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                                                Chapter Three: The Cross


Passover is about the blood of the lamb, and the blood of the lamb is about the cross. It was the instrument that crucified Jesus and it is, in our lives, the instrument that crucifies us to the world and to self. To understand the Way, the Christian path, we need to understand the cross and willingly embrace it, carrying it wherever we go from this day on. This may sound like an awful prescription, but if it is the only one that heals us then isn’t it something to be desired with all of our hearts?

The Spiritual Consultation

Imagine you are not feeling quite right and you are able to book a consultation with the world’s greatest physician. He has healed everyone who has submitted to his care. When you finally get a chance to see him he does not ask you, “What ails you?” because he already knows. Instead he asks, “Do you seek healing? Do you want to get well?”

Your answer is immediate, “Of course I want to get well.” And you think to yourself, “This guy’s supposed to be the best. What kind of silly question is that?”

The physician continues, “You may think this question is silly, because you have no idea how desperate your condition is. You are very sick, and your path to wholeness will be difficult. You will experience pain and suffering. Do you wish to change your answer?”

Now you are a little concerned about answering too quickly, so you pause for a moment and then ask: “How much pain and suffering?”

He looks at you tenderly, but does not sugar coat his answer. He wants your expectations to be realistic. “It will always be bearable, though at times it will seem beyond your capacity to endure. It will not be continuous. There will be long stretches of time when you will begin to experience the joy of health. But after I allow your strength to build back up, I will need to start the next round of therapy, for you are very sick.”

This is not want you wanted to hear, but he continues: “Of course, you can forgo this therapy, but you will not forgo suffering. Suffering will be with you throughout this life whether you strive to get well or not. However, if you suffer apart from this therapy it will only make matters worse. Your heart that is so hard will grow harder still. Your diseased condition will worsen until the day you die at which time all hope for healing ends. But if you embrace this therapy, the suffering will soften your heart, and though you may never be completely whole you will one day look back and marvel at how you have become a new person, a better person.

“Whatever course you choose there will be suffering, only remember: suffering is never an end; it merely leads to two distinct ends and only one of these destinations is desirable.”

Paul had this in mind when he wrote the comforting verse: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”[i] The moments of exhilaration and abject depression, the laughter and tears, all of it benefits the believer in Jesus. So we need to remember this as we study this difficult phase of being disciplined in this rehabilitation clinic known as the wilderness. And we also need to remember that this is just the first stage. The next two stages are quite different.

In this Passover phase of our journey we are confronted by the cross. It is more than just a symbol. It is a powerful, living tool that is used in our reconstructive surgery. To borrow from W. B. Yeats, it has “a terrible beauty.”[ii] It is terrible because it was Rome’s cruelest instrument of torture. It is beautiful because it illustrates the immeasurably deep love God has for His children, and the extraordinary suffering He was willing to endure to liberate those He adopted.

What a strange faith. At its center is an instrument of torture. Yet this reveals how one of the goals of Christianity is to make the horrifically ugly, beautiful. It did this with the cross and it does this with us. One day we will be able to know the full extent of our disfigurement by sin. But hideous though we may have been in our rebellious unbelief, we are made beautiful children of God by His gracious love.

The Way requires that we be subjected to the cross and not just in this first stage. It is an instrument of healing that God will use on us throughout our journey, and for this reason Jesus told us, “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. …And anyone who does not carry his cross and follow me cannot be my disciple.”[iii] Wherever we go on the Way, day in and day out, we must carry the cross. Our misshapen souls require it.

The Theology of the Cross

Martin Luther’s theological insights were extraordinary, and nowhere more so than in his vision of the cross. Paul Althus, in The Theology of Martin Luther, wrote: “…the theology of the cross views man as one who has been called to suffer. Man’s cross ‘destroys man’s self-confidence’ so that now, instead of wanting to do something himself, he allows God to do everything in him. Such a man has been led from moralistic activism to pure receptivity.”[iv]

The sin of self-exaltation, of attempting to play the self-sufficient role of God-of-one’s-life, breeds a self-confidence that isolates us from God. “Who needs Him! I am the master of my fate,” say the ones whose confidence lies in themselves and not God. The cross of Christ targets this sinful attitude and destroys it. The carefully erected walls of the self’s fortress are no match for the cross. He knows where we are weak and it is on this raw, disabling point that the divine finger presses.

There is one thing certain about this stage of our journey. We will always feel we are spending too much time in the wilderness while we are in it. However, the time we spend under the cross depends on the severity of our condition. Its work is never gratuitous, it is always measured, purposeful, and rich in blessing.

The cross is not theoretical; it is existential. We live with it, feel its burden chafe our shoulders and struggle to carry it. “The theologian of the cross does not confront the cross of Christ as a spectator, but is himself drawn into this event. He knows that God can only be found in the cross and suffering.”[v] Why must this be so? It is because God revealed Himself to humanity through the cross, and upon this sacred ground the importance of suffering is established.

The work of the cross can be intimidating. We can see its work in our lives and pray to God, “Please take this cup away from me.” But God will not answer this prayer, until the work of the cross is finished. He seeks to heal us and take us to that unnatural place wherein we willing accept the cup we must drink and say the words, nonetheless, not as I will but as You will.”

This expression of faith is not natural to our souls. Our tendency is to take control of a situation and demonstrate our mastery, but God leads us into a wilderness where our mastery doesn’t work. We suffer and all of our machinations and scheming do not resolve the situation we are in.

Wrestling With God

The story of Jacob is important because most of us—at least those who are honest—are much more like him than we are like Daniel, who was a near-perfect saint. Jacob’s faith was in his abilities and all of his life he was fighting to get to the top of the heap. First, he won Esau’s birthright by trickery, fooling his father Isaac into believing he was Esau so that he could receive the blessing reserved for the first-born. Then he struggled with his father-in-law Laban. As Jacob put it so pithily:

This was my situation: The heat consumed me in the daytime and the cold at night, and sleep fled from my eyes. It was like this for the twenty years I was in your household. I worked for you fourteen years for your two daughters and six years for your flocks, and you changed my wages ten times. If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been with me, you would surely have sent me away empty-handed.[vi]

Some in-laws are real horror stories and such was the case with Laban. Jacob won that contest of wills and wits and escaped from his virtual enslavement, but it was only to meet a more daunting threat: his brother Esau, whom he had cheated. As he fled from Laban Jacob had to travel through the lands where Esau dwelt. True to his self-sufficient character, Jacob worked out another plan to take care of this conflict.

Jacob imagined his encounter with Esau would likely result in his severe punishment or death so he planned the following to secure his brother’s favor. He would send servants ahead of his arrival and they were to give Esau much of his wealth—his flocks of livestock—and the message, “They belong to your servant Jacob. They are a gift sent to my Lord Esau, and he is coming behind us.”[vii]

No matter what his measure of faith in God was it paled beside his confidence in his own plans. But God had another plan for Jacob, one leading to healing and it is similar to His plan for us.

The night before his meeting with Esau, Jacob sent his family and possessions ahead so that he was alone. The story then takes a sharp turn. All of the sudden he is wrestling with a man until daybreak and it turns out this man is God. Obviously God, the maker of heaven and earth, could win any wrestling match, but that was not His purpose. For this reason the text claimed He could not overcome Jacob. Their wrestling match was a draw. However, God can do whatever He intends and He intended to cripple Jacob, to disable to some degree his self-reliance. So God touched Jacob’s hip socket so that his hip was wrenched and he afterwards limped.

Like Jacob, we also need to be weakened in order to express God’s strength. Ironically, this wounding is all a part of the painful healing process we must endure if we are to be entrusted with the spiritual power to serve God mightily in this life. It does not mean we will experience physical disabilities—we may, but the point of the story is not to make this an essential part of the process. It does mean we will need our self-confidence shaken and replaced by a confidence in God.

What’s In a Name?

Just as the cross was followed by the glorious resurrection, our development involves emerging from the wilderness to be blessed. The channel through which our blessing comes is our refusal to abandon God, our seemingly tenuous, prayerful contact with the Most High. And so we see Jacob refusing to let go of God even when asked by God to do so. His wrestling with God now resembles the prayers of the saints—persistent and bold. Jacob laid down his terms, “You bless me, then I’ll let you go.” But God is the one who dictates terms. He said, tell me your name. This is akin to demanding of Jacob that he admit defeat, or say, “Uncle!” Jacob surrendered his name.[viii]

Jacob, a fighter to the end, asks God His name and God refuses to reveal it. He would reveal it to others, Moses and Jesus for example, but not to Jacob because His mission in Jacob’s life, and their relationship, was to be different. Not only did He refuse to reveal His name He wanted to make sure Jacob understood who he was now going to report to, and communicated this by renaming him “Israel.”

Just as offering up one’s name has spiritual significance in Scripture, so also does renaming someone or something. Adam, for example, who was given rule over all of the animal kingdom, was given the opportunity by God to name all of the animals. He ruled over them, he named them. To name someone, as a parent names a child, is to indicate a relationship of authority. Therefore, when Jesus was born His heavenly Father named Him through the message of the angel Gabriel to Joseph. Joseph had no role in selecting His name.

God changed Jacob’s name to Israel, meaning, “he struggles with God,” and declared that he had struggled with God and man and had overcome. What?!? He limps away from a wrestling match after saying “Uncle!” and this is overcoming? Yes, because he refused to let go of God. Part of his victory was being renamed by God, or being formally adopted into heaven’s household. In effect, he had won his battle through God’s strength. On the Way of the Cross life’s victories exalt God and not self.

The Cross and Works

Jacob’s life illustrates how we tend to act as our own savior, our own God, until we come to a saving faith. After being saved, the disabling and weakening process begins so that we will become more and more yielded to God. And for some, like Jacob/Israel, there is a need to experience the cross many times. For though we are saved by faith it is difficult to live by it, and the cross works to enable us to do so. According to the theology of the cross: “faith is denial of ourselves, total rejection of self and reliance on God’s grace.”[ix] There is little difference between the act of faith and the activity of the cross.

The dark vision of Ecclesiastes, Solomon’s great meditation on work, is where the cross will take us. In this book the author concluded that all of his great work under the sun was blighted and useless. It was “Vanity of vanities,” or “Emptiness of emptiness.” This was not to say that all work was bad, for in Ecclesiastes there was also work under the heavens. It was work under the sun that was fruitless, while the work under the heavens, the work of a life lived by faith, was blessed. Or, as Luther’s theology of the cross tells us:

“He, however, who has emptied himself through suffering no longer does works, but knows that God works and does all things in him. For this reason, whether God does works or not, it is all the same to him. He neither boasts if he does good works, nor is he disturbed if God does not do good works through him. He knows that it is sufficient if he suffers and is brought low by the cross in order to be annihilated all the more.”[x]

This ominous vision is one of a man who was thoroughly acquainted with the cross. Luther lived under the threat of death. He was an arch-heretic in the eyes of the Catholic Church. He was excommunicated, and the Diet of Worms absolved of guilt anyone who murdered him. However, I do not believe he expressed these thoughts while he was consigned to the harsh discipline of the wilderness. For when we are in the depths of this lonely, remote, pitiless desert we can sometimes barely lift up our head to pray. You don’t glory in the cross and its work when you are under the knife and being operated upon. During those times you wonder, “Why have you forsaken me, God? Why have you turned your face from me? How much longer do you think I can stand this?”

As those who have experienced it know, the wilderness can be brutal in the way it breaks us down. We cling to one slender thread and place our hope in it, and then the thread breaks. We believe this new turn of events will finally change our condition, and it leads to things worsening. When we are emptied of spirit, thoroughly, abjectly humbled, we are near the place where God can begin to shower us with blessings.

Our Work Is Cursed

When Adam sinned the sentence he received was to work hard and produce nothing of value. His work was cursed and so is ours. For example, no matter how hard we try, we cannot work our way into the kingdom of God. Nor will all of our exertions produce anything resembling spiritual fruit like love, faith and hope. To produce spiritual fruit requires abiding in Jesus. Thus, so long as we are descendants of Adam our work is fruitless; but as soon as we can trace our descent from the second Adam, Jesus, our work has the potential to be blessed.

However, even though our work apart from Christ is cursed, we tend to trust and rely on it for more strongly than we trust or rely on God. This faith in our own work is alive and well long after we are saved. For this reason, one of the areas the cross targets is work. We experience the cross in this way when we are struggling in the wilderness and our ability to make things happen fails us. Our toil becomes fruitless. Open doors slam shut and can’t even be cracked open. These are the times when God does not choose to work through us, because He needs to work in us and disable our self-centering faith in ourselves.

My personal experience reveals that oftentimes when I am working my hardest to make something happen, it never happens. Then, when I rest and put it in God’s hands, the very thing I was struggling to accomplish falls into place in a day. Months of labor produced nothing and a day of rest produced it all. Yet, my work-orientation is such that I forget this important lesson and once again struggle to make something happen.

Through the cross God seeks to redefine the value of work for us. It is not what we do, but what He does in and through us. We are not to shirk our duty of serving others, or working to pay for our food, clothing, and so on. But we need to realize that the wilderness-phase of our being made Christ-like will sometimes park us near the Kerith brook, as it did to the great prophet, Elijah, and have us do little to nothing while He operates on our heart and prepares us for our next assignment.

The Cross and the World

When Luther writes about our being “annihilated all the more,” we should understand that he is speaking of the way that God is refining us, removing all of the parts of our nature that do not resemble Jesus. Luther may seem to be overstating things, but compare his statement to the most frequently repeated teaching of Jesus that appears in all four gospels: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.”[xi] Is this position not even more extreme than Luther’s? Jesus does not want us to lose a part of our life, He wants us to lose all of it that we might be healed by the ministry of the cross.

Jesus wants this extreme solution because our healing requires it. The phrases “born again” and “new creation” all point to the end of one life and the beginning of another. But what does this “losing one’s life for Jesus’ sake” mean? At the heart of this “new creation” or “new birth” is a new heart. The cross has the power to change the affections of our heart, or crucify the world to us. If we are to be freed from slavery this step is vital. For if the world’s values remain our own, then we are not free.

Think about the world’s values. Are they not consumed with self? Does the world promote God? And as for Jesus, His name is like a dirty word that is best left unspoken. But the world is seductive. I cannot separate myself from it by a mere act of will; I need to be driven from it because it repulses my new nature. My heart needs to desire something better or else, in a moment of weakness, I will return to the world and all it offers. In short, I need the ministry of the cross: “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.”[xii]

C. S. Lewis: Bewildered in the Wilderness

His ways are not our ways; therefore, it should not be surprising that the path to blessedness will take us over new and unexpected terrain. It can make us feel like we have wandered off of the path even when our feet are firmly planted on it. Consider the life of the beloved Christian author, C. S. Lewis. After penning such classics as Mere Christianity, and The Chronicles of Narnia, he suffered the grievous loss of his wife, Joy, and then wrote the following shocking words:

Eventually I must face the question in plain language. What reason have we, except our own desperate wishes, to believe that God is, by any standard we can conceive, “good?” Doesn’t all the prima facie evidence suggest exactly the opposite? What have we to set against it?

We set Christ against it, but how if He were mistaken? Almost His last words may have a perfectly clear meaning. He had found that the Being He called Father was horribly and infinitely different from what He had supposed. The trap, so long and carefully prepared and so subtly baited, was at last sprung, on the cross. The vile practical joke had succeeded.[xiii]

Lewis’s equating the crucifixion to a carefully prepared trap and a “vile practical joke” is stunning enough, but his anguish still required additional venting. He continued:

What chokes every prayer and hope is the memory of all the prayers H. [i.e., his wife, Joy Lewis] and I offered and all the false hopes we had. Not hopes raised merely by our own wishful thinking; hopes encouraged, even forced upon us, by false diagnoses, by x-ray photographs, by strange remissions, by one temporary recovery that might have ranked as a miracle. Step by step we were ‘led up the garden path.’ Time after time, when He seemed most gracious He was really preparing for the next torture.[xiv]

How could an admired Christian author write something like this? Elsewhere he wonders if God is a “Cosmic Sadist,” an “Eternal Vivisector.”[xv] How could God move from being a beneficent Father to One whose graciousness was part of a sadistic façade hiding His true, torturous intent?

We should not judge Lewis harshly, because he was simply being human. Those who have experienced excruciating pain know how the shrieks it causes us to emit are often involuntary, because the pain has a way of edging out all other thoughts, making us lose our senses and self-control. With that sincere allowance, we must still note that he was not a novice to the faith. He was sixty-one years old at the time of Joy’s death and would die a short three years later. Also, this shriek was subjected to the process of writing and rewriting. The first draft may have been an involuntary shriek, but could the final draft qualify as such? What happened to Lewis?

We will revisit the case of Lewis, but for now we need simply note that he was not abandoned by God, nor did he abandon the Most High. As he was shaking an angry fist at God he was walking the Way. This was part of the sanctification plan. God was blessing Lewis in ways he could not understand at the time.

Soul Surgery

The Bible has another word to describe how we will go under the knife and it is “pruning.” “Pruning” is a word understood by gardeners. It refers to cutting away that which interferes with growth, things like dead branches. A gardener prunes a plant to make it more fruitful and one of our primary purposes on this earth is to bear spiritual fruit to the glory of God.

Jesus told His apostles that He chose them and appointed them to go and bear fruit that would last, and He also told them that every branch that bore fruit would be pruned so that it would be even more fruitful. Not even the apostles of Jesus were exempt from pruning. It is a part of the process that reverses the effects of the fall, and no one is exempt. This takes us to the next step in the first stage of our journey. It is a vital step if we are to live rich and fulfilling lives.  

Chapter Three: The Cross

[i] Ro 8:28

[ii] In his magnificent poem, Easter 1916, recounting an event that started the Irish uprising against British rule, Yeats employed an incantory refrain, “A terrible beauty is born.”

[iii] Lk 9:23, 14:27

[iv] Paul Althus, The Theology of Martin Luther,trans. Robert C. Schultz (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), p. 27-28.

[v] Walter von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross tr. Herbert J. A. Bouman (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976), p. 113

[vi] Gen 31:40-42.

[vii] Gen 32:18.

[viii] I learned of the significance of demanding an opponents name, and how surrendering it was akin to saying, “Uncle!” through R.C. Sproul’s magnificent work, The Holiness of God. See Tyndale Publishing House’s revised and expanded second edition, p. 138.

[ix] Loewenich, p. 129.

[x] Paul Althus, The Theology of Martin Luther, p. 28

[xi] Lk 9:23; see also Mt 10:39, 16:25, Mk 8:35, Lk 17:33, Jn 12:25

[xii] Gal 6:14.

[xiii] Clive Staples Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperOne, 1989), p.42.

[xiv] Clive Staples Lewis, pp. 42-43.

[xv] The idea of God possibly being a Cosmic Sadist or Eternal Vivisector is explored toward the end of A Grief Observed.