What God did on Calvary was far more than all that the brilliant achievements of mere man could ever accomplish. The transference of guilt from the souls of an innumerable company to the God-man required not only vast mercy, but also unimaginable divine energy. It required that same omnipotent love and might that made a cosmos by a divine word.

Jesus Christ’s crucifixion displays, more than any other event in history, the extraordinary character of the one true and living God, our Creator and our Sustainer, in whom we live and move and have our being, the Judge of the whole earth. The very essence of the Christian faith is found in Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 

However, many in the professing church and in its pulpits are baffled by the cross. When they consider that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was nailed to a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem about two thousand years ago, they regard this event with sheer sentimentalism. After decades of attending church, teaching Sunday School, and living exemplary moral lives, they are still ignorant about the very heart of Scripture’s claims concerning the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.

How different is that grievous reality from the magnificent conviction of the first disciples of Jesus Christ, those witnesses of His life, crucifixion, and resurrection. The apostles not only documented Jesus’s life, miracles, and appearances, but also His humiliation and death. They did not shrink from thoroughly and accurately documenting the Last Supper, the garden of Gethsemane, and the arrest, trials, whipping, crucifixion, and burial, of the Lord Jesus.

Nevertheless, these were not sentimental or discouraged disciples. They were dynamic men filled with a divine energy. “The people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits” (Dan. 11:32). It is the message of the cross that creates this strength of character and life. That message bifurcates the response of all who hear it: it is either total folly, like belief in the Loch Ness Monster, or it is the most relevant and life-transforming reality possible for men and women living on this planet. The apostle Paul stated that “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

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