Belief that’s born at the foot of the cross.
Belief that’s born at the foot of the cross.
John R. W. Stott and the crucified God of the Christian faith.
What type of God does the Bible reveal? What is he like? What is his commensurate character and disposition toward the world and its inhabitants? Life’s realities and experiences may very well instill in you several biases that inform your response to such questions, but the bare fact of Scripture is that it reveals a God unlike any with which we are familiar. He does not play by our rules or toe the party line, so to speak. The God who is unveiled throughout the pages of the Bible is a God who embraces failures, sufferers, and pig-headed sinners. He extends a hand of everlasting mercy to those who spit on him and refuse his generosity. He stops at nothing to demonstrate his love for the world, even if that means dying for those who are celebrating his demise. He sprints down the driveway for prodigals, pursues the runaways, and stoops to heal the bedraggled and beat up. How do we know all of those things are true, though? How do we know those aren’t “half-remembered dreams” or imagined myths? Because of the cross and the empty tomb.
We can know and believe in the revelatory proclamations of who God is because the vacant grave works backward to vindicate the absurdity of the cross as the lynchpin of our hope. Likewise, the cross becomes the axel upon which biblical interpretation revolves. Golgotha is the apex moment of God’s self-disclosure, allowing us to understand everything before and after it as glimpses and echoes that find their fulfillment and culmination only in Christ’s cruciform suffering. This is what makes the proclamation of the gospel so powerful and so profound. At its center is the God who comes not only to dwell but to die. Therefore, as John Stott confesses, believing in the God of the Bible is almost unthinkable if not for the cross. He writes:
I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. The only God I believe in is the One Nietzsche ridiculed as ‘God on the cross’. In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after awhile I have had to turn away. And in imagination, I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through his hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in the light of his. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. ‘The cross of Christ . . . is God’s only self-justification in such a world’ as ours. (326–27)
The oft-repeated biblical description of who God is — that he is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness” (Exod. 34:6; Num. 14:18; 2 Chron. 30:9; Neh. 9:17; Ps. 86:15; 103:8; 111:4; 112:4; 116:5; 145:8; Joel 2:13) — reaches its crescendo when God’s own Son willingly succumbs to torture, shame, spit, and death. The slowness of his anger and the abundance of his grace is nowhere better revealed than when he utters words of absolution for his executioners (Luke 23:34). Indeed, it is at the foot of the cross that belief is born since it is the cross that forms the nexus of repentance and faith. As much as the sight of Christ’s heaving and bloodied frame may make us want to turn away, it is precisely that image of God’s only Son, with sweat and tears co-mingling with blood, that offers us our only hope in life and death.
Grace and peace to you.
(Thank you, Matt, for sharing the quote that inspired this post!)
Works cited:
John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 20th Anniversary Edition (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006).