, naked, plagued by insects, and covered with dirt, sweat, blood and excrement. Added to this was the fact that for a Jew, one so condemned came under the curse of God (Deuteronomy 21:23).

When the early Christians proclaimed this one to be the Messiah promised by all the prophets who would deliver his people from their sins and who had been appointed as judge of the human race, it was too much for Paul. For a respectable, religious, moral and passionate person like Paul, his reaction was understandable. He made it his mission to stamp out this new sect. “I persecuted the followers of this Way to their death, arresting both men and women and throwing them into prison” (Acts 22:4). “I put many of the Lord’s people in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. I was so obsessed with persecuting them that I even hunted them down in foreign cities” (Acts 26:10, 11).

Maybe, when Paul observed the manner in which the first martyr, Stephen, met his death (Acts 7:57-60), he had begun to have misgivings. His reaction, though, was to silence his conscience by violent anti-Christian activity. However, when he was finally confronted by the risen Christ on the road to Damascus (Acts 9:1-9), his faith in his own morality, his religious beliefs and his own learning collapsed like a pack of cards. It is little wonder that, after his conversion, he disappeared into the desert for three years to sort things out and rethink his understanding of the Old Testament from scratch (Galatians 1:17, 18).

Paul emerged from this time with two unmistakable convictions. The first was that the man Jesus, who had died on Calvary’s hill and who had spoken to him on the Damascus Road was indeed Lord of heaven and earth. His experience on the Damascus Road was enough to convince him of that. For one brought up in the strict monotheism of Judaism, this conviction was to form his understanding of the trinitarian nature of God. The second conviction was the fact that the key to understanding the nature of true religion lay in the cross and resurrection of Jesus. No doubt, this understanding had taken longer to resolve. However, the shock of the Damascus Road must have enabled him to glimpse something of the depths of evil in the human heart, the grip of which had led him in such a wrong and violent direction. A radical problem demands a radical solution. His views on the cross, with their roots in the teaching of Jesus himself, were probably fully developed by Paul early in his Christian experience. Certainly they were by the time he began to write the earliest letters to his converts of which we have any record—that is, about A.D. 50, twenty or so years after the crucifixion and probably about fifteen to seventeen years after his conversion. As Denney stated, “We cannot discover in Paul’s interpretation of Christ’s death anything which essentially distinguishes his earliest [letters] from his latest.” His gospel, the only gospel he knew, was always “the message of the cross” (1 Corinthians 1:18), or “the message of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:19). So let’s summarise the emphasis he gives to the cross in these letters.

The cross and sin

As with all the writers of the New Testament, the reason Paul gives for Jesus’ death is that it dealt with the problem of sin and the effect sin had on our relationship with God. Whatever else we may learn from the cross—how to stick to our principles whatever the consequences, how to face suffering, how to love our neighbour, how to treat our enemies—it is the fact that he died “for our sins” or “for us” that always receives the greatest emphasis. “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us” (2 Corinthians 5:21). He “redeemed us…by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). Other truths flow from this one. He didn’t die for good people but “for the ungodly”, those who were “God’s enemies” (Romans 5:6, 10). He is the “Passover lamb ” whose blood shelters us from judgement (1 Corinthians 5:7).

And it is not just that he died “for us all” (Romans 8:32). There is something very personal about the cross for Paul. “The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me[29] and gave himself for me[30]” (Galatians 2:20). As someone has put it: “Jesus died on the cross—that’s history. Jesus died for me—that’s salvation.” It never ceased to amaze Paul that Jesus should die for him, “Even though I was once a blasphemer and a persecutor and a violent man… Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst” (1 Timothy 1:13-15). The truth of what Jesus had done for him had so gripped him that the allurements of this world and its false values had no more appeal for him than they would have for a dead man. “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world” (Galatians 6:14). As Denney states:

When it had dawned on his mind what the cross of Christ was, when he saw what it signified as a revelation of God and his love, everything else in the universe faded from his view.

[29] Italics mine.

[30] Italics mine.

The cross central in Paul’s preaching

It was the cross that became the central plank of his preaching. In reminding the Corinthian Church of his ministry among them, he declared, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Corinthians 2:2). And again, “What I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures” (1 Corinthians 15:3, 4). He rebuked the Galatian Christians for turning from truths he had taught them: “Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified” (Galatians 3:1). However much the example of Jesus’ life may have meant to Paul, it was by his death that he “disarmed the powers and authorities, [making] a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross” (Colossians 2:15). Denney says of Paul’s exposition of the meaning of the cross in Romans and Galatians, “This death of Christ is the source of all that is Christian. All Christian inferences about God are deduced from it.”

Our identification with Christ in his death

One of the major themes of Paul’s teaching is the emphasis that he puts on our union or identification with Christ, particularly in his death and resurrection. When we come in repentance and faith to Jesus, submitting our lives to him as Saviour and Lord, then the Holy Spirit, who is now the Spirit of the risen Christ, brings us into an intimate relationship with Christ which Paul constantly speaks of as being “in Christ”. John Stott, in Life in Christ, tells us that the expressions “in Christ”, “in him” and “in the Lord” occur 164 times in Paul’s letters. Baptism is the symbol of our entry into this relationship. Whereas baptism in Acts is spoken of as the washing away of sins (Acts 22:16), Paul can also speak of it as the burial service of our old way of life, symbolising our identity with Christ in his death and resurrection. “Don’t you know that all of us who were baptised into Christ were baptised into his death? We were therefore buried with him through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life” (Romans 6:3, 4—cf. Colossians 2:12). Lalu Dasgupta, who came to faith in Christ while attending an Alpha Course, described in Alpha News what his baptism meant to him.

I did get the feeling of it being a new start. Just before I went under the water for baptism, I remembered all those guilty feelings and thoughts, all the things in my life that I was particularly ashamed of—the sort of things that happened five or ten years ago, that have never left me.

I had them in the front of my mind and I thought, ‘What I’m about to go through now is going to cleanse me of all of this…’

I felt myself saying sorry to God for all those things and they don’t exercise me any more.

So through that very simple act of baptism, I had the knowledge that despite my guilty feelings, I’d been forgiven. I felt that the old me was dead and I was now living for someone else.

This does not mean that there is anything automatic about baptism in bringing us into a relationship with God. In his letters to the Romans, the Galatians and the Colossians, Paul is concerned to underline the importance of faith in our relationship with Christ before he ever gets around to speaking of the significance of baptism. Rather, baptism is the sign and seal of the righteousness we receive by faith, as was circumcision under the old covenant (Romans 4:11).

Other passages where Paul speaks of our identification with Christ in his death are Romans 7:4 and Colossians 2:20: “So, my brothers and sisters, you also died to the law through the body of Christ, that you might belong to another, to him who was raised from the dead, in order that we might bear fruit for God.” “Since you died with Christ to the elemental spiritual forces of this world, why, as though you still belonged to the world, do you submit to its rules: ‘Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!’?” When Jesus died, in God’s reckoning, it was just as if I had died, paying the full penalty for my own sins. The result is that the law cannot now condemn me—I am freed from guilt—and my allegiance now is not to a set of rules, do’s and don’ts, but to a person to whom I now belong. Of course, allegiance to Christ has its moral demands,[31] but my motivation now is gratitude and my love for Jesus, and my motivator is the living Christ who has come to live within me by his Spirit.

[31] See further on this theme in my booklet Does It Matter How We Live? A Christian View of Morality.

Paul expresses this identification from God’s perspective (Jesus identifying with us) in Romans 8:3: “What the law was powerless to do because it was weakened by the sinful nature, God did by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful humanity to be a sin offering. And so he condemned sin in human flesh, in order that the righteous requirements of the law might be fully met in us, who do not live according to the sinful nature but according to the Spirit.” Similarly, in 2 Corinthians 5:14 Paul declares, “we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died.”Denney comments:

This clause puts as plainly as it can be put the idea that his death was equivalent to the death of all. In other words, it was the death of all men which was died by him.

Miroslav Volf, in Free of Charge, puts it like this:

Social commentator, Os Guinness gives us one implication of this truth:

At the supreme moment of his dying Jesus so identified himself with men and the depths of their predicament and agony that no man can now sink so low that God has not gone lower.

Or as N. T. Wright eloquently expresses it in The Lord and His Prayer”, he went “solo and unaided into the whirlpool [of evil], so that it may exhaust its force on him and let the rest of the world go free.”

In this same passage in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul goes on to state that those who believe this “should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (v. 15). Denney comments again:

It will not be easy for anyone to be grateful for Christ’s death, especially with a gratitude which will acknowledge that his very life is Christ’s, unless he understands the cross in the sense that Christ there made the death of all men his own.

And it is this identification with Christ in his death that is the sole ground of our salvation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in Life Together, says:

The fact that Jesus Christ died is more important than the fact that I shall die, and the fact that Jesus Christ rose from the dead is the sole ground of my hope that I too shall be raised on the Last Day. Our salvation is “external to us.” I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ.

As Jesus represented us in his death and resurrection, so he now represents us in heaven, where he is our advocate who presents his death on our behalf before his Father and intercedes on our behalf (Romans 8:34; 1 John 2:1, 2). It is in this context that Paul can speak of him as “the last Adam”, “the second man” or “the heavenly man” whose likeness we will one day bear (1 Corinthians 15:45-49). Also relevant is 2 Timothy 2:11: “If we died with him, we will also live with him.”

Paul underlines what the effect of this truth should have on our goals in life. “For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again” (2 Corinthians 5:14, 15).

Our identification with Christ in suffering

Paul can also speak of our willingness to endure suffering because of our allegiance to Christ as being identified with Christ in his sufferings. “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body” (2 Corinthians 4:10, 11). “Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24). It is our willingness to be identified with Christ and his purposes in this world, whatever it might cost, that releases the resources the living Christ makes available to us in order to fulfil those purposes. Paul can express his passion to know Christ and experience his resurrection power in his service to him in these terms: “I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:10, 11).

The cross and the wisdom of God

Another major emphasis in Paul is how the cross challenges human pride and human ideas of wisdom. God has deliberately chosen a way of reconciling us to himself which perfectly meets our real needs, but which undermines human pride, “so that no one may boast before him” (1 Corinthians 1:29). From a human perspective, “he was crucified in weakness” (2 Corinthians 13:4). The idea that God should save humankind by allowing his Son to die a shameful death is “a stumbling block to Jews” (those who, in their pride, refuse to admit their deep need of forgiveness and think they can earn God’s acceptance by their good works and religious observances) “and foolishness to Gentiles” (those who are too proud to admit that their Creator knows more than they do and to learn from him—1 Corinthians 1:23). “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Corinthians 1:18). Paul deals with this theme in extended passages in 1 Corinthians 1:18-2:16; 3:18-23).

The cross and the challenge to godly living

It is to the cross that Paul appeals when encouraging Christians to lead godly lives. It is because “Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed” that we are to “keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Corinthians 5:7, 8—for seven days after the Passover festival the people were to eat only unleavened bread and have no yeast in their homes. See Exodus 13:3-7). Paul was particularly concerned that at the Lord’s Supper, the meal which commemorates Christ’s death for us, the Corinthian Christians were showing lack of love and concern for one another. He warns that “those who eat and drink without discerning the body of Christ” (the body of fellow believers) “eat and drink judgement on themselves” (1 Corinthians 11:17-33).

We are to forgive one another “and walk in the way of love, just as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Ephesians 5:1). Husbands are to “love [their] wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her” (Ephesians 5:25). Our fellow believer now becomes “your brother or sister for whom Christ died” (Romans 14:15). This is what gives them infinite value and we are to treat them accordingly. Unless we hold to the belief in a “limited atonement”, that Christ only died for those he knew would accept his salvation—a view I find hard to accept as there seems to be so much emphasis in the New Testament that he died for all people, regardless of what their response would be—then we can no doubt apply this principle to all human beings. Even though the Scripture indicates that many will reject the Saviour and suffer eternal loss[32], we should still regard them as “those whom Christ loves and for whom he died” and work and pray for their conversion.

Paul tells us that “Christ died for us so that, whether we are awake of asleep, we may live together with him.” Because of this we are to “encourage one another and build each other up” (1 Thessalonians 5:10, 11). He also “died and returned to life so that he might be Lord of both the dead and living” (Romans 14:9).

[32] For a detailed discussion on this theme see my book Life After Death: The Christian's Hope and Challenge.

Christ’s death and our death

It is through his death and resurrection that Jesus has “destroyed death” (2 Timothy 1:10). It is not that death no longer exists. The word “destroyed” (Greek katargeô) would be better translated “made ineffective or powerless”. So Paul can encourage his Christian friends in Thessalonica who are grieving: “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest, who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him” (1 Thessalonians 4:13, 14). When dying Christians pray, they are seeking help from one who knows all about it because he himself has died.

The death of Christ and his exultation

It is because Christ voluntarily “made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness,” and because he “humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!” that “God exalted him to the highest place and gave him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue acknowledge that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:6-11).

As Paul S. Minear puts it in The Kingdom and the Power:

God's verdict reversed the world's judgement. He exalted his humbled servant, Jesus, and gave to him a name above every other name, in heaven or on earth...By accepting this position of greatest humiliation, Jesus had taken the road to highest exaltation...The least of all and the servant of all had become in fact the greatest of all and the Saviour of all.

If God his Father places such value on the death of his Son, should we do less?

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