This talk is about " the cross ". Now when we say " the cross ", we're not talking about a religious symbol but rather the death of Jesus Christ on a real, wooden cross. According to the Bible something world-changing happened on the cross. As one early Christian preacher put it, "we preach Christ crucified ". In other words: our message concerns Jesus and his death on the cross.
The Bible sees sin as the ripping up of God's design for us. We feel that we have the right to live as we choose, deciding right and wrong for ourselves; we have rejected God and rebelled against him. That's sin. But what is God's reaction to sin? Well that's why we need to talk about the cross, because there we get an answer to that very question. At the cross we see God's reaction to sin.
Firstly: what actually happened to Jesus? When Jesus was arrested, he was innocent of any crime but some of the main politicians in the country wanted him out of the way. They tried him, but failed to condemn him. So the main judge pushed Jesus for an answer to one question: was he claiming to have been sent specially by God? And when Jesus said he had, then the courtroom erupted. They spat at him; they hit him; they mocked him. Then they pronounced the death penalty upon him in punishment for, as they saw it, lying about God. Yet Jesus had committed no crime.
The Jewish authorities weren't allowed to execute Jesus, so they had to see the Roman governor - a man called Pilate. He wasn't convinced by their accusations but when a crowd was stirred up and started chanting then Pilate feebly gave in. So Jesus was taken away and flogged- a cruel method of torture involving a whip into which bits of bone had been tied. After mocking him, the soldiers then took Jesus out to a place called Golgotha. Here he was nailed naked to a wooden cross. Crucifixion was reserved by the Romans for their worst criminals - in Roman eyes it was a shameful way to die. And the Jews agreed with them; they saw the cross as cursed by God.
Well Jesus suffered with the shame and the dreadful pain of the cross for a number of hours. Then he cried out this question: "My God, my God why have you forsaken me?" A little while later he died. Jesus's suffering reached its most intense moment when he felt that the God he loved had abandoned him.
Yet Jesus's claim was that he was the Son of God. He had come from God himself to tell us and show us all about God. How, if that was true, could he die in this way? Why would God do this? We see two things about God at the cross.
First of all, we see that God is angry with sin. Now how can that be the case with Jesus? Surely Jesus died unfairly, as an innocent man? How can we read into that any anger from God? Because, says the Bible, in his death Jesus took the place of other people. One writer puts it this way: "While we were still sinners, Christ died for us". The death he experienced was on behalf of other people. Other people should have died like this but Jesus chose to die in their place.
So when we see the way God treated his son then we know about God's reaction to our sins. God is angry and wants sin punished. When God breathed into the first man and gave him life, God was giving the most precious gift that he could give to us. But we have taken that gift and told God that we'll live as we please and ignore him. That's what makes God angry.
Think about it this way. Imagine you have a street of houses during the second world war and one night a bomb explodes causing dreadful damage. The next morning you stand looking at those houses from the front. The bomb fell at the back of the houses and the couple nearest to the dropping point have been completely flattened. All you can see is a crater filled with bricks and dust and smouldering fires. But up the street the houses look more like houses should look. One of them even has its front door still on. But when you walk round the back, you discover that all of them have been ruined. Even the one you thought was still standing, is actually just a front wall hiding a pile of broken bricks. None of the houses are houses any more. They are just the damaged remains of what once were houses. Some worse than others but all equally useless.
That is what God sees when he looks at us. We are the remains of the human race that he designed and made. The human race has been ruined by its rejection of its creator. Sure not all of us are as bad as we could be. Not all of us are Myra Hindley or Ian Brady. We couldn't imagine bringing ourselves to abuse and murder children with delight in the way that they did. The damage to their humanity seems to be more extreme than ours; they are like the houses which are just craters in the ground. But even so, we are still just like the houses up the street. We may still have a wall and door. From the front we may look like an ordinary house. But go round the back and you find that it's not true. The structure has collapsed. It no longer exists as a house.
Even those of us who like to think we are good people, the Bible says to us, "You're just a front on something that has been ruined." Having rejected the creator and gone to live our own lives, none of us are what our creator desires us to be.
Now how would you feel if you were the owner of one of those houses? Let's imagine that when the bomb dropped you were away from home and only got back the next morning. Everything has been destroyed that you most care about - including your family who were sleeping there. Would you feel less angry at the enemy if yours was the house with the front door still standing? No: you would be angry at the destruction and at the violence whether you had a front door or not. Everything that matters has been ruined.
God is angry about what others have done to him. And those others are us. We have destroyed his beautiful design by going our own way. He is rightly angry with us. So God has brought in punishment against sin. The Bible says, "the wages of sin is death." His punishment is to strip away the lovely gift of life that he gave to us, and leave us with the misery of death. Then, says the Bible, he gets rid of what is left. The ruined remains are cast away into a dreadful place called Hell. A place described by Jesus as somewhere where the fire is not quenched. He tells us that ruined human beings are left ruined for ever, like the burning rubbish in the remains of the house.
When we think about Jesus's death on the cross we are seeing the anger and punishment from God. The cross shows it to us before we must face it ourselves when we die.
But the cross also tells us about God's mercy. The verse "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" tells us that Christ died so that we didn't have to die. This is the good news which Christians have been spreading all over the world since Jesus rose again from the grave. Jesus was punished so that others, who committed the sins and deserved the punishment, can go free.
But couldn't God have just forgotten about it all? No, because God is concerned about justice. Now some people don't like that. They say that God shouldn't be like that. But when we say, "I don't think God should be like that " then we are saying that we have the right to sit in judgement on God. We are simply expressing the very rebellion which will be our eternal downfall if we carry on with it.
However, besides that, we can also see the wisdom in God's ways. If a lad stole an apple from my orchard, I might let him off if he's sorry. On the other hand if he rapes and murders my daughter, I won't. I would still insist on the punishment, otherwise justice won't be done. The crime is too serious and all need to know that. God must punish sin because it's so serious. However, if he punishes us, then we won't survive. So we need a saviour who is capable of stepping in, bearing the punishment and then setting us free. Jesus is that saviour.
Are we saying, then, that God is angry but Jesus is merciful? No, says the Bible. It was God who planned on rescuing sinners and he asked his son to come save them in this way. The cross shows us that God is merciful. As one of Jesus's friends put it: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." The message of the cross is good news to those who recognise the reality of sin and God's anger against it. Those who understand what happened at the cross, and believe in Jesus Christ to save them, will be saved. Won't you believe?