Discoveries at the Cross

OK, if we could find our way to our seats. Well, it's definitely a blessing to see, all of you here today. Hopefully we'll see some of you in the first service next week. real quick, my mother is here today.

Mom, could you stand? Let's welcome her. OK. Her name is, Janie Vincent, and, some of you have, have met her.

If you haven't, please, she'll be here next Sunday as well, but I'd love for her to meet you and for you to meet her. And see the one responsible for this. so, any complaints that you have, she would be the one to, To bring those to. Anyway, for our time of study in, in the word this morning, we, we've been focusing on the cross, throughout our service up to this point, and I want to continue our focus, on the cross.

during the, the, the message with the time that I have, your attention, and if you want to give a title to the message this morning, it would be Discoveries at the Cross. Discoveries, at the, cross. one of the things that we need to realize as believers is that God wants more from us than just a quick passing glance at the cross on the day of conversion. And then we move on from there and hardly ever look at it again.

God wants us as believers to daily be at the foot of the cross, to gaze at Christ crucified, to investigate the cross, and what we would find is that at the foot of the cross there is an infinite supply of treasure and insight and blessing. for us to explore and experience and benefit from, and it never ends. It never ends, and hence we should never stop gazing at the cross. How many of you have read the book Pilgrim's Progress?

OK, a lot of you have, in the narrative, you guys know how, pilgrim or Christian has this burden on his back, and that represents the sin burden that's growing ever larger and more burdensome. And he's looking for a way to get that send burden off of his back, and Evangelist points him to a certain location and says, go here and it'll take the burden off your back. He gets off the beaten path a time or two, but ultimately he makes his way to a hill and begins to climb this hill with the burden growing bigger as he climbs.

But then the cross comes within full view, and upon the glance, just looking at the cross, instantly that sin burden unfastens from his back, falls off of his back, rolls down a hill, and into the grave.

Amen. And you would think in the narrative that at that point, Christian would say, wow, this feels great. I don't have this burden on my back. Now I can continue with my journey.

But that's not what happens. Even after he's saved, after his sins have been removed, look at what John Bunyan describes as happening. Then he, Christian, stood a while to look and wonder. For he was very surprised that the sight of the cross should ease him of his burden in such a way.

He looked, therefore, and looked again. Even until the spring in his head sent their waters flowing down his cheeks. I think John Bunyan is trying to teach us something, and that is that once we've looked at the cross and have been saved by the cross, we need to look and look again and wonder in amazement at the cross, and that's exactly what Christian does in this narrative, and he stares at the cross until he begins to weep. The cross has that power even for those of us who have been saved.

That is why Charles Spurgeon of the last century says we cannot think of that death too often. We cannot look too much at the cross of Christ. We cannot think too much of Christ crucified. We can never be too atonement centered, as some Christians or professing Christians would accuse us of being.

There is too much blessing, too many riches that lie around the foot of the cross for us to ever think that we're not spending our time well to be lingering there. In fact, the cross is not just something to take a shallow glance at, but to open up and investigate, and we find incredible blessings inside there, and it's well worth the effort. In fact, I was reading a number of years ago, I love these stories. A guy named Donald Shear back in '91 was at a flea market.

in Pennsylvania, and he saw, for sale a painting, and, he walked over to it and, and looked at it and there was nothing impressive about the painting. It was just this old country scene and the canvas was even a little bit torn, so that's not what attracted him, but he, he was fascinated by the frame. It looked very old and very nice, and he thought, I'll, I'll buy this and I'll take it home and And I'll remove the canvas from the middle and I'll use the frame for something else.

So he takes it to the counter and he buys this, this painting for $4.

All right, remember that. How, how much did he buy the painting for? $4. All right, he brings it home.

And sets it on a table and begins to break it open and try to remove the frame from the painting. As he did so, the frame broke in his hands. It was so fragile. so he's like, Man, this isn't going to, I've wasted my $4 and I'm not going to be able to do anything with this.

But nonetheless, he began to continue to look at the painting and the canvas and the wood backing and, and for some reason he just started to try to separate the canvas from the wood backing, and as he did so, he found a folded piece of paper in there. It was a rather old looking piece of paper and he takes it and pulls it out and opens it up and, and it is a copy of the Declaration of Independence. True story, check it out on snopes.com. I checked it out before I came and told you guys this, but, Anyway, he had a friend of his that was an expert on American history, and his friend said, dude, you better get this checked out.

This may be for real. And so he has some other people research it and they find out that it was one of the original prints, the original printing of the Declaration. Of independence. So once he discovers that, he about a couple of years later puts it up for sale at an auction, and it sells for $2.4 million.

How much did he buy it for? 4, sold it for $2.4 million. The guy who bought it for $2.4 million kept it for a few years, and in 2001, he sold it for over $8 million. Turns out that that $4 painting that I'm sure many people had walked by and saw no value in this guy ended up upon closer inspection reaping a huge windfall of blessing.

what, that's the way the cross is. The world looks at it and says, OK, someone died 2000 years ago. Jesus died, and they don't get it. They don't get what the big deal is.

They don't stop and really ponder what's really behind all of this and, and to see the treasures of wisdom and insight that lie underneath the surface for those that are willing to daily gaze, contemplate, study. And investigate the cross. That's what we're going to do this morning, and we can make a long list, but just with the time that we have today, we're going to gaze at the cross, and we're going to, I believe, uncover 6 valuable discoveries, 6 valuable insights that we can legitimately infer by just gazing at the cross.

In fact, I'm coming to realize that the cross serves as a one stop tour of everything really important that you need to.

If all you ever did was went to the foot of the cross and studied the cross, it's, it's amazing the list of theological truths and insight that you can gain just from that one event. We're just going to pull 6 from, this event. 6 valuable insights. The first one will probably surprise you, and you may go, there's no way we could get that from just the cross without help from other sources, but actually, I will show you this.

Anyone with an open heart that gazes intently, At the crucified Christ on the cross, observing what happened to Him, what happened while he was on the cross, and the way he died, an honest observer would conclude, this is the Son of God. So the first valuable discovery as we gaze at the cross is that Jesus is indeed the Son of God. In fact, if the Roman centurion who was there at the crucifixion were here today, he would tell you, I didn't know anything about Jesus, never knew him, talked to him, heard anything about him, but I was there at the crucifixion.

I had a front row seat and just based on what I observed, I came to the conclusion that he was the Son of God.

The centurion would have observed the earthquake and the darkness that fell over the face of the earth for a space of 3 hours. He would have observed the mocking and the ridicule that was hurled at Jesus. He would have heard Jesus as he said, Father, forgive them. They don't know what they're doing.

He would have seen the grace coming from Jesus towards those. who were crucifying him. He would have heard Jesus say that he was thirsty. He would have heard Jesus say, it is finished.

He would have heard Jesus say, Father, into your hands I commit my Spirit. He would have also heard Jesus before his death, say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The centurion would have observed the earthquake that took place and so forth, and look what it says in Mark 15:39 when the centurion who was standing right in front of him, no one got a better seat than he did, front row seat, the crucifixion. He saw the way he breathed his last.

He, the centurion, said, truly this man was the Son of God. And so just an honest look at the cross, we would conclude something about the one who's hanging there, and that he, he is the perfect and spotless Son of God. Which then raises the question, what's he doing there? If he is perfect and spotless, the Son of God Himself, what is he doing on that cross?

Well, as we continue to gaze, we begin to get some answers. There's a second valuable life changing insight that we Can glean as we gaze at the cross, and that is that God's wrath against sin and sinners is real. There's no way to honestly look at this historical event of the crucifixion of Christ, and not come to the conclusion that there is a God in heaven. And this God has wrath.

And this wrath is an awful wrath. It is obviously from what I see, a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God. Look what it says in Romans 5:9. Much more than Paul says.

Having now been justified through His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. So something's happening as Jesus is being crucified, where God's wrath is intersecting. With the very life of Jesus upon that cross, We hear Jesus say, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? And we conclude that this isn't just something going on between Jesus and human beings that are crucifying Him.

There's something going on between Jesus and God the Father. As Martin Luther said, God is striving with God. Something very mysterious is going on where he is being rejected by the Father. In Isaiah 53, Isaiah tells us that when Jesus was on the cross, He was smitten of God.

God smote His Son with His wrath. And as we observe the cross, Christ's crucifixion, we see His agony on the cross, especially being abandoned by God. We come to understand that God's wrath is real and it's awful and it's something that we would never ourselves ever want to experience. the wrath of God should be an important doctrine for all of us.

We don't like to talk about it and the world doesn't like to hear it. So many Christians just file the wrath of God away, and it's something we talk about as believers with each other, but, but a lot of times people can be intimidated from talking about it, but not the apostle Paul. In fact, one of the things you'll notice in the book of Romans is that As Paul is laying out the gospel and the most extensive portrayal of the gospel that we find in the New Testament, Paul begins in chapter 1, verse 16, saying, I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

It's the power of God and the salvation.

Everyone who believes the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, as it is written, the just shall live by faith, and then the very next words out of his mouth, at the very beginning of his gospel presentation, Paul says these words, the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. And what we would say, well, we knew that from just looking at the cross. God's wrath is real, and it's a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

The wrath of God should be a doctrine that, that should be, one of the more central doctrines of our faith, not something we store away in the attic of our theology or some closet somewhere, but it's something that should be central.

In fact, one Japanese theologian who was writing in 1945 in his, in his work called The Pain of God, He says this, we may say that the recognition of God's wrath is the beginning of wisdom. In his mind, and understanding that there is a God and this God has a wrath that is to be feared. That is the beginning of wisdom. That fits with what Solomon says in Proverbs 9:10.

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And often we strip that down and say, yeah, the fear of the Lord, we need to respect God, we need to have a sense of awe of God, and certainly we do. But part of the fear of the Lord that all of us should have is an understanding that that God also has wrath. And it is a terrifying wrath.

And it's something we would never want to experience. And Solomon says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And as we gaze at the cross and witness what Christ is experiencing on that cross, we come to understand that there is such a thing as the wrath of God, and it is awful. It is God's wrath against sin, and against sinners.

And it's real. There's a third insight that we gain as we, Gaze at the cross. And observe Christ dying in our place. It's an insight that I would invite you to see.

And that is that we must have been helpless to save ourselves. Guys, there's no way to look honestly at the cross and see Christ's infinite donation of Himself towards our salvation. To see him dying there, there's no way that we can honestly look at that and walk away with any other conclusion than I must have been totally helpless. To deliver myself from God's wrath.

Because the truth is, if there was any way we could have saved ourselves from the wrath of God, God would have never had his son endure what he endured. Do you understand that? What the cross means is that there was no other way that we were totally helpless to save ourselves. Paul affirms this outright.

In Romans 5:6, when he says, while we were still helpless at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly, and the cross speaks to us of our utter helplessness. I just, to all of you that are here today, I just, I invite you to embrace God's assessment of you. And that is that you and I are completely helpless to save ourselves. And that word helpless means helpless.

I looked it up. It means helpless. and, and, and let me illustrate in a couple of ways. I imagine that I'm trying to climb this 10 ft wall.

And with my athletic abilities, I get, maybe 70% of the way to the top, and I can reach the top, but I just can't quite get over and you come walking by and I can say to you, maybe, man, I, I need some help in getting over this wall because I do need help. But the truth is, even though I need your help, I'm not helpless. You understand that? I could get about 70% of the way up and towards being over that wall.

I just need you to help get me the rest of the way. That's not what this Greek term means. However, if you're walking by that wall, and you see me sitting in a wheelchair, Chair and I'm paralyzed from the neck down and I can't move a muscle from the neck down and I say to you, can you help me to get over that wall? That's what the word helpless means.

You would have to do everything. I couldn't even make one twitch of a contribution towards getting myself over that wall. And when we look at the cross and see what Christ endured, certainly if there were any other way, if there were something we could have done, God would not have had his son endure that. This past semester, my son Benjamin and I, for his schooling, we read through the book Where the Red Fern Grows.

How many of you have read that? OK. I read that when I was younger, I think I was in high school, and I was no sissy, but I sobbed, when I got to the end of that book. And, I, I had to create an alternative ending in my head just to be able to get through the day., but nonetheless, we were reading that book this semester and there's a point in the narrative where Billy, the main character, realizes he wants to buy those pups and, he says in, in the narrative, he says, I remembered what my, I think he said my parents used to, they used to always quote from the good book and tell me that God helps those who help themselves.

Amen. I, when I read that, it's like, I can't believe that that's not in the Bible anywhere. And yet a lot of people do think it's in the Bible. That's not a biblical notion.

The biblical notion is in Romans 5:6, while we were helpless, God sent Christ to die on the cross for us. And so, so, as we gaze at the cross, it speaks to us of our utter helplessness. Can I give you one other analogy? Rick Holland, the past, the college pastor at Grace Community Church.

I was listening to a message by him a few weeks ago, and he tried this analogy, helplessness, he, he used the analogy of trying to get an FM signal on an AM transistor. So, go with him there. I'm just going to, I, I typed out what he said here. I love this.

He says it's like we're trying to pick up an FM signal with an AM transistor. And the transistor radio has no batteries, and it has a broken antenna. And every wire's been cut, and the knobs have been pulled off, and there's no on and off switch, and we have no hands or arms to reach for it, and the radio is on the moon and we're dead. That's what it means to be helpless.

And what? Nobody gets saved by Jesus, who does not embrace this humbling message that the cross speaks to him. You are utterly helpless to save yourself. And only those who say, I get it.

I get it. And if I am to be delivered from God's wrath, it's got to be all Jesus, or nothing, all Him and none of me. Only those can be saved by Jesus. That's why, sometimes you hear the gospel and it's like, what is there not to love about this?

Why doesn't everybody accept it? It's because of this right here. They don't like the concept of the wrath of God, but also they don't like anyone telling them they're helpless with this helplessness. But even as believers, we do well to study the cross and let it speak to us of our helplessness because, It forever cures us of ever from day to day falling back into a works mentality of daring to think we can contribute something of our works.

To Christ, infinite donation of Himself to our salvation. There's 1/4 valuable discovery that we make as we gaze upon the cross and study it carefully, and that is that sin is much worse than we imagined. Sin is much worse than we imagine. that song we sing sometimes, stricken, smitten and afflicted.

It goes like this, ye who think of sin but lightly, nor suppose the evil great, here, in other words, at the cross, may view its nature rightly. Here, it's guilt, you may estimate. Mark the sacrifice appointed. See who bears the awful load.

Tis the word, the Lord's anointed Son of man and Son of God. You want to know what the true assessment of sin is, come to the cross and you will learn something about sin. You see, we have much to learn about sin because all of us, we, we, we tend to minimize our sins, do we not? we rationalize our sins.

We excuse our, sins. We relabel our sins, and we, we think of our sins as a failing, maybe an innocent, noble effort that fell a little bit short. And so it's a failure of some sort. It's a mistake when we explode in anger and sin against God and those created in His image by the way we speak in an explosion of anger, and then after the fact we try to make it right.

We say, I'm sorry, I got a little passionate. And so we, we're really good, are we not, at minimizing our sin? But what? God can't save people who minimize their sin.

He just can't. And if you really want a true estimate of the gravity of your sin, you come to the cross. And as you come to the cross and you observe Jesus dying, you start asking why did he die? Why is this perfect Son of God hanging on this tree?

And you hear from God's word that he is dying for your sins. In fact, in Isaiah 53:5, this is a, I'm translating this literally from the Hebrew text, and the preposition that you see in yellow is very significant. It could be translated this way. He, Jesus, was pierced from our transgressions.

He was crushed from our iniquities. In other words, he was crushed from the weight of our iniquities. There's different ways of looking at the cross and who killed Jesus. You could say, well, the Jewish leadership was responsible, and indeed they were.

You could say, well, the Roman soldiers were responsible, and indeed they were. You could say God was the one who smote his son, and indeed he was. That's a biblical concept. You could also say from another standpoint that all of us killed Jesus.

In fact, we sang about that. We all made that confession earlier in our service. But there's also a reference point by which we can say our sins killed Jesus. And hence, we killed him.

what that means? You take all of the sins you've ever committed and based on Isaiah 53:5, All of those sins make you a violator of the sixth commandment. Thou shalt not kill. You killed Jesus.

By your sins. And you look at the cross again, and it's like, I'm the reason. My, my sins? Did this.

The sins in my mind, the, the private sins I have committed, the words I have spoken, I, I contributed to the killing of the Son of God. And suddenly now we, we turn from the cross and look back at our sin and we see our sin differently. We see that there's something more sinister than just some noble falling short, that there's actually something murderous at the heart of our sin. In fact, one writer says this.

He says, God sent His Son into the world to speak the truth and be the truth, to be the living embodiment of God on this earth. To have seen Jesus when he was on this earth was to see the Father. And what did we do to God when He came? We killed him.

In this act, sin overplayed its hand and showed itself for what it really is. We overplayed our hand. And exposed ourselves for what we really are. We are murderers, murderers of God.

We often call the cross the central act of human history, and rightly so. But if that is true, then what that means is that in this, the central act of human history with all the eyes of the universe watching, we killed God. Now this is such a harsh view of sin that we would have never embraced it. We would have never believed it were it not for the cross.

Listen to what Paul says in Romans 8:7. By the way, how like in First John 3:15, it says, everyone who hates his brother is a murderer. where it says that? So God who judges the heart, says if you hate your brother, you're guilty of murdering your brother, you're a murderer.

All right? Well, based on that, Look at what the Bible teaches. Romans 8:7. The mind set on the flesh is hostile toward God.

That is one of the Greek words for hate. We hated God. Our flesh hates him, is hateful towards him. Therefore, it's not subject to the law of God, nor is it able to do so.

Jesus, when he was on the earth, he wasn't just innocently rejected, like someone looked at him and said, well, I just, I'm just not seeing it. I'm just not seeing this Messiah thing. No, Jesus took that rejection as hatred of him. In John 15, he says, He who hates me hates my father also.

If I had not done among them the works which no one else did, they would not have sinned, but now they have both seen and hated me and my father as well. But they have done this to fulfill the word that is written in their law. They hated me without a cause. And so if God truly judges sin by the heart, And at the core of sin is a hatefulness towards God, then God has no other choice but to render the verdict that we are killers.

We are murderers. And again, that's such a harsh view of sin. We would have never believed it if it weren't for the cross that proves that point with devastating clarity. What the cross shows is that if God came into this world and stood in between us and our sin, we would kill him.

We can never say, we can never view our sin as some innocent failing. And I know it's harsh to think of ourselves as despising God. And like, for example, just to show you that this is scriptural, King David, a man after God's heart, did he, did he ever hate God? Did he ever despise God?

After David committed adultery with Bathsheba and then killed her husband, God rebukes him. And God says, Why have you despised the word of the Lord by doing evil in his sight? You have despised me, and taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife. God took that very personally.

You have despised me. So every time we rebel against God, every time we just move them out of our minds because we want to commit some sin. So we just try not to think about him and we'll just pretend that he doesn't exist. We're hating God.

In our hearts, and God, who judges the heart, says that's murder, that's murder. And one of my agendas in causing the cross to happen was to prove that that's really what sin is. It is a murderous rebellion against God. In fact, when Jesus comes at his second coming, the Antichrist and all those who follow Him are going to turn all their guns on Him.

They're going to try to kill him. That is the essence of sin. And so we're no longer naive about sin. We see that it is exceedingly grave.

Our sin contributed to the killing of Jesus. And so now as believers, when we're careful about sin, we declare war on sin. When we're watching something on television or in a movie or we're listening to music, if there's a, if there's a celebration of sin, we're like that's. That is a hatred of God.

That's not just an innocent thing. This is, this is, this is murderous. I will not celebrate this. I will not support this.

I will declare war on this in my life because sin killed Jesus. There's a 5th Insight that we discover at the foot of the cross as we gaze upon the cross. That is sobering indeed. And it's, it's good on the one hand, but also it leaves us profoundly sobered, and that is that God has provided atonement for our sins.

Isn't that great? By Christ dying on the cross, taking God's wrath upon himself, we have atonement. And we are happy about that. But often we take that for granted.

God has provided atonement for our sins as we look at the cross, but at great cost to himself. Do we stop and ponder the cost, or do we just ponder the byproduct of the paying of that price? Do we contemplate all that must have been involved? In the accomplishment of this atonement that we just have every day, good days and bad days, we get up every morning and it's there do we stop and think about.

The cost for this to be ours. And Isaiah 53:6, Isaiah says, all of us like sheep have gone astray. Each one of us has turned to his own way, but the Lord has caused the perversity. The iniquity of us all to fall on Him.

All of the sins that we have committed, all of the guilt that those sins have engendered, all of the eternal consequences that we deserve for those sins, God caused all of that to fall on Jesus. Do you think about that? Jesus, the perfect, spotless, holy, righteous, altogether lovely Son of God. Imagine how repulsive sin must have been to him, and that sin was placed on him.

That had to happen for us to have atonement. First Peter 2:24, he bore our sins in his body. He had to let our sins, as it were, touch him. On the cross, There's some things in our household that at times, The female members of our family are grossed out by, Bugs and spiders and, roaches and, They're so eked out by them, they don't even want to participate in the killing of those creatures.

They go to the other side of the room or another room altogether and they call for the hero of the home. One of the, one of the guys, and often it's me and, in fact, this just happened, I think it was yesterday or the day before and. and I have to come in to the rescue and grab about 4 ft of toilet paper. So as to be sufficiently protected myself and then to kill the offending item without getting any of the ick on my hands.

Multiply that by infinity. Jesus, I imagine what that must have been like for all of the filth of our sin. To be put on him. Imagine how grossed out.

He must have been. By all of the sins that we have committed. In fact, he did more than burying our sins in his body. Look at this 2 Corinthians 5:21.

God made him who knew no sin to be sin. He actually, as it were, in the eyes of the Father became these things. God treated Jesus as if he became these sins. Do we, do we gaze upon this and contemplate the price that was paid so that we could be forgiven and have a relationship with God?

I got to read this to you. It's a lengthy quote, but it won't feel long at all. Johnny Erickson, my wife and I a couple of years ago were reading a book. Written by her and Steve Estes entitled When God Weeps.

It's a book on suffering, but as we were going through the book, There's a part near the front end of the book where she describes the crucifixion of Christ and, really captures the horror of it, and my wife and I were both very moved. We ended up reading it actually recently to our family during family worship and, she talks about the physical suffering of Christ and, being arrested and being, Punched in the face and slapped and spat upon and blindfolded and mocked and ridiculed and a crown of thorns put on his head and then beaten down with a rod into his brow and then tied around a stone and a, and a vicious cat of nine tails was lashed across his body again and again and again, tearing the flesh from his body.

And then he was laid upon a cross and, and nails were driven through his hands and through his feet. And then the cross was put in position, and there he is dying and being crucified.

And I'll pick up the quote from her right here. As awful as that was, she said, these pains are a mere warm up to his other and growing dread. Jesus begins to feel a foreign sensation. Somewhere during this day, an unearthly foul odor began to waft, not around his nose, but around his heart.

He feels dirty. Human wickedness starts to crawl upon his spotless being, the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his father's eye turns brown with rot. Oh, his father, he must face his father like this.

From heaven the Father now rouses himself like a lion disturbed, shakes his mane, and roars against the shriveling remnant of a man hanging on a cross. Never has the sun seen the Father look at him so, never felt even the least of his hot breath. But the roar shakes the unseen world and darkens the visible sky. The sun does not recognize these eyes.

And then she goes on to describe the Father, how the Father would speak to Jesus, as it were, in that moment where Christ became sin. The father says, Son of man, why have you behaved so? You have cheated, lusted, stolen, gossiped, murdered, envied, hated, you've lied, you've cursed, robbed, overspent, overeaten, fornicated, disobeyed, embezzled, and blasphemed. Oh, the duties you have shirked.

The children you have abandoned. Who has ever so ignored the poor, so played, the coward, so belittled my name? Have you ever held your razor tongue? What a self-righteous, pitiful drunk, you who molest young boys, peddle killer drugs, traveling clicks, and mock your parents.

Who gave you the boldness to rig elections, spur revolutions, torture animals, and worship demons? Does the list never end? Splitting families, raping virgins, acting smugly, playing the pimp, buying politicians. Practicing extortion, filming pornography, accepting bribes, you've burned down buildings, perfected terrorist tactics, founded false religions, traded and slaves, relishing each morsel and bragging about it all.

I hate, I loathe these things in you. Disgust for everything about you consumes me. Can you not feel my wrath? Of course, the son is innocent.

Yeah. He is blamelessness itself. The father knows this. But the divine pair have an agreement, and the unthinkable must now take place.

Jesus will be treated as if he personally, as if personally responsible for every sin ever committed. The father watches as his heart's treasure, the mirror image of himself sinks, drowning into raw liquid sin. Jehovah's stored rage against humankind from every century explodes in a single direction. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

But heaven stops its ears. The sun stares up at the one who cannot, who will not reach down or reply. The Trinity had planned it. The son endured it.

The spirit enabled him. The father rejected the son whom he loved, Jesus, the God man from Nazareth. Perished. The father accepted his sacrifice for sin and was satisfied, and the rescue was accomplished.

But, oh, At what a cost? Think of those sins you have committed, That after you committed them, you just felt this gnawing sense of, Being dirty and abandoned, separate from God and that, that feeling of guilt that, that followed you, and just know that, that, that sin and that guilt, Jesus felt that He felt that for those very sins you have committed. That is the price he paid. That is what he endured so that we can have this atonement thing that we often take for granted.

That we would not take it for granted if we daily gazed upon the cross. There's a final discovery we make at the foot of the cross, and we're just about out of time, so, I have to wrap up quickly, and that is that God loves us with an amazing love. Amen. what, we're never supposed to get over this.

we are never to lose our amazement at his love. The apostle Paul, as he writes the book of Romans, he's been saved for a number of years now, and he's still scratching his head. he's been to the third heaven and back. He's, he's written inspired scripture.

He's preached the gospel over and over and over again every day for many years, meditate upon it, and yet he's still scratching his head. And he's like saying to the Romans, let me, let me think through this out loud with you guys. Verse 7, for one will hardly die for a righteous man. Though perhaps for the good man, someone would dare even to die.

He's like, I, I can understand that barely. But God demonstrates his own love for us and that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And again, what's a sinner? We're talking about murderous, rebel, hateful sinners.

In fact, in verse 10, he uses that same word for hate that we saw earlier, while we were enemies, hateful enemies. We were reconciled to God through the death of his son. So Paul's like, I, I can get the fact that someone might die for a good or a righteous man, but We were hostile sinners. Hateful against God.

And while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Paul never lost his sense of amazement. Over this atonement that has been accomplished. And I don't think God wants us to ever get over that amazement.

OK. We are to be daily amazed. At this incredible love that has been shown, To us. How much time do you spend looking at the cross?

Don't tell me you did it on the day you were converted. That's great, but, God wants us to Be looking upon the cross every day, and he says there's a lot. You start peeling back the layers of the cross, there's an infinite supply of wisdom and glory and power that's available for you if you daily, Gaze At the cross and investigate it. The list could go on and on, but today we've just looked at 6 discoveries that we can make.

As we gaze at the crucified one. I want to ask you to bow your heads this morning. If you're here today, you have never put your faith in Jesus. Man, today is your day.

You are blessed by God by divine appointment. You, you got to hear this. God has been very good to you. Do you understand that Jesus is the Son of God?

Do you understand that God's wrath is real, and that it's a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God? Do you understand that you are utterly and completely helpless to even make the slightest Contribution to your salvation. Do you understand what the cross says about the gravity of your sin? Do you understand the high price that has been paid and the amazing love that God is showing to you?

I would invite you to come to the cross, confess your helplessness. And look to Jesus as your Lord and Savior, right where you're seated, just do that. We're going to take up an offering in just a moment and we encourage you to give as the Lord leads you to give. There's comment cards in your bulletin if, Have any comments or prayer requests, praises, you can put those on the back of the card and we'll be praying over those in our staff meeting on Tuesday, and also, we'll be happy to put those on our church family prayer sheet.

Let's go to the Lord in prayer. Lord, we thank you for the cross, that through it we are saved, but we thank you that, The message of the cross is a gift that keeps on giving to us all we need for life and godliness. You are good to us every day out of the bounty of the cross. We got so many other things, Lord, in front of our face.

Help us to put the cross in front of our face and to see the glory, the power, the wealth, and the insight that's there. All the things we learn about ourselves, about our sin, and about you and about the world. The most important things we need to know, We can learn here. We ask Lord that you would accept our offering.

Multiply the usefulness of the money given to further the preaching of this gospel around the world. And as we give to you of our funds, we give our hearts to you also. And we do so in the name of Jesus, and all God's people said, Amen.