Eternal Sovereign Justice

The Cross Is God’s Answer – Part 2

As we read in Part 1, the Cross is God’s answer to the question, “Why don’t you do something about evil?”

In this post, I will be sharing excerpts from the second half of chapter 21 of Randy Alcorn’s book If God Is Good. This chapter focuses on Jesus, who is the only answer bigger than the questions. As I shared in part 1, this chapter for me reinforced what this God-Man did for me. This is why I passionately love Jesus, the Savior, He alone is the answer to whatever we face. I pray this chapter brings you closer to the One who died for you.

Perhaps you have not made the choice to follow Jesus yet, after reading this post, hopefully, you will not wait any longer. Where you spend eternity is at stake.

Remember you can find posts of previous chapters under the heading Bible Studies in the menu above. Please leave your respectful thoughts and comments or prayer needs below. Unless otherwise noted, the Scriptures used are from the NKJV.

A Few Highlights from Part 1

  • The Cross is where God’s Suffering Conquered Evil.
  • God Allowed Jesus’s Temporary Suffering.
  • Sometimes familiarity with the gospel story prevents us from understanding its breathtaking nature.
    • The excellent book and movie of C. S. Lewis, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe offers us particular help understanding Christ’s atoning sacrifice.
  • The Cross was God’s Plan from the Beginning.
  • Jesus is the perfect, permanent, and only intermediary between God and man.
  • The Greatest Good in human history came out of the greatest evil.
  • The Cross is Everything.
    • Everything before the Cross points forward to it.
    • Everything since the Cross points back to it.
    • Everything that will last was purchased on it.
    • Everything that matters hinges on it.
  • The Greatest Wonder of the Cross is not that Jesus went to the Cross but that he stayed on it.
    • Jesus said, “Do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels?” – Matt 26:5
  • God’s love Was Proven by the Cross.
  • God’s love comes to us Soaked in Divine Blood.
  • One look at Jesus, at his incarnation and the redemption he provided us, should silence the argument that God has withdrawn to some far corner of the universe where he keeps his hands clean and maintains his distance from human suffering.
  • God does not merely emphasize with our sufferings. He actually suffers. Jesus is God.
    • What Jesus suffered; God suffered.

Read more in Part 1

Jesus shouts to us without opening his mouth:

“I do care. Don’t you see the blood, bruises, and scars? Whatever you may think, never doubt that I care for you!”

God’s Empathy Was Demonstrated on the Cross

Poll 100 people on the question “In all human history who has paid the highest price for evil and suffering”, and only a few would come up with the right answer: God.

“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” – 1 John 4:10 (NIV)

Many complaints against the Creator boil down to this: “God, you don’t get it.”

Christ’s suffering says back to us:

“No, actually, I do get it. It’s you who doesn’t get it.”

Jesus suffered the same trials and temptations that we do. God understands our worst losses and heartbreaks, even our temptations:

“For in that He Himself has suffered, being tempted, He is able to aid those who are tempted.” – Heb 2:18

God might say to us:

“I have an intimate understanding of what it is to be in your place. You have no clue what it is to be in my place. If you’d experience Gethsemane and the march to Golgotha and the horrors of the Cross, you’d not question for a moment either my understanding or my love.”

And he might add:

“After you’ve created a world, and seen your creatures betray you, and you’ve chosen to die for all their sins and offer them forgiveness… then come back and let’s talk about it.”

When Tempted to Ask Why

Whenever you feel tempted to ask God, “Why did you do this to me?” look at the Cross and ask, “Why did you do that for me?”

The Bible describes Christ in the garden before he went to the Cross:

“And being in agony, He prayed more earnestly. Then His sweat became like great drops of blood falling down to the ground.” – Luke 22:44

History’s worst event happened to history’s best person.

God knows what it’s like to watch his son die. Handing over your child to executioners to save others is a far greater sacrifice than losing your child to death when you have no choice.

God’s son bore no guilt of his own; He bore ours. In his love for us, God self-imposed the sentence of death on our behalf.

One thing we must never say about God is that he doesn’t understand what it means to be abandoned utterly, suffer terribly, and die miserably.

Dorothy Sayers wrote,

“For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is. Limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death, God had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair.

He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”[1]    

That God did this willingly, with ancient premeditation, is all the more remarkable. Jesus said,

“As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father.”- John 10:15,18

Some people can’t believe God would create a world in which people would suffer so much. Isn’t it more remarkable that God would create a world in which no one would suffer more than he?

Christ Identifies With Our Despair

On the Cross, echoing David in Psalm 22, Jesus, the Messianic son of David, cried out, “My God my God why have you forsaken me?”

The beloved son who had “well pleased” his father (see Matthew 3:17) became our sin (see 2 Corinthians 5:21). So the father turned away. For the first time in all eternity, the oneness with the Godhead knew separation. In ways, we cannot comprehend and ways that would amount to blasphemy had not God revealed it to us – the Atonement somehow tore God apart.

Some believe Jesus Christ showed he didn’t know why his Father had poured out his wrath on him. But scripture says otherwise:

“Now My soul is troubled, and what shall I say? ‘Father, save Me from this hour’? But for this purpose I came to this hour. Father, glorify Your name.” – John 12:27-28.

Jesus knew why he had to die. He cried out because any separation from his Father constituted an infinite horror.

Tim Keller explains,

“The physical pain was nothing compared to the spiritual experience of cosmic abandonment. Christianity alone among the world’s religions claims that God became uniquely and fully human in Jesus Christ and therefore knows firsthand despair, rejection, loneliness, poverty, bereavement, torture, and imprisonment. On the Cross he went beyond even the worst human suffering and experienced cosmic rejection and pain that exceeds ours as infinitely as his knowledge and power exceeds ours.” [2]   

When Jesus cried “My God my God why have you forsaken me?” he bridged the gap between God and us not only theologically, in the Atonement but emotionally, between our suffering and God’s, between our agonizing cries and God’s.

The unrighteous have no grounds for asking God why he has forsaken them. All who understand His Holiness and our sin know the reasons. But God’s beloved Son had the right to ask, even knowing the answer.

Then when “Jesus had cried out with a loud voice, He said, “Father, ‘into Your hands I commit My spirit.’” Having said this, He breathed His last.” – Lk 23:46

In some qualitative not quantitative way, Jesus endured the punishment of Hell. When Jesus said, “It is finished,” signaling he had paid the redemption price, Jesus ceased to bear the penalty for our sin.

The triune God had been restored to utter and complete oneness.

“Looking unto Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” – Heb 12:2

How could he endure such suffering for us? Moreover, why since he has done so would we ever accuse or reject him?

If God can use the horror of Christ’s crucifixion for good, then surely, he can use our suffering for good.

  • If God brought eternal joy through the suffering of Jesus, can’t he bring eternal joy to our present suffering?
  • If Jesus endured his suffering by anticipating the reward of unending joy, can’t he empower us to do the same?

The Christ of the Cross is Our Best Answer

A grieving father asked, “Where was God when my son died?” and a friend answered, “The same place he was when his son died.”

Alcorn states that despite the statement’s power, it’s not entirely accurate. For God turned away from his Son when he died. Why? So, he would not have to turn away when the grieving man’s son died. The man and his son can enjoy eternity together in a world without suffering and death because God’s son died for them.

John Scott wrote,

“I could never myself believe in God if it were not for 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 a while I have to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through 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 became more manageable in light of his.” [3]

The Cross and God’s Relationship with His Children

The Cross perpetually establishes God’s close relationship with his children. Many people imagine that though God once suffered on the Cross he’s now remote and distant from suffering. However, this is not so! In Acts 9:4 Jesus asks “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?” and in the next verse Christ says to Saul “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” –  Acts 9:5

Note the present tense, although Christ’s atoning sacrifice occurred in the past, he continues to identify with and participate in his people’s suffering until he returns to end all suffering.

Christ made it clear that to persecute his people is to persecute him. Whatever others do to his people, positively or negatively, he regards as being done to him. Christ no longer suffers on the cross, but he suffers with his suffering people.

“And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’” – Matt 25:40

“Then He will answer them, saying, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to Me.’” – Matt 25:45

When we feel upset with God and tempted to blame him, we should look at the outstretched arms of Jesus and focus on his wounds not ours.

“fixing our eyes on Jesus, … For the joy set before him he endured the cross, …Consider him who endured such opposition from sinners, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.” – Heb 12:2-3

However great our suffering, his was far greater. If you feel angry at God, what price would you have him pay for his failure to do more for people facing suffering and evil? Would you inflict capital punishment on him? You’re too late.

No matter how bitter we feel toward God, could any of us come up with a punishment worse than what God chose to inflict upon himself?

If you know Jesus, then the hand holding yours bares the calluses of a Carpenter who worked with wood and carried a Cross for you. When he opens his hand, you will see the gnarled flesh of the nail scars on his wrists. And when you think he doesn’t understand your pain, realize that you don’t understand the extent of his pain. Love him or not, he has proven he loves you.

If you hate suffering, does it make sense to choose eternal suffering when God has already suffered so much to deliver you from it? In your most troubled moments when you cry out to God “Why have you let this happen?” picture the outstretched hands of Christ, forever scarred… for you.

God's answer

Do those look like the hands of a God who doesn’t care?

See For Yourself

Do not rely on someone else’s judgments. Each person needs to see for him/herself who Jesus is.

Jesus became a man and went to the Cross for us, paying for our sins and offering us the gift of eternal life.

Jesus asked his Father for another way to the same end. There was none.

We cannot be saved in any other way. And believing in him, trusting in him, is the only way to experience his redemptive work.

Jesus said: “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.” – John 14:6

“To as many as did receive and welcome Him, He gave the right [the authority, the privilege] to become children of God, that is, to those who believe in (adhere to, trust in, and rely on) His name” – John 1:12 (AMP)

The early church believed this, and the apostles preached it:

“Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” – Acts 4:12

Yet twenty centuries later, According to Pew Research’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study, 66 percent of American Christians say many religions can lead to eternal life. [4]

Jesus asked his disciples the most important question: “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” – Matt 16:15-16

If we get it right about Jesus, we can afford to get some minor things wrong. But, if we get it wrong about Jesus, it won’t matter in the end what else we get right.

The Psalmist says: “Come and see the works of God; He is awesome in His doing toward the sons of men.”  – Ps 66:5

“Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good; Blessed is the man who trusts in Him!” – Ps 34:8

Scripture gives us many such invitations to come to God and personally experience him. The best way to do this is to open the Bible and learn about Jesus. Ask yourself who he is and whether you could believe in him. If you hold him at a distance, you will never see him for who he is. Phillip simply invited his friend Nathaniel to “come and see” Jesus (John 1:45-46).

Have you come? Have you seen him? If not, brace yourself. Because once you see Jesus as he really is, your worldview, your goals, your affections, everything – including your view of evil and suffering will change.

Maranatha! Until next time, I am Passionately Loving Jesus, the Anchor of my Soul.

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