The power of the cross – authority restored

Thirdly, Jesus reclaimed the authority that had been lost.

When God created man, he gave him authority over the natural world. God had given the world to man as a gift, to look after, to steward, to enjoy. The enemy deceived man into giving him that authority. Man allowed himself to be deceived and in that transaction, through that turning away from God which leads to death, by listening to the enemy and doing as he said, he empowered the enemy against man. The enemy took man’s authority for himself and became Prince of this World. He rules as usurper, knowing that man has the right to dethrone him again. So he rules through fear – keeping man under his control through fear and through deception. Not for nothing is he described as the Father of Lies.

When Jesus rose again, he took back the authority that had been lost, that the enemy had taken. Jesus had every right to do so. It was a man who had relinquished the God-given authority to the enemy. Only a man had the right to dethrone the dictator and take back the authority that rightfully belongs to man. As a representative of the human race, Jesus was in a position to take back the authority which had been conceded. And take it back he did!

“Having disarmed the powers and authorities in the spiritual realm,” Paul writes to the believers in Colosse, “he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them because of the cross.” (Col 2:15)

After he came back to life, talking to those who had been following him, Jesus affirms: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”  

The glorious truth is, the enemy has been defeated! The enemy no longer has the ‘legal’ right to rule over this world! Jesus, taking back the authority that was lost, is now the rightful prince of the world and Scripture describes him as the Prince of Peace. There will come a time when he will take his rightful throne as King.

That is fantastic news!

The power of the cross – sin dealt with

Secondly, by his death, Jesus took on himself the full consequence of living turned away from God.

We have already seen that when we live turned away from God, when we sin as the Bible puts it, we are cut off from God and that when we live cut off from God, death encroaches on us. We have already seen that because we have all at some point in our lives turned away from God, we all inevitably experience death as a consequence.

Jesus never lived cut off or separated from God. Ever. Not even for a moment. He lived fully in the light of God’s Love, fully in relationship with Him, fully aligned to God. Death was not a consequence he deserved or had to live with.

But he willingly chose to take on himself the effect of living turned away from God. He willingly took death on himself. Peter, one of Jesus’ closest earthly friends, says: “He himself carried our sin in his body.”

The Bible sometimes talks about the wrath of God, which people often misunderstand to mean his anger against us. The wrath of God is not directed at us as much as at ‘it’, at the way things have turned out, at the fact that death has a claim on us, at the way sin separates us from God and prevents us from being able to receive the Love He lavishes on us. God’s wrath can be compared to the raging anger a parent feels when their child is going through pain, or being bullied or abused in some way. It is not anger directed at the beloved child. Not in this case.

Jesus experienced the full impact of God’s wrath, God’s anger at how things had become and at all that which cuts us off from Him, from His Love. He experienced death and at the same time, for the first time ever, he experienced separation from God. As he dies, he bears the full brunt of that separation. “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?!” Jesus cries moments before he dies.

And so, in his death, the consequence of being cut off from God, the consequence of living separated from God, living turned away from God has been met. The consequence of sin for mankind might be death, but a man has taken the consequence! Using a transactional, legal analogy, the debt of sin has been paid. Sin no longer has a ‘legal’ right on mankind. It can no longer require death as a consequence! Turning away from God had trapped us and made it impossible for us to turn back to God by our own effort. But Jesus paid the ‘ransom’ that was required in order to release the world from sin that held us prisoner. The Bible tells us that living turned away from God, or sin to put it another way, is death’s sting. (1 Corinthians 1 5:56) And so through Jesus’ death, death has lost its sting[1]. Death can now no longer claim the right to separate man from God’s Love. Anyone who wants to is now able to turn towards God again. The way into the fullness of a relationship with God, a relationship characterised entirely by Love, is now free and open.

That is excellent news!

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[1] Once, when Jesus was chatting to a man called Nicodemus, he reminds Nicodemus of an incident that happened in the history of the nation Israel. It happened during the time in their history when they spent years wandering round in the desert. One day lots of poisonous snakes come into the camp, biting people and people died. God told Moses, the leader of the nation at that time, to make a snake out of bronze and to put it up on a pole. If people looked at the bronze snake, the poison of the snakes would have no effect on them. Jesus uses this picture to explain to Nicodemus that in the same way, anyone who looks at him (Jesus) and believes, would not be affected by the poison of sin, but would live. Because at the end of the day, God is Love. And he loves the world so much that he sent Jesus, the only one qualified to become the antidote to the poison of sin, so that whoever believes him will not die, but will live.

The power of the cross – death defeated

Jesus was the only one qualified to change the matrix of a kingdom where the Prince of this World, the enemy of our souls, rules and tries to keep man separated from God. And change the matrix he did. When Jesus died, brutally killed at the hands of those who were offended and angered by the things he said and did, the order of things was shaken to the core. When Jesus didn’t stay dead but came back to life, the matrix was once again irrevocably changed.

In what ways did everything change?

Firstly, because Jesus defeated death, death also has lost its power over us.

Death could not hold Jesus. It had no power over Jesus. Jesus was the only human for whom death was not a natural consequence. The life that was in Jesus, the life that came from living saturated by God’s Love, the lift the came from living in right connection with God, having never turned away from God, overcame death.

But there is more! Because Jesus overcame his own death as a human, he also overcame death for all of mankind! Death has no lasting hold on us either! Yes, of course our bodies die when physical death takes place. The wonderful truth however is that the effect of death has been reversed – Scripture tells us that our bodies will rise again, just as Jesus did!

Paul, writing to the believers in Corinth explains it in this way (1 Corinthians 15 – [my paraphrase]): “(Whether you choose to believe it or not) Jesus really was raised from the dead. And as such he is the first of everyone who has died or will die. Death came into the world through one man (Adam). Now the opposite, the resurrection from death, has also come through one man. Because of Adam we all die. Because of Jesus, we will all, eventually, be made alive again. But all in good time. You see, Jesus was only the first one ... Some people ask ‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body will we come back to life?’ What a ridiculous question! When you plant a seed in the ground, it dies and what grows from the seed you planted looks nothing like what you put in the ground. In a similar way God will give us a new body according to what he has determined. Like a seed that is sown and dies, so our bodies die. And just like that seed grows into something new, so our bodies will become a kind of spiritual body, one that can’t be destroyed again. And when the time comes for us to receive our new bodies, when the mortal is clothed with immortality to put it another way, then what was written in Scripture will come true: ‘Death, where is your victory? Where, death, is your sting?”

That is good news!

Jesus

God becomes human in the form of Jesus of Nazareth and breaks into the matrix of how things had become in the world.

Essentially he is God. By becoming human he has not changed his character. In essence he totally reflects who God is – Love. Jesus is described as the Son of God - the one who is in essence God, the one who has God’s DNA, the one who stems from God. When we look at Jesus, we can see what God is like. In that sense, Jesus and God are one, the same.

But he is more than God wrapped in human skin. He is fully human, not only in body, but in mind and soul and spirit. Jesus often describes himself as the Son of Man. Not only is he human. He is the ultimate human, the perfect human, a human the way humans were designed by the Creator to be, a human living in the fullness of what being human was meant to be all about. What makes Jesus the ultimate human is not his divinity. It is the fact that as a human he is living fully and completely in the light of God’s Love – just as God purposed for humanity at creation. He is the perfect human because in no way is he separated from God’s Love. He is fully turned to God, fully saturated by Him. That makes him sinless. He is untainted by greed, by self-centredness, by jealousy, by lust for power, by all those things that reflect Satan’s patterns and all those things that smack of death. And so all he does and all he says is steeped and saturated in Love.

Being fully human also means being limited in his attributes. Being human, he is not able to exercise the attributes that God, in his divinity, has the right to exercise. Jesus is not omnipotent (he has limited power), he is not omniscient (his knowledge is limited) and he is not omnipresent (he is limited to time and space). Paul, writing to the believers in Philippi, says that Jesus was in very nature God, but that even so he did not try to be equal to God but that being human, he made himself like nothing. (Philippians 2:6-7)

Jesus’ humanity is crucial in God’s breaking into the matrix of how things are. God, as God, cannot oust the dictator who has set himself up as ruler of the world. Only man can, because it was man who allowed him to take his place as ruler over the world. God, as God, cannot make anyone turn to him. Only man can choose to turn to God and to allow God’s Love to touch him, change him, draw him into relationship with Him. God cannot change the fact that man dies as a consequence of living turned away from God. Only man tastes death.

And so Jesus, as the ultimate human, is the only one qualified to change the matrix. As man he has the authority to dethrone the dictator. As man he is able to demonstrate what a human life looks like when life is lived fully saturated by God’s Love – something he would call life to the full, or eternal life. And as a sinless man, a man saturated by God’s life-giving Love, he is the only human who is able to take the consequence of separation with God, death, and defeat it, reversing death as the consequence of separation with God, offering an antidote to the poison of death.

No wonder then that Jesus is described as the One who Saves, the One who delivers. Only Jesus, God made man, can change the matrix and so be the Saviour of the World.

The big picture

It is against these parameters then that human history unfolds:

God is Love.

He allows man the choice of whether to live within that Love and become part of it, or not.

He allows man the consequences of his choices, because essentially he wants a relationship with man based on love, not on response to stimulus or on fear.

Choosing to turn away from God, living away from his life-giving Love brings with it dire consequences – death.

Because man chose to turn away from God on the back of listening to Satan, the one who is opposed to God and the enemy of our souls, man conceded his God-given authority over the world he lives in to the enemy.

Or, seen from a different angle, the enemy deceived man into handing over his God-given authority and usurped man’s place of authority over the world, at the same time usurping God’s place as master in man’s life.

Living turned away from God, refusing to receive His Love, empowers the enemy of our souls, enabling him to remain in the place of authority over the world and allowing him to continue his deceiving influence in our lives, keeping us away from God and his Love.

And so when we sin, when we live turned away from God, we empower the enemy against us and something dies.

God has not given up on man however. He continues to love, he continues to seek to be involved in man’s life, he continues to invite man back into meaningful and liberating relationship with him.

Man, however, is unable to turn to God by his own efforts.

The enemy of our souls imprisons man by continuing to deceive man, making him believe that God no longer cares. He makes it his business to make sure man does not turn back to God. Not only is it man’s tendency to keep listening to the deceiver. Not only has man’s tendency become to seek power and self-centredness (Satan’s values) more than love. Satan makes a claim on man’s life, claiming that because man had enthroned him in God’s place, man is now under his dominion and rule.

Yet throughout history, there are those who by faith, by choosing to ponder on the things of God, by choosing to think about what is revealed about God in Scripture (and through any other evidence) about God, are able to enjoy a meaningful relationship with God and are able to experience and taste his Love, at least to an extent. The Bible is full of stories of people like this. Yet these people are still caught up, still trapped in the matrix of a world dominated by the enemy who calls himself the Prince of this World. Man is essentially a prisoner - separated from God and powerless to change the matrix he finds himself in.

Because God is Love, he does not leave things as they are. He does all in his power to free man from his prison, from the dictator who rules, from the cancer of sin that wreaks havoc in his life.

Because God is Love, he breaks into the matrix man finds himself in. God cannot change the rules, he cannot go against his character, he cannot go against the ‘law’ of Love. He will not force man into relationship. Connection with God will always have to be as a result of man’s acceptance of an invitation into relationship. Nor will He overrule the consequences of man’s choices and simply oust the enemy whom man has allowed to rule. He has to allow consequences to choices that are made, including man’s choice of empowering and enthroning the enemy.

But break into the matrix he does. 

In a wonderful act of sabotage, God breaks into humanity and becomes a man. 

Believing God

The Bible talks a lot about faith. It puts a huge emphasis on faith in relation to our relationship with God. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that it is the bedrock, the foundation of relationship with God. “Without faith it is impossible to please God,” it says. (Hebrews 11:6).

What is faith? At the heart of it, it is about believing who God says he is, believing that he does what he says he does (even when there is little or no proof to support it). The writer of the book of Hebrews puts it succinctly: “Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” It is more than deciding to believe a particular idea. It is certainly more than deciding to believe something because we wish it to be true. It is a sure hope, a hopeful certainty, a deep trust ... and it is allowing that faith to shape our thoughts, our words and our actions. True faith always translates into action.

If God, out of Love has to judge our choices, but if God out of Love equally allows a time of grace, a time in which we can re-align ourselves, our lives and our decisions, with his Love, faith plays a huge part in how we choose to live. We have to act out of faith and not by what we see in the immediate. We have to “live by faith and not by sight”. We choose how we live not because we can see who God is and what he is like, but because we believe him and fully trust that he is who he says he is. 

So faith, acting out of a trust in God even if the evidence is unseen, acting out of trust in what God has said even if humanly speaking the odds are against you, becomes the basis of a relationship with God.

Relationship with God, responding to God’s Love, is always and has always been a matter of faith. But as in any relationship, God doesn’t wait until our faith is perfect. He takes whatever response towards him we have, however small – and he meets us more than half way. With every step that we deepen in our trust of Him, his character and his promises, he draws us deeper into him. Every time we choose to trust him a bit deeper, he reveals a little bit more of Himself to us.

We see this again and again in the lives of people depicted in the Bible. The Bible is full of the stories of ordinary people who choose to believe that God is who he says he is. They choose to believe that when God promises, he keeps his word and does what he promises to do. And it is through their response to God in faith, believing God translated into action, that God works in and through them in extraordinary ways.

The Bible is very clear that it is the faith of these people, not what they achieved and did, that is of value to God. It is their faith, their response to God even against the odds, that is the basis of their relationship with God and the reason God is able to enter into and deepen in His relationship with them. It is faith that saves us from this broken world we live in.

Faith matters.