This post follows on from: The Contradiction of The Cross
What the cross is not.
We continue to subject ourselves to mythical deception when we view the cross of Jesus as the punishment that satisfies God’s anger; when we speak of the blood of Jesus that magically satisfies God’s blood lust. These are the very fallacies the cross came to expose.
God did not require the sacrifice of Jesus to enable Him to forgive. God forgave long before this event! The blood of Jesus has much greater power than the magical qualities we’ve assigned to it in our religious language. The blood of Jesus has unique power because it has a unique message. Every innocent victims blood before Jesus cried for vengeance, yet the blood of Jesus … Jesus who identified himself with every victim … His blood cries for forgiveness.
Theories of sacrifice that pictures God as delighting in the violence, brings a schizophrenic division into the union of God, with one part of God angrily exerting his violence against man and another part lovingly taking our punishment for us. If one deconstructs this argument to its basic message it means that Jesus came to save us from the Father! The truth is, God has never been our problem! We did not need to be saved from God, but from evil.
Victory over evil.
Why would God then use such a paradoxical event?
Revelation is both destructive and constructive; it is destructive to the deceptions it exposes and it is constructive as it lights up hidden truths.
The scriptures describe this event as God’s victory over evil.
Lets look at a few scriptures that describe this revelatory aspect:
1John 3:8 The Son of God was revealed for this purpose: to destroy the devil’s works.
And we know that the Son of God has come and has given us understanding so that we may know the true One. We are in the true One—that is, in His Son Jesus Christ. He is the true God and eternal life. (1 Jn 5:20)
For so it stands written, “I WILL EXHIBIT THE NOTHINGNESS OF THE WISDOM OF THE WISE, AND THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE INTELLIGENT I WILL BRING TO NOUGHT.” (1Cor. 1:19 Weymouth)
The mission of Jesus is described as the destruction of the works of the accuser/accusation; as the event in which we are given understanding concerning the true God and our true selves in Him; as the public exhibition of human wisdom for the foolishness it is.
The cross both exposes evil for what it is, and reveals the goodness of God, and it does so with man as the central character. Never has evil been seen more clearly than in the brutality of mankind against an innocent victim. Never has God been seen more clearly than in this man, Jesus Christ, willingly suffering at our hands.
What does the cross reveal about evil?
Evil found its most real expression in human institutions, principalities and powers, represented by Rome, and the religious authority represented by the Sanhedrin.
The cross exposes that our very best religious dogma, the highest human philosophy about God, will sacrifice the true God for the sake of our imaginary gods. It exposes the violence of societies build upon sacrificial systems. The principalities and powers of this world, of every culture, began in false accusation escalating to murder. Human societies has violent and deceptive beginnings.
The cross exposes evil, for it reveals that it is neither the guilt of our scapegoats, nor angry gods that are the source of our suffering. We need to look for the source of evil somewhere far closer than what we are comfortable with … we need to take seriously the biblical view that partaking of a certain knowledge is what introduced evil to this world.
In what way did He conquer evil? This was the event in which the deceiver would deceive himself; the act in which our unfounded accusations would be exposed for what it is. The story that would deconstruct all our myths into the nothingness that they are.
These false models are exposed in the very moment when our true model is revealed. We are now able to see the true God and reflect Him – a God who loves and adores; a God in whom there is no accusation.
What does the cross reveal concerning God?
Lets first say this: if the cross is the event that God required to satisfy His need for retribution, then it has no revelatory power. That is the story that mythology has always been telling.
However, if the violence of the cross is not what God required, but what He endured because we required it, it reveals something totally new to mankind, something hidden from the foundation of this world. (Mt 13:35, 23:35, Lk 11:51)
Jesus, identified by John the baptist as the lamb of God, reveals that it is not our sacrifices that changes the mind of God, but God’s lamb that changes the mind of man. God is not the one who needs to be converted!
In the event of the cross, where God allows us to sink to our deepest alienation from Him, at the point where we are at our worst, He forgives … it is in this moment that we are confronted with the reality that God is not our problem – never has been, and will never be! If when we are at our worst, He remains forgiving, it means that we need to seek a different party to blame for our suffering.
God has never been and never will be our problem … He is our salvation!