Who Died at the Cross?

I read a powerful statement recently in the writings of one of my favorite authors, T.A. Sparks, who lived in community and ministered in regular Christian life conferences in Great Britain between 1930 and 1970.


He wrote, "Whenever a man or a people comes under immediate government of God (which means to live under the direction and empowerment of the Holy Spirit) in relation to His eternal purpose, they will have this one thing brought home to them: It is that in themselves "dwells no good thing" (Rom. 7:18). There is much prayer for revival and much effort for the deepening of the spiritual life. But the only answer to this is a new knowing of the Cross, not only as it pertains to sins and a life of victory over them, but as Christ supplanting (replacing) the natural man."

On the cross, not only was Jesus Christ offering Himself to pay for our sins, but He was offering Himself as our substitute. When He died, in God's mind, He died not only for us, but He died as us. As Paul says, "I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live..." (Gal. 2:20)

To come to Jesus Christ in faith is to come into an inward union with Christ. We recognize Him as our substitute to God, our representative before God, and our life in God. When we do this, we aren't playing psychological make believe. We're agreeing with God. For God has sent His own Son to become our substitute, our representative, and our life.

It all starts with the cross and our apprehension of what occurred their by faith. At the cross, God put us to death in Christ. Our self-loving hearts recoil from such a word, but this is the clear affirmation of the Scriptures. "Or do you not know that you have died with Christ?" Why do we recoil? Like Cain we're still trying to get God to accept us and our offerings. God will not. God will never accept man's best efforts, not even when those men are Christians. When the source of the living is man, it's man's life that's expressed. It's godless effort, and utterly rejected by God. How does that make you feel?
Check yourself. Most people who don't see how utterly rejected and contemptible they are apart from Christ never embrace the cross. We can't imagine hell, much less that apart from Jesus Christ that God would surely send us there. Our belief that our best efforts make us more acceptable in the eyes of God only provoke Him all the more, because He opposes the proud. We too must reject our best efforts by embracing the cross as the place we died to God.

Don't misunderstand this point. It's not that we have no value as God's creatures who display His glory and are made in His image. But our value to God is just that... that we bear His image and display His glory. Apart from bearing His image, the only way we will display His glory is through eternal damnation. But the good news is that through Christ, God has made a way of redemption and salvation that is an infinitely more satisfying display of His glory by making us one with His image... "Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God."

I recently had a couple of discussions with a few Mormons and J.W.s about this very thing. They imagine that God is pleased with our good works and displeased with our sins. So, in this view, Jesus's death erases our sins so that we can be rewarded for our good works. But in doing so they rob Jesus Christ of His glory of being our complete Savior, whom we do not help in the least. It is fully His grace from beginning to end that must save us.
But how many Christians are "Mormons at heart", looking to Jesus to cover our sins while looking to ourselves to please God? No! Jesus Christ is our complete righteousness, not only taking away our sins, but taking the "old man" into death. So how then do we live?

We live by this faith, the faith of the Son of God. We must not merely add Christ to our living, or attempt to add to Christ's life by our living, but to make room for Christ to be our life. We should be dead to our own desires, good intentions, best efforts, good ideas, etc. Though while we live on in the body we can not escape from them, but we dare not live on the basis of them. All things must be governed by His Spirit. Does the idea, intention, or desire come from us, or from His Spirit? "Live by the Spirit and you will not fulfill the desires of the flesh".

What does this mean? We must get acquainted with the Life of His Spirit. We must saturate ourselves with the Word of God which is able to divide between soul and Spirit. We must remember that His blood cleanses our conscience from dead works to serve the Living God, for we will no longer simply feel a need for cleansing from sin, but from moving, living, desiring anything apart from the Life of Christ Jesus. The Living God is served by Living Sacrifices, those who are offering themselves up to live in the Life of His own Son.

What lies ahead for those who take this path? A great deal of suffering and greater experience of the Lord Jesus Christ as our life. "God gives us the Cross, but the Cross gives us God."

The Cross and the Highjacked Planet- A meditation on 2 Cor 5:17

Imagine, if you would, that you have the great privilege of viewing human history from the vantage point of an angel from near the throne of God. As you take a moment to scan the horizon of the material world, you glance across the myriads of galaxies to behold the vast display of the glory of the Creator. With your angelic vision, distance is irrelevant. Whatever you fix your gaze upon becomes immediately present.

The worship turns to uneasy concern when, in a medium sized swirling galaxy, rotating around one of it's less significant stars, you notice a small, pea sized planet that is dramatically out of step with the the rest of the universe and the Throne Room of Heaven... something you've never imagined was possible until now... something in God's creation not doing His will. Unthinkable! Unimaginable!

It turns out that this planet had a pilot, a guide and director made to represent God Himself, who was given a charted course to lead the planet into the most beautiful display of the glory of God. But something went terribly wrong. The planet was secretly boarded by malicious hijackers. The pilot initially resisted the hijackers, but somehow it seems that the hijackers actually enlisted the pilot to willingly join in their suicidal rebellion against their Sovereign Creator. The pilot and the planet were hijacked by the enemies of God.

The course of the planet was now horribly clear. The hijackers intended to use the planet to fly directly into the very Throne of God, turning the planet and all it's passengers into a missile aimed at eliminating the good rule and direction of the Lord in His own creation. What's worse, it seems, at least from your angelic perspective, that nothing could be done to stop this wicked attack. God's own appointed ruler for this planet had betrayed the Lord, the passengers, and the planet.

To your angelic mind, there seems to be no resolution. God however is not limited to angelic ways of thinking. As you ponder the horrible possibility of this evil challenge to the authority of God, you look back to the hijacked planet and see a most inexplicable wonder; the Son of God has gotten on board the runaway planet as one of the passengers.

To the other passengers, He appeared as one of their own. But inside this passenger lived the Son of God. As it turns out, although no one had fully realized, the Lord God Almighty had created the passengers unlike any other life form. They were created to contain Him. So it was possible for the Divine Son of God to place all of His Divine life inside the material world inside of one of these passengers. This unique passenger's name was Jesus Christ.

Once on board starting from the rear of the planet, He immediately walks straight to the cockpit. All the hijackers recognize that a new pilot had arrived. The gig was up. When He took control of the cockpit, what do you think He might do? You may be surprised. Instead of stearing the planet back onto the original coarse, the glorious Lord plunges the planet straight down into the ground, terminating everything that ever opposed the will of the Lord- the original pilot and all the passengers, the hijackers, and all the wickedness that lived in their hearts- gone forever in an explosion of fire and putrid black smoke. In His own death, as the pilot, the entire planet died. The old creation had passed away.

But after a short time, something wonderful happens. Up from the ashes of the newly destroyed creation, the Lord of Glory rises up. Unlike the wicked hijackers and the passengers, the Lord of Glory had the power of an "indestructible life". But now, the Lord was somehow different. At first it wasn't clear how, but then you recognize it. He's still one of them... He's not only divine, but He is a raised and transformed passenger. He is forever part of the creation as a passenger. Yet now, His divine glory, instead of being veiled was fully manifest through His passenger life form. The creator had become one with the creature. Creation? Yes, but a new creation made out of the resurrected life of the Son of God.

But a closer look reveals there is still more. Could it be possible? What looked at first to be the singular reemergence of the glorious Son of God from the wreckage of the old creation, become clearly something more. Yes, it was the Glorious Son of God shining through His passenger life form... but not just His own passenger life. Because the new pilot entered the planet from the back, as He made his way forward to the cockpit, he touched passengers from every row. Though it was not plain to the eye, in His touch, He was planting the seed of His indestructible life inside of other passengers. Now, because His life was placed inside of them, there now appeared in Him hundreds of thousands of passengers raised up in His indestructible life. His divine glory is now being displayed in myriads of passengers raised up in a corporate display of the awesome beauty of the divine life of the Son of God.

Then, from the depths of the Son of God and innermost being of all those sharing His life, one unified shout arose that reverberates eternally in the ears of angels and saints alike, "If anyone is in Christ, He is a new creation! Behold, the old is gone and the new has come!"
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The Lord Jesus healed the sick, raised the dead, cleansed the leper, made the blind see and the deaf hear. Most however misunderstand the meanings of the miraculous; then and now. Many then and many today chase Jesus with the misconception that He came into this world to fix our old lives and make them better.

What does Jesus say? Less than a week before His death, a group of Gentiles asked to see Jesus. He responded in a peculiar way. He said, "Now has the hour come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Unless a grain of wheat falls to the earth and dies, it remains alone, but if it dies, it bears much fruit." John 12:23-24. Do you realise what Jesus is saying?

Here is the eternal Son of God, having lived on the earth for over 30 years, having healed multitudes, having raised at least 4 people from the dead, having taught in such power that even His enemies were silenced. And Yet our Lord looks back on His entire ministry and says that up till now He is FRUITLESS. Why? He alone was dwelling in the eternal life of the Father. He would have to die to give that life to others. His miracles were simply signs of the Life He was dying to put inside of us; the indestructible, saving divine Life of Jesus Christ.

When He died, He died as the head of the old humanity. He was the Last Adam. In the eyes of God, Adam's race ended on the cross of Christ. The death sentence for the race who conspired to hijack the planet earth was fully carried out. God's solution for the old creation was the cross.
Jesus Christ did not chose to fix the old creation with His power, but to use His power to carry it up to the cross and terminate it that it may not linger on in God's eyes forever. When taunted, "Come down off that cross and we will believe in you" Jesus continued to hang there until His work was finished. Rather than come down and rule in the old creation He chose to rule over the old creation in the New Creation.

We who believe in Christ have been placed into His death to this creation. We are now raised up with Him. The new creation race is a resurrection race. We now posses resurrection life in Jesus Christ who dwells within us. That life is a life of righteousness, holiness, joy and peace which flows from fellowship with the Father. Although our Father does still heal and give signs and wonders, we err to think His purpose is ever to fix the old life. His healing wonders are signs of a new creation, pointing us away from the temporal towards the eternal. God has no intention to fix what He has already terminated. He does His work in accordance with His work at the cross, not in contradiction to it. So too now, we who know the Lord and posses His life ought to more fully cooperate with that Life, praising and thanking our Father who has loved us with such gracious love. We should be wholehearted to press on to know Christ, and Him crucified as our very own life as we live in the power of His resurrection and sharing in the fellowship of His sufferings. The grain of wheat has died that He may not live alone in the bosom of the Father, but that we may join Him in His life there. Let us then live in union with Him.