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COULD JESUS HAVE SKIPPED CALVARY?
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TWO TRAGIC DEATHS
I guess with good reason it was one of the shorter
jury deliberations ever. Just a few hours were enough to decide that John
William King was guilty of first-degree murder, of dragging a Mr. James
Byrd, Jr. to his death. And not much more time was necessary to determine
that this foulest of crimes was certainly enough to warrant the death
penalty: execution by lethal injection. As uniformed men led the 24-year-old
racist killer away to death row, someone asked him if he had any words
for the family of the victim. "Yeah," he grunted. And he made
an ugly sexual reference too vile to even hint about here on the radio.
Well, friend, it's a story you already know, I'm sure. And the very heinousness
of it, the depths of depravity to which this tragedy takes the whole human
race, is an odd setting, I guess, for where we want to invite the Lord
to take us this week in our Bible study. Because here is our topic: COULD
JESUS HAVE SKIPPED CALVARY?
Now, what connection is there between the two? Well, we're talking here
about not just sin, but perhaps the outer limits of sin. Christians say
that Christ died to save sinners, and here's a test case to beat all test
cases. This man, James Byrd, was subjected to a horrible death, a painful,
agonizing, brutal form of execution put to death by his enemies. So
was Jesus. The enemies of Mr. Byrd had in their minds a kind of kingdom,
a world where their own brand of darkness would rule. That was true in
31 A.D. as well.
But this week, for 65 painfully brief minutes of radio airtime, I'd like
for you to join me in the most humble expedition human beings can undertake.
Because, friend, the science of the cross of Calvary is an impossible
mystery to sinful human beings. That's all there is to it! We can think
about it, we can study it, we can reflect upon it, we can debate it, we
can pray about it . . . but we cannot comprehend it. We cannot take it
fully in.
Even the Apostle Paul, who lived during that era, who was personal friends
with eyewitnesses to the whole saga, admits that the cross is "(quote)
foolishness." Non-believers for sure could not grasp its significance,
and really, neither could Christians.
Now, here's another challenge for us. Today this business of Calvary,
the science of the atonement, is more and more being swept to the sidelines.
It's being suggested IN THE CHURCH that the cross is not a crucial aspect
of the Christian faith, that the blood isn't necessary. Bible students
and theologians, as they consider what the cross actually symbolizes
and as we all come up short in our understanding often prefer to simply
think about the teachings of Christ. It is His spirit of love, they suggest,
and His keen insights that are the heart of the Christian faith today.
The fact that He was nailed to a cross in 31 A.D. is nothing more than
a Jasper-type tragedy, a sorry footnote in history. He spilled blood on
the ground of Palestine just as this helpless victim in the dragging death
spilled his blood on the Texas pavement. But that was just a random miscarriage
of justice, an unfortunate Jerusalem headline. Nothing more.
Obviously, Jan and I are here for the next five days, as this ministry
has been for 70 years, to defend the doctrine of the Cross. We want to
talk about theories, and about the character of God. And about what the
blood shed on that tree really DID for each of us . . . if anything. At
the same time, I want to make this point as clearly as I possibly can:
The THEORY of the cross is not nearly as important as the cross itself
is. Let me repeat that in another way. The theologies we discuss about
Calvary are not what save us; what saves us is Calvary itself.
We're going to look here and there in our study some Bible verses, observations
by good writers. Let me share, though, a carefully stated summation from
the book Mere Christianity, by C. S. Lewis. Here's what he writes:
"Neither this theory nor any other IS Christianity.
The central Christian belief is that Christ's death has somehow put us
right with God and given us a fresh start. Theories as to HOW it did this
are another matter. A good many different theories have been held as to
how it works; what ALL Christians are agreed on is that it DOES work."
That's a good point, except for the fact that we are
increasingly living in an age when even Christians if they continue
to cling politically to that label are NOT agreeing that the Cross is
still important, that it still has any work to do for the human race.
But let me illustrate Lewis' point with a story we've used before. I mentioned
once how in that terrible Mt. Everest tragedy of May, 1996, a Texan named
Dr. Beck Weathers just about died near the top, at Camp Four. Minutes
away from death, lying in a coma in the snow, somehow he revived and staggered,
blind, back into camp. His arm and face were frostbitten beyond saving;
and he was still up in the Death Zone, at 26,000+ feet. Fellow climbers
had to get him down almost immediately, but he was in no shape to climb.
Miraculously they managed to help him stagger, even with his injuries,
down to Camp Two, which was still up at 20,000 feet. Then another miracle,
when a Nepalese army officer, Lt. Col. Madan Khatri Chhetri, managed to
land a helicopter up there in the painfully thin air. There'd never been
an air rescue up that high before, but somehow he managed to set that
olive-drab B2 Squirrel chopper down on a huge Kool-aid-marked red X, and
whisk Beck Weathers to the safety of a Kathmandu hospital.
Here's the point. At that rendezvous moment, with the chopper's blades
trying desperately to bite on that non-existent Himalayan air and get
some lift, Beck Weathers might have been tempted to ask the pilot: "How's
this thing fly? Huh? What's that knob do? And that lever over there? Huh?
Huh?" He might have been very interested in the science of helicopter
flight. OR, at that moment, he might have simply been grateful to be rescued,
to have someone take him from the Death Zone to the safety of a distant
kingdom.
And friend, I admit that I don't know much about how the Cross saves me
from sin. Why should a perfect Man's death count for ME? In our criminal
justice system, we wouldn't think of having guilty people go free by punishing
innocent ones instead. Punishment is not transferable in our world; why
is it in God's? And how can the death of just one Man, even someone wonderful
like Jesus Christ, give some kind of spiritual credit to six BILLION rotten
human beings, some of them as degraded as this John William King and his
two Aryan Brotherhood co-conspirators? And why does a loving God DEMAND
vengeance anyway? Why does He insist on SEEING some blood flow?
I say again, we'll prayerfully think about some of these issues as we
go along. But you and I, sinners as we know ourselves to be, are much
like that Everest climber, desperate for rescue. It might be good to know
something about science and helicopters; theologically we might be blessed
by dissecting the mystery of the cross. But more important is to be rescued.
In his book, Watching the War, David Smith falls down in humility at the
foot of these great issues and concludes:
"It may well be that our best response to
the unfathomable business accomplished at Golgotha is simply Thank you.'"
One of the very interesting books that was invaluable
in researching this week's study is entitled My Gripe With God, by the
great Christian theologian Dr. George Knight, a professor of church history
at Andrews University in Michigan. We'll borrow gratefully and repeatedly
as we go along, but he makes an important point, after painstaking researching
in God's Word. Notice:
"The very intricacy of sin," he writes,
"and the very complexity of God's love as expressed in the plan of
salvation are beyond the reach of the human intellect. It is significant
that God never even tried to make a full explanation in Scripture. His
answer was one of demonstration and revelation rather than complete explanation."
And really, that's true. Jesus said many times, "I
will die for the world." "I am the Lamb sent from God."
"I will pay the price for the world's sins." But He doesn't
ever launch into a THEOLOGY of how this works. Neither do the great gospel
writers like Peter and John. Or Paul, who writes eloquently about other
aspects of the faith. But not the cross or at least, the HOW of the
cross. No wonder E. G. White, one of the early pioneers in my own Adventist
denomination writes with bowed head:
"It will take the whole of eternity for
man to understand the plan of redemption."
I believe that to be a true statement. And here we
don't have the whole of eternity; we have five 13-minute radio slots.
Which is just enough to tell you the news that all by itself IS enough:
"For God so loved the world, that He GAVE
His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish,
but have everlasting life."
That's what God says. And I guess that's enough.
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