The Sufferings of the Cross - Geoff Thomas

Now we don't observe days,

but we can take advantage of them.

Today is Good Friday and we're thinking

about the cross of Christ
all over the world.

And I want to speak
to you about the cross.

1 Corinthians 1:18.

Those great words:

"For the message of the cross

is foolishness to those who are perishing,

but unto us who are being saved,

it is the power of God."

You know how the cross of Christ

is emphasized in the Scriptures.

The great verses - we know when Paul

reminds the Corinthians about the Gospel

that he brought to them.

He says first of all,

I spoke to you about Jesus Christ

and Him crucified,

that Jesus died for our sins

according to the Scriptures

and that He was buried

and He rose again the third day.

That's my priority when
I came to call you.

I was determined not to
know anything among you

save Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

He says God forbid that I should glory

save in the cross of Christ my Lord.

He loved me and gave Himself for me.

It's a strange aspect of the Gospel

that a third of them deal with one week

in the life of our Lord - the last week.

Well, let's say now that there
are 520 weeks in 10 years

and that would be 1560 weeks

in thirty years.

And then you add another, say, 115 weeks.

If we do the sums,

all those years of Jesus in His 20's -

we know nothing about those weeks,

what He did.

But we know a third of Matthew

and Mark and Luke and John tell us

about one week, and it's the last week -

the last week in the life
of our Lord Jesus.

And then there are the ordinances.

There are two.

There's the Lord's Supper.

The bread representing the
broken body of our Lord,

and the wine His shed blood.

There's baptism.

That we are baptized in union with Him

into His death and into His resurrection

from the grave.

And there are the great hymns.

We've sung some of them.

When I survey the wondrous cross...

In the cross of Christ I glory...

There's a fountain filled with blood...

Alas, and did my Savior bleed...

O, Sacred Head now wounded...

There's a green hill far away

where the dear Lord was crucified

and died to save us all...

That's the power of the cross.

And then there are the wonderful books

by Stott and (unintelligible)
and Krummacher

and Martyn and Murray.

One that's a favorite of
mine by Donald McCloud -

"Christ Crucified."

And I owe him so much

and what I'm to say to you tonight

is what he's taught me.

So here are the great emphases

on what Paul calls the folly of the cross.

It seems to me that it's so easy for us

to talk of the cross in passing;

to take Calvary in our stride;

to live very close to the doctrine

and the Gospel records of the cross,

and yet feel so little

of the overwhelming emotional power.

When I survey the wondrous cross.

Amazing love! How can it be

that Thou my God shouldst die for me?

And the problem is for us
the cross seems so logical.

It seems so reasonable.

It seems that we've lived
from our childhood

until this moment

with the reality of
the green hill far away.

And we've never stumbled across it

with just a breathtaking
sense of discovery.

And that is one of the keys

to experiencing anew the glory

of what our brave young Savior did for us.

The Kingdom of Heaven is like a man

who digs a hole in the field

and he's burying something.

His blade strikes something

and he clears it away.

There's a chest and he opens it

and gold and silver and pearls

and diamonds and rubies

and tiaras and crowns -

he's found treasure.

The problem is we've
never seen the paradox.

We've never seen the ugliness.

We've never seen the absurdity.

What Paul calls the
sheer folly of the cross.

And in what does that folly reside?

Where is the paradox?

Where is the absurdity?

Well, it's very plain isn't it?

It's the marvelous bringing together

of this Person with this cross.

This Person is the
brightness of God's glory.

He is the express image of His Person.

He is holy, harmless, undefiled,

separate from sinners

and higher than the heavens.

He is the express image of God.

He says, "I and My Father are one."

He is the one by whom God made the worlds.

That He should be crucified;

that He who sits at God's right hand

should be crucified;

that God should crucify His own Son;

that He should crucify the
one who knew no sin;

the one who is Lord and God of all;

that He should crucify Immanuel,

God with us.

And in many ways this is the question

to which the New Testament

is providing the answer.

What right did God
have to crucify His Son?

What did God hope to achieve

by enacting this absurdity?

This crucifixion of His sinless Boy.

Why was Christ made a curse?

Why did the anathema of God

lie on His beloved Son?

And the way into this
then to find the answer

is to plumb some of the depths

of this curse, this anathema,

that Christ bore.

And the answer to our query is

that Christ was made to bear

all that our sin deserves -

the whole wrath of God against our sin,

the whole recoil of God

against all that contradicts His nature

and His being and His attributes.

Christ received the wages of sin.

And this involved in a fourfold suffering

on Christ's part.

Firstly, the curse involved
the Lord's physical suffering.

There was a body prepared for the Savior.

It was a body prepared for Him

by God the Father

through the power of the Holy Spirit.

It was a body identical in every aspect

with our bodies.

It had the same kind of nervous system.

It had the same kind of
exquisite sensitivity to pain.

There was no built-in
analgesic or pain killer

that God provided for His Son.

It was a body that was
dependent on nutrients

and on sleep and on exercise.

It was a body that had
physical limitations

as to energy and so on.

It was vulnerable to
exhaustion and weariness.

And in that body, Christ suffered.

His body was a part of the holocaust.

Now we are called upon
to present our bodies

as living sacrifices to God.

That's our spiritual worship,

our reasonable service.

And so Christ suffered carrying our sins

in His own body on the cross.

And in that body He knew hunger

and He knew thirst.

He had to ask someone,

"Can you give me a drink?"

In that body, He knew physical exhaustion.

In that body, He experienced
extreme pain on Golgotha.

All that was involved in being beaten up

by the squad of soldiers, the scourging.

All that was involved in the attachment

with the sledgehammer and great nails

in His hands and feet to the cross.

All that it meant - the suspension

of His body on the cross hour after hour.

The dehydration by the effects of the sun

beating down on Him.

And last, the humiliation of the body

and the ultimate experience of death

and dissolution.

It's often said that there
is no description

of crucifixion in the New Testament.

But it wasn't necessary, you see,

because it was such a common sight

outside the walls of Jerusalem

in every major city, on the crossroads,

wherever Rome was.

The warning to criminals that this

will be your fate if you defy us.

It seems to me that one
of the great comforts then

that we have as we
ourselves face the reality

of physical pain in our own lives

is to know that the Lord knows

and the Lord understands.

So whatever the extreme
of our own agony may be,

we could never scream to the heavens

that we're going into places

where He's never been;

or we are taking a journey that
He's never traversed.

Because He has.

He's been there.

He's known the pain and far worse.

So we sin.

We sin in our bodies.

Our fingers sin.

Our eyes sin. Our lips, our tongues.

Our emotions.

And He suffered in His body

because He loved us.

That's what kept Him there.

He wouldn't undo the enfleshment.

And He wouldn't come down.

So there was our
Lord's physical sufferings.

Secondly, our Lord
experienced emotional pain.

He had a human soul and a human spirit.

He had true human psychology.

And in that psychology as a man,

He suffered emotionally.

I know it's possible to present this

in an utterly unbalanced way.

I think too much is made of the claim

that Christ is said to have wept

but never said to have smiled

or to have laughed.

You bear in mind that the
fruit of the Spirit is joy.

You bear in mind that
the constant emphasis

in the New Testament

is that rejoicing is the common emotion

of everyone who is born from above.

It's an indispensible mark then

of our Lord's authentic humanness

that He was a profoundly contented person;

that He rejoiced in
the Spirit we are told;

that He was happy because He could say

"I delight to do Thy will, O Lord."

Notwithstanding all the deprivation

of His earthly existence and sin-bearing.

He was a man, I believe, who knew

great heights of joy and delight

in the will of God.

There was in His heart melody every day

to the Lord.

And we can emphasize that more firmly

because despondency and depression

are normally violations

of God's will for His people.

They're often sinful manifestations

of our own human egocentricity.

Christ therefore I say rejoiced.

Christ knew contentment.

He knew the most elevated

and pure and profound happiness

in the depths of His heart.

And yet having said that,

it's most wondrously evident

in the New Testament

that Christ also knew the depths

of disconsolateness and despondency

and human sorrow.

We find Him at the grave of Lazarus

and this family that He loved -

the brother and the two sisters -

He'd go stay with them.

He's there and He sees them brokenhearted

and He weeps too.

And I think it's marvelous!

It's marvelous because today

we are told by some strange people

that it's a weakness of faith to sorrow.

And I'm saying that
sorrowing in bereavement

has a great mandate in the Word of God,

in the suffering of the Savior,

and in His sorrow at the grave of Lazarus.

And when death separates
us from loved ones -

separates us temporarily,

but devastatingly -

then we have the right from
our Lord's own example,

we have the right then to weep.

We are told by Paul that
we're not to sorrow

as those who have no hope,

but we're not told not to sorrow.

In fact, we find in the New Testament

that after Stephen had been

viciously stoned to death,

that righteous men came

and carried him to clean him and bury him

with great lamentation we are told.

It's a divine accommodation
to our frailty.

It's the right to sorrow,

the right to weep.

And it's imperative in every
experience of bereavement

that when we pastors and church leaders

and women friends go into the home

where there's been a bereavement,

that we encourage in every way

the sorrow and the tears

and pass the box of Kleenex around

and weep with them.

We weren't intended to go

through the valley of the shadow

as if we were stones;

as if we were stoics.

Jesus Christ the Son of God wept.

He looked at the city of Jerusalem

(unintelligible).

And we're told when He looked

that He just cried.

We're told that He wailed over it

because the sorrow was so desolating

when the Lord saw the
hardness of their hearts

and their refusal to come to Him.

He would have spread His wings over them

and protected them from the hawk of Satan.

And they wouldn't come.
They didn't want to.

They were spiritually obstinate.

And He just cried aloud.

And we have the same mandate there

when we pray.

Some will weep as they pray with us

because of the desolation

of their own providence

and our own society.

But then there's a deeper way

in which our Lord wept, isn't there?

And we go with Him,

we're invited with Him

to go into Gethsemane.

And there He confesses

that His soul is exceeding sorrowful

even unto death.

We hear Him say He is sore amazed

and very heavy,

that He is very despondent.

And I feel that as Christ contemplated

the reality of Calvary

that He was amazed

as He contemplated the next day,

what was going to happen,

He was emotionally overboard.

He couldn't just take it in His stride.

There was an evilness for Him.

The Father gave Him the cup

and He looked into that cup.

And there are times
when the cup God gives us

fills us with amazement.

How faithless I would be to the Lord

who called me to be a preacher of His Word

if I were to pretend that
the life of the believer

was always easy,

always manageable,

always one in which we
have triumphant victories,

one after another, they
all fall down before us.

Because we know that our road is eventful

and our road can be difficult.

And our road can be full of things

that just take our breath away.

The Psalmist says to God,

"Thou hast given us the wine
of astonishment to drink."

It's almost: You made us drunk.

I'm just reeling at what I've heard.

Just what's happened - I'm staggering.

I'm at my wit's end.

And there are some of you
here who would know

moments of that kind,

moments that seem to distance us

from all that we believe
about a loving God

that we can trust with all our hearts

and He will give us all
the delight of our hearts

as we trust in Him.

I am saying to you

your Savior knew the kind of amazement

that you as one who trusts in the same God

that He trusted in,

the sort of wonder:

I can't manage this.

I can't handle this.

It's just too much for me.

I can't cope

in the weakness of my humanness.

Christ full of sorrow,

Christ full of amazement,

Christ full of fear as He contemplates

the reality of Golgotha.

He was sore amazed and very heavy.

My soul is exceeding sorrowful

even unto death.

I don't believe that
the cup was given to Him

simply for the Lord
to take it in His stride

and quaff it down and carry on.

I believe our Lord was totally reconciled

to the will of God for Him.

I believe He went to Calvary willingly.

But behind that contentment

and behind that receiving and submission

to God's will

there was a mighty struggle.

He had to struggle to bring

His created humanness

into submission to the will of God.

And I see nothing unworthy.

I see nothing sinful

in the way some of you have lost children

and husbands and wives

and have known great, great heartache

and have felt the pain and the anguish.

Could you cope with it?

It's perfectly natural.

It was for our Lord

only a tribute to the accuracy

of His own insight into the awesomeness

of the righteousness and justice

of Almighty God.

And so the Lord went
through all these emotions -

emotions of sorrow and amazement and fear.

That emotional pain.

All that was part of the anathema,

of the curse that came upon Him.

He was sorrowful even unto death.

So we have physical pain,

and we have emotional pain.

Thirdly, we have social pain.

I mean by that that Christ suffered

in His relationships.

Alright, we go back and we see

that man is made in the image of God.

And that the God in whose
image we are made

is a triune God.

He doesn't simply exist as one,

but He exists as three
Persons in one God -

a God who always exists in relationships.

That vision we are given by John

in the opening words of the first chapter

of his Gospel:

"In the beginning was the Word,

and the Word was with God,

and the Word was God."

So in the beginning there
was God with God.

That marvelous reality

in the glory of His unity.

So in God there is always with-ness.

In the real God, the only God, there is.

There is always togetherness.

There's never loneliness with God.

He didn't need to create
because He was lonely.

He was never in isolation.

There is always love in God.

There is an object of His love,

a recipient of His love,

and He receives love in return.

There was never a more loving Father.

There was never a more loved Son

or loving Son.

It's impossible for a monad like Allah -

for one being -

someone who lives in
undifferentiated isolation,

it's impossible for him to love.

There's nothing to love.

But in God, there's always with-ness.

There's dynamism.

There is fellowship.

There is communion in God.

And when God made man,

He made man in His own image.

He made him for community.

The Word was made flesh.

He made him for fellowship,

for with-ness.

And a man must find that need fulfilled

in his fellowship with God

at one great level.

God walked in the garden.

God came and Adam came to Him.

He walked with me and He talked with me

and He told me I was His own.

And the joys we shared as we tarried there

no one will ever know.

Adam and Eve could
have sung that together.

God spoke to man.

He spoke familiarly.

How are things today, Adam?

What have you seen?
What have you done today?

And in that vertical relationship,

man has fellowship with God.

Man has with-ness with God.

And yet, this, God says, it's not good

for man to be alone.

I will give him a helpmeet for him.

And so God provided therefore

for man's social needs.

He provided a wife.

He provided a family

to meet man's needs for togetherness.

With his own kind, it's a glorious thing.

That when Jesus Christ became a man,

He became a man in the image of God.

And in the image of God's togetherness,

in the image of God's with-ness.

And Christ's need for fellowship

found marvelous fulfillment

of course in His relationship with God,

in those wonderful conversations -

getting up early and having a time

of delight and communion with His Father,

prayers that He offered to His Father.

He went as the only begotten Son

through the veil into the most holy place

and He went with boldness.

He spoke with God

and He found delight.

"Who would not rise early
to meet such company?"

He could say as McCheyne said.

But there is something
more glorious still.

That even in Christ

there was a social instinct.

There was a need for fellowship

that could not find its
exhausted fulfillment

in His fellowship with God.

I read He chose twelve.

And I might say yes, He chose twelve

to instruct them.

And He chose twelve to commission them

and send them forth as
(unintelligible) His ambassadors.

But I don't find that in Scripture.

I find that He chose
twelve to be with Him.

And there are few things
in the New Testament

that are more glorious than that.

That the Word who became flesh

who was with God and was God

chose men to be His companions

and His friends.

It speaks eloquently of the
reality of His incarnation,

the reality of His humanness.

That He was no loner.

The contrast with John the Baptist

is so pervasive in those opening chapters.

John there dressed in camel's hair

and a robe he's roughly made

and cut a strip of a carcass as a belt.

He's living on honey and locusts.

And Jesus goes to weddings.

He goes to parties and feasts.

He goes into people's homes

and He speaks to them.

He talks with them.

There was a need.

There was an isolation that could only

be met in togetherness

with bone of His bone

and flesh of His flesh.

He had laid hold of the seed of Abraham.

He had assumed flesh and blood.

And He took the reality
of being flesh and blood

and He chose twelve to be with Him.

And then as the end is near,

as He sets His face steadfastly

to Jerusalem,

He is more conscious of them.

And He withdraws from Galilee

and He withdraws from preaching

in the open air, in the temple.

He sees less and less of
the world and the public,

and He says oh, I'm so looking forward

to our meal together.

He spends that last
night in the upper room

and He speaks to them.

They have their head on His bosom

because they love Him so much.

He goes from that upper room

into His final experience at Gethsemane

and He says "oh, you'll come, Peter.

And John, James, you'll come with Me."

And do you think it was only to observe?

Do you think it was only to report?

Do you think it was only
that they might learn

some great spiritual lesson?

He says come and watch with Me.

Come and watch with Me.

You say to someone,

pray for me, pastor.

Pray for me now, will you?

And the Son of God sought

someone to bear His burdens

and share His oppression

and watch with Him

so that at this desperate time

of deep darkness,

there would be somebody there

walking with Him.

And it's at that point then
that the curse comes -

the curse of social deprivation.

Because He comes across the meadow

and there they are snoring.

Couldn't you watch with Me for an hour?

You said though I should die with You,

you should never forsake Me at all.

Never that marvelous word of the orator,

of the rhetorician -

the marvelous word of
the tool of human oratory.

"Never." I'll never let you down.

You let Me down, didn't you?

Then they all run off

as they see the torches

and the breaking of the branches

as they come through the trees

with their swords and staves

and they run for their lives.

All their protestations -

they agreed with Peter,

"You can count on us."

And then as He's being led away,

He hears Peter and a girl saying,

"Aren't you with Him?"

"Don't you have a Galilean accent?"

And this heroic, steadfast believer says,

"I never knew that blasted Man.

Never knew. No, not me."

And He's alone.

Absolutely alone.

The time when He most needed sympathy.

When He most needed someone to listen,

a flicker, a catching of His eye,

and saying in a glance,

"I know why You're there."

"I know why You're dying for me."

"I know why You won't
come down from the cross."

"I know it."

"We appreciate so much what You're doing."

No one.

He treads the winespress.

And all the people,
there is none with Him.

He's just by Himself.

He's an object of
contempt to the soldiers.

He's an object of
contempt to the Pharisees.

The chief priests come
down and they mock Him.

He's an object of heartbroken sorrow

to His mother and the women there.

And He's a disappointment.

He's a failure - another failed prophet

to His disciples.

They all left Him.

Do you know there are Christians

and they've borne a brave testimony

to the Word of God,

and because they've
had a prophetic ministry,

then they've known what it is to be

misunderstood and maligned

and their words twisted.

And they've been forsaken by people

that they thought were standing with them.

They've had false accusations made

and their motives have been twisted.

Come to Calvary,

come with me.

Come to your blessed Savior

and see Him there

and the comfort that He offers to you.

Because He's been there where you are.

(unintelligible)

You've never been totally
rejected, have you?

You've had a concerned wife who's come in

and hugged you.

You've had your mother on the phone.

"Are you alright?"

She's filled with concern.

You've had brethren come.

"We'll be praying for you
all the time, pastor."

There's been some faint voice -

there's been a voice
of your own integrity.

You look through it,

and everything we do,
we could do better.

But you knew you had to take that stand.

You knew that had to be said.

Jesus - utterly alone.

And if you feel that yours has been

a lonely ministry,

that your universe is empty,

that your world has collapsed,

stand close by the Man of Calvary

because there is ultimate

and there is total and
unqualified repudiation.

There is no one who knows.

Every other martyr had his supporters.

They waited there as the cart came along

and their beloved teacher was taken off

and was bound in chain to the stake.

And they cried to him

and they shouted verses out.

They sang together that they could hear.

And he had the comfort
of preaching perhaps

and hurling defiance

at those that were accusing him.

And then the Lord in His compassion

has a man - a criminal -

and he's there and he's
nailed alongside Jesus.

And he speaks to Him.

"Jesus, remember me

when You come in Your kingdom."

I expect that long before our Lord

entered His final agony,

that this man had lost any capacity

of speaking, of giving a verse,

of praying, of helping Jesus in any way.

So, I am saying to you,

we are looking at the cross

and the curse,

the anathema that He bore.

And I'm saying firstly,

it was physical pain.

Secondly, it was emotional pain.

And thirdly, it was social pain.

And then last of all,

our Lord experienced spiritual pain.

Now, we can look at that two ways.

Firstly, how He was exposed

to Satanic onslaught.

It was the hour of the power of darkness.

And the devil threw
his own blazing arrows,

his incendiaries into
the heart of the Savior -

the incendiaries of doubt,

the incendiaries of blasphemy,

the incendiaries of despair.

I do not say, I would not allow

that they caused any conflagration,

that they found in Christ then

no moral or spiritually
combustible material

that they could set fire to.

He was from His heart

loving God with all the atoms

and subatomic particles of His soul.

But the pain was there

and the darkness was there.

It was the valley of the shadow of death.

It was the hour of the
authority of darkness.

There's that marvelous
picture in Colossians 2.

We're told that Christ has delivered us

from the power of darkness,

and God's translated us into
the kingdom of His dear Son.

He disarmed the principalities and powers.

He made a public spectacle of them

triumphing over them by the cross.

So He made an incursion

into the kingdom of darkness,

into the authority of
the darkness of Satan

and Christ went into that kingdom.

It was almost to use today's picture,

(unintelligible).

A commando raid.

And Christ rescued us

and Christ was used

by this tremendous rescue operation

that God had planned in eternity

and set up and now orchestrates.

He comes into the kingdom of darkness,

into the authority of darkness.

He is made vulnerable to its power

and He is attacked and He is assaulted

by Satan's doubts and Satan's
blasphemous thoughts

and Satan's attempts to bring our Lord

not only to despondency, but to despair.

And end the enfleshment

and call for the legion of angels

before His redemptive work is over

and whisk Him away

from our salvation.

An onslaught.

So Satan lifts the lid
of the bottomless pit

and he summons every demon out.

And his command then to them all

is that they go to Golgotha

and they descend like
a huge swarm of hornets.

And they descend on our Lord

and they attack Him

and He is vulnerable

and He is in terrible spiritual anguish

because of the power of darkness.

And that is one cause
of the spiritual pain

that our Lord endured on the cross.

And then secondly,

the terrible thing was the dereliction:

"My God, My God, why
hast Thou forsaken Me?"

And that was the final
manifestation of God's anathema.

God putting a gulf
between Himself and His Son.

It meant on one level the loss
of assurance of God's love,

the loss of a sense of God's assistance.

I don't believe that God
ever stopped loving Him

or ever ceased to help Him.

The great prophecy was:

"Behold, My Servant whom I uphold."

And I believe that God was
upholding Him in the garden,

and upholding Him under the lash,

and upholding Him when He stumbled

carrying the cross,

and upholding Him when the nails

were driven through His hands and feet,

and He was there.

It was through the eternal Spirit

that He offered Himself
without spot to God.

But I do believe that our beloved Savior

wasn't conscious of the
Father upholding Him

or the Spirit ministering to Him.

And that can be a parable

for some of the anguish

that some of you have suffered.

There are times when God is there,

God is your refuge,

God is your strength,

God is a very real help

in a day of great trouble,

but you're not conscious that He's there.

You don't appreciate

that God is with you

when you feel absolutely alone

and the heavens seem as brass above you.

And you lack the comfort of His presence

and the sense of it.

I don't believe He ever
lost the Father's love,

the love of God for Him.

God's delight in Him as His servant.

My elect, in whom My soul delights.

He had been lovely and
pleasant in His life,

but in His death, He was more lovely

and more pleasant still.

It was a sacrifice which was a sweet aroma

to Almighty God.

What a fragrance there was going up,

filling heaven from Golgotha.

All that obedience,

all that willingness to take

what the Father had given to Him -

the redemption of a company of people

more than anyone can number

being redeemed, each one,

and the fragrance as their names

and their eternities were brought there

and settled in heaven forevermore.

God loved Him for what He was doing.

God loved Him very specially,

but He couldn't tell Him.

The love was a reality,

but the sense of it was withheld.

The sense of sonship.

You say to me, well now, pastor,

that sounds fine, but can you bring me

any objective proof

for what you've just told us?

Well, I take you simply
to the great words:

"My God, My God, why
have You forsaken Me?"

Whenever we are told of Christ praying

in the Gospel, until this juncture,

whenever His praying is described for us,

He always says, "Abba" -

the Aramaic for "father."

It's fashionable to
translate that as "daddy."

He was never that to Christ.

Holy Father.

Righteous Father.

We don't in adulthood commonly refer

to our aged fathers as "daddy."

Father, dad, we say.

And so Christ with all His reverance

for His Father's righteousness,

for His insight into
His Father's holiness,

yet He can't say "Father" on Calvary -

not at the last.

"My God."

It's wonderful that
it's "My God," isn't it?

There's no despair on Calvary.

There's in many ways
faith there in our Lord

in every of the utterances that He makes.

He's triumphing over
unspeakable deprivation.

That's the glory that (unintelligible).

"My God" - not "My Father."

He is conscious that He is face-to-face

with infinite, uncreated holiness.

He is full of the consciousness

of the wrath of God.

His Sonship is obscured.

I don't say He doubted it,

but He wasn't conscious of it.

And He is desolate in a sense of help,

in a sense of love, in a sense of Sonship.

And He cries and there's
no one to answer Him.

I called, but there is none to hear.

And you see the glory of that -

that He had no experience of that.

Not in eternity.

The Word was with God

and the Word was God

and they were there together.

They were eternally delighting
in one another,

in the Father and the Son's love.

And then He becomes incarnate

and He adds a human body and mind

to His heavenly, eternal, divine nature.

Every day: "Father..."

He'd begun the day giving
Himself anew to His Father.

At the end of every day,

thanked God for His presence and help

and always they were together -

the Father and the Son - always together.

Then in the Upper Room,

He tells God the Father
exactly what He wants.

He says, "Father, I will

that they whom Thou hast given Me

shall be with Me where I am."

And He prays with
confidence in the garden.

"Father, let this cup pass from Me.

Nevertheless, not My will,
but Thine be done."

And He cries now on Golgotha

to a God who has always been there,

but a God who doesn't seem to Him

to be there any longer.

And there's no response.

There's no angel coming.

At His baptism, there was an angel,

and at His transfiguration.

In the garden, an angel
comes and comforts Him.

Robert Duncan said

after He'd seen Jesus in Heaven,

he wanted to see the angel
that comforted His Lord.

But there was no voice and no angel

there on the cross.

No one saying,

"You're My lovely Son."

"I'm so pleased with
everything You've done."

"Well done, good and faithful Servant."

Just the intolerable eloquent silence

from Heaven.

He's in the far country.

He's in the strange country.

He's the scapegoat.

He's bearing the sins of the world.

He's in the wilderness.

He's falling through the bottomless pit.

He's swimming through the lake of fire.

He's in hell. He's crying to God.

All He gets is the echo of His own voice

and the chant of the crowd,

"Crucify! Crucify! Crucify!"
And that's all.

And then in the Father as He looks,

what's there in the Father at that time?

As He looks at His Son,

as Abram ties Isaac -

the promised one,

his lovely boy,

and he ties him.

But Jesus was a lovelier Son.

And God was a more loving Father.

And all the love was there.

The Father's pain and the Father's care.

And the Father's longing to spare

and the longing to hold His Son's hand

and whisper in His Son's ear,

but He was anathema

because He was made sin.

He bore our sins

in His own body on the tree.

He was accursed.

God couldn't condone.

He was the holocaust.

And the holocaust must burn and burn

until He is consumed.

And so the apostle tells us,

"He did not spare His own Son."

He must have longed to

as a Christian mother is longing

knowing something of the pain

her daughter's going through.

And she went through pain.

Let me take that pain, but she can't.

Christian mothers have
bled in their hearts

when the world and the church

has turned on men of God

and scorned them

and longed to relieve their son's pain.

And God the Father is there,

oh, His wings over Golgotha.

His wings over us tonight.

His wings over you and your family

and your congregation.

Sitting down we're told

the soldiers watched Him there.

They watched Him.

They watched Him holy,
harmless, undefiled,

separate from sinners

higher than the heavens,

there on that cross.

The desolate, derelict, forsaken

by the God who loved Him

and cared for Him.

But the covenant was this:

the cup shall not pass.

It couldn't pass.

And He says to them again and again,

the Son of God must suffer many things.

He must suffer.

And that "must" isn't rooted

in human convention.

It's not rooted in
theological contrivance

but in the great realities of who God is.

And He is light,

and in Him there is no darkness at all.

And we may say God can forgive sin.

And we can say God loves to forgive sin.

We can say God multiplies pardon.

The vilest offender who truly believes,

that moment from Jesus a pardon receives.

We can say that.

But God condones nothing

and Christ must bear the sin

that God forgives.

The one who bears is the one who exacts.

God demands the atonement.

God provides the atonement.

God becomes the atonement.

God demands a lamb.

God finds a lamb.

He finds it in His own bosom.

And God becomes the Lamb.

And that truly is the greatest
single reality of the Christian faith.

He became a curse for us.

He became the Lamb for us.

He became the scapegoat.

He became the holocaust.

(unintelligible)

And that's why the
paradox is so important

because if you are taking what
I'm saying in your stride,

you'll never see the glory of it.

Unless you see the immorality

(unintelligible)

and the illegality and the ugliness

and the utterly indefensible,
horrendousness

of what is happening on the cross,

you'll never see the glory

because Calvary is the ugliest deed

in the history of the cosmos.

It has been and it always will be.

It is ugly as human rejection of God.

It is ugly as I look on the paradox

of God crucifying His own Son.

And I need light there

because if I can't find light

that will illuminate Calvary,

then my whole universe is a black hole.

There's no reason. There's no logic.

There is something here
that is more horrific than Belsen.

Why did God crucify His own Son?

And the extraordinary answer is:

because He loved sinners like me and you.

Because He loved us.

He was made a curse for us.

He had no personal connection with sin,

but He became connected to it

because He loved us.

That made Him a debtor.
That made Him a sinner.

Paul says it with a boldness.

"He made Him sin."

That's why God recoiled.

That's why He sent Him
into the far country.

That's why He wouldn't
listen to Him when He cried.

That's why He wouldn't look

when the Savior bled and died.

It's a glorious thing,
that little word "for."

It is the "for" of substitution.

For us.

My Substitute.

My sin there.

In Christ on the cross.

And God not spared.

We are redeemed from the curse of the law.

Yea, wash Thou me

and I shall be whiter than snow.

There is a fountian filled with blood

drawn from Immanuel's veins,

and sinners plunged beneath that flood

lose all their guilty stains.

He casts our sins into the depths

of the sea of His own forgetfulness.

All my mean little sins,

all my sins against those

who love me the most.

All my trespasses.

At the great mercy seat,

I live under the cover

of that sacrifice.

Once and for all,

it is finished.

Lord, be merciful to me, a sinner.

Give me a covering.

My sin needs to be covered.

(unintelligible)

We have a great High Priest.

Well, let's draw near.

Let's come with boldness.

Let's find mercy.

All of us, everybody here tonight.

Come now. Come now to Christ for mercy.

Come for a covering.

There's a covering here.

It's available for you tonight -

this covering for your sin is here.

Don't leave without a covering.

It's been woven by the agony

and bloody sweat of a Savior

who because of His love

wouldn't come down

till He redeemed you

until He paid the price,

until He cleared the slate clean.

You'll go to Him tonight

and say, "Lord, I need a covering."

I need forgiveness.

I need my sin to be forgotten.

Put a veil over it.

And the veil is the
obedience of Jesus Christ

to death - even the death of the cross.

I don't believe God ever brings
our sins back to haunt us.

I believe the devil does.

And in our folly, we will go

and we will dive in and seek for them

and find them again in our folly.

The devil will bring them back.

We can often say, yes,
God forgives our sins,

but we don't forgive our own sins.

You must. You must.

If the blood of Christ

has satisfied God's righteousness,

it can satisfy your conscience.

I must put my past -

my indefensible past

that I am most ashamed of in my life -

I must put it behind me.

I must leave it there.

Sometimes perhaps when
you give your testimony,

you needn't even hint

at what you once were

because grace has changed you

and the blood has cleansed you

and the righteousness clothes you

and the forgetfulness of
God has cast it from you,

and He will never bring
it before you again.

And the Judge when you
stand in that great day

and give an account of your life.

that Judge will be the Savior

who gave His life and shed His blood

that you might be ransomed,

healed, restored, forgiven.

There is therefore now no condemnation

to those are in Christ Jesus.

You take Him tonight.

Taking Him is a movement

of your heart and soul

as the Holy Spirit works by the Word

and applies that Word to you

and enables to you to say I'm sorry.

I'm so wrong

keeping You on the outside,

and I'm opening my life to You now.

Come. Come into me.

You say it. There's no formalism.

You say it. You start talking to Him.

You talk to Him in wonder

and thankfulness

that you've heard the
Gospel of redeeming grace

and of comprehensive,
complete forgiveness

for all our sins

through what the Savior has done.

And when you stand before Him,

and He says,

"Why should I let you into My Heaven?"

You'll say, "because of Jesus."

That's all.

Because of Him.

Let us pray.

We ask Thee, loving God, to work now.

We've spoken on such holy matters.

Oh Lord, do bless it.

Don't let the devil take away the seed,

but oh, may it produce fruit

in the lives of many here.

May they tonight run from their good works

and church attendance and their baptism,

the Lord's Supper,

all the wonderful things,

and earlier common graces

You've allowed them to do.

May they lodge in the wounded side.

May they know with wonder

their names are written

in the palms of Jesus' hands

in marks of indelible grace.

May they plead:

Father, forgive me for Jesus' sake.

And may they believe

that there is mercy with Him

for the chief of sinners

that glory may be given

to our blessed Savior

who stayed there until He saved us -

everybody.

Accept our doxology of praise and thanks.

In Jesus' name, Amen.

Now I've asked that we could sing

"The Power of the Cross"

as our last hymn tonight.