The Heart is Dying

I Cor.1:17-18 - For Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel; not with wisdom of words, lest the cross of Christ should be made of none effect. For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God.

The facts of the gospel can be known and recited and even explained by any agnostic. They can be communicated through the simulated voice of a computer and in fact a parrot can be taught to mimic the basics of the gospel particulars. The devil himself can readily quote you Bible verses and the actual message of the everlasting gospel. Hitler, Stalin, and any literate human monster could read any portion of God’s Word they were asked to just as accurately as could Spurgeon himself. Reading and reciting God’s Word is not the problem, for indeed to recreate the sounds of human words takes no more sincerity than an electronic synthesizer. What is missing is the heart.

The psalmist exclaims he seeks the Lord with his whole heart and Paul tells us with the heart we believe. We cannot be satisfied with a pop quiz knowledge of Biblical truth, we need to seek it as if it were gold which indeed it is. The gospel must be our life not our past, and the heart of the gospel is the cross. All of it must burn within us, continually bursting forth through our lips and our lives and moving us always to praise and worship the Author of all Salvation. Our gospel is not some dry and algebraic equation that is more logic than love, more facts than faith, more argument than adoration, and more doctrine than devotion.

Without heart there is no depth, no meaning, it is hollow and void, and just as in a human being without heart there is no life. The heart represents the core, the center, the life giving essence. And so it with the gospel. The very heart of the gospel is the cross. It is that single act of atonement from which we draw life. The cross is the center of the gospel and without the cross the gospel has no meaning and is worthless to us. From the very first Word of creation spoken by Jesus Christ to that day just before Passover in Jerusalem, the cross had been God’s destination and purpose. When the dust of the earth had swirled into Adam and when God had breathed His very breath into this human form, the cross was in both Adam’s and God’s future. And on that day that Adam became a living spirit, somewhere on the earth grew a tree, a tree from whose seed would come another tree. And after that unbroken lineage one tree would grow that would provide a two plank altar upon which God would sacrifice His own Son.

In about six hours God would atone for the sins of mankind in a way that no one could mistake. It was and is the heart of God on display, and the family titles were for our benefit. God the Father and God the Son are eternal and not created, so the Father - Son relationship was again so we could actually understand on some level the love and sacrifice and depth of what the cross meant both to God and of course to us. This is the heart of the gospel, this is the heart of salvation, this is the heart of God.

But sadly this heart is dying. There are many movements and teachings that have not been satisfied with altering and tampering with fringe issues of Biblical truth, they are zeroing in on the cross. Of all things, the cross. Let us explore the theology of the cross and when you have been enlightened and illuminated to what the cross is and what divine purpose was inherent in that very act, then you will be able to resist the foolish teachings of men couched in words of worldly logic and the fallen wisdom of men’s minds.

The clearest foreshadowing of the cross in the Old Testament is the Passover Lamb. The children of Israel were being held as slaves in Egypt and God Himself was going to provide deliverance for them. God was angry and He was about to kill the firstborn of every household in Egypt. There can be no denying that God’s wrath is deadly and in fact God does carry out His plan of death throughout Egypt. But God instructs Moses concerning a sacrifice, a blood sacrifice that will serve as protection from God’s coming wrath executed through an angel of death.

Each household was to take a lamb that was without spot or blemish and kill it. Do you see the picture? Even a child can see that this lamb would die in the place of the firstborn in each Jewish household, an act of protection and atonement. The blood from this lamb was not to be collected and hidden away, no, the blood was to be placed conspicuously upon the doorposts of the house itself so everyone can see including God Himself. Do not assume the blood issue would be just some ancient metaphor that would be more sophisticatedly translated in future generations including the New Testament teachings themselves. Not only would the blood issue remain undiluted as it reached the New Testament manuscripts, but in fact it would now be propelled into the spiritual stratosphere. No more animal, no sheep or goats or birds, the blood issue now must be drawn from a human source.

Hold on to your selves because it goes further and deeper than anyone ever imagined. No one saw this coming and no one could have imagined the glory of God's amazing and colossal plan of redemption. The final installment of the blood which would encompass and legitimize all the millions of gallons of animal blood that had been spilt, would come from God Himself. God in a human body would willingly shed His own blood and command men everywhere to repent and by faith place this blood upon the doorposts of their own sinful hearts. Who cannot, who will not, see the clear teaching in this connection? Listen and hear John the Baptist identify the Lord Jesus is terminology that every Jew would recognize as redemptive as well as messianic.

“Behold, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world!”

You see the death angel did not pass over the Jews because they had no sin, he passed over them because of the blood. This would continue to be revealed as Moses was given the law whose heart was the Day of Atonement, again centered in blood sacrifice. And all through the thousands of days the children of Israel spilled out animal blood as an atonement for their sins, and with that God was pleased to spare them. Not because of the animal blood, for the blood of bulls and goats could never take away sins. But because every time the Father saw the blood He saw the blood of His own Son. The coming blood sacrifice would be all sufficient and the final sacrifice never to be repeated. In Christ’s death God was satisfied.

And just as the Jews in the Old Testament, God does not spare us because we have no sin. He who claims no sin is a liar and the truth is not in him and in fact he counts the atonement as unnecessary in his life. But the reason God spares us and actually embraces us as sons has nothing to do with us and is in spite of us. It is completely and totally because he sees the blood of the Lamb of God covering us in a holy blanket of redemption. We are free from bondage and free from death and the redemption that Israel knew has now been multiplied beyond human understanding.

“Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us that we should be called the sons of God!”

Hear me oh my brothers and sisters in Christ, we are the children of God Himself, grafted in by faith through the shed blood of Calvary’s life giving tree. Shout and weep for joy and shake your head in unbridled amazement, we deserved none of this at all. And every day is now our day of atonement, and if any man sins we still have our Advocate who is in fact our Atoning Lamb Himself! Can you not feel the Spirit rise up in your hearts? Have you not been brought to tears to think of the height and depth and width and length of the redeeming love of the Father applied to your own unworthy life? The Jews had only tasted a shadow but we have the incarnate substance. We do not just have a sacrifice, antiseptic and impersonal, we have Christ. Our bloody sacrifice has risen and He lives!!

This is the core and the heart of our confession, He is the object of our praise and worship. Oh the cross upon which we were nailed with this Passover lamb. Oh yes, I was there. I do not remember, I only know. The Lord Jesus took me with Him upon that tree, and although I did not suffer He cleansed me there. It was all of Him and none of me and when it was done I was offered eternal atonement in my very own name. The Jews in Egypt each had their own lamb but this Lamb is the only and exclusive One from which all must partake. His redeeming flesh must be eaten by faith and in that atoning meal we are healed. The table of communion is a sacred replica but the actual life changing meal of faith takes place in the spirit.

So the Holy Spirit comes upon the prophet Isaiah to give us an incredible and fearfully wondrous revelation of what happened at Golgotha on that bloody day. The 53rd chapter of Isaiah is a s clear a portrayal and revealing of the cross as any New Testament book and in fact many Jews are converted as they read this particular chapter since it is so very clearly speaking of Jesus and His cross. The entire chapter is a tear producing future narrative of our Lord and His coming sufferings. But in verse 10 the Spirit says,

“Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief: when thou shall make His soul an offering for sin…”

No human mind, left to its own puny devices, can understand this and yet no sinner saved by its truth can ever deny it. God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself and yet God was somehow using those Roman soldiers to sacrifice His own Son, and if fact Himself. The Creator acquiesces to His creation and allows Himself to be conquered by those He created. The depth of this selfless love is unfathomable. What do we, what can we see here. I am not speaking of some surface understanding, some doctrinal creed by which all say amen and go about their religious business. I am asking how do we enter in on a deeper level to what the Spirit has offered us through His servant Isaiah. I am asking how do we tap into the infinite treasure that is this cross.

And in Hebraic wording that is breathtaking even in English, the Scripture says in this bloody and innocent sacrifice…God was pleased. Pleased? Of course we can say “appeased” but the word is saying pleased. God the Father sacrificed His own Son for whom? Us? Sinners? Vile and rebellious sinners like us? Yes and amen, this is the gospel truth that reveals the heart of God and saves the sinner’s soul. And Jesus Himself knew and sought His act of atonement at Calvary. This did not take Him by surprise and He was not caught off guard, no this is exactly why He came. This was not just a Day of Atonement, this was the God of Atonement. There is still so much left, but this is the heart of the gospel.

And this is what so many today are attempting to dismantle and dilute and redefine, the glorious heart of the gospel, the cross. When you hear words like “alternative theologies of the cross” run from them like they are heresies, and in fact they are. When you hear emergent conversations about the cross plug your ears and pray for the pitiful fools that are being used to detract from the only thing that can save. This is no game and this is no light dialogue that is harmless, this current trend to write blasphemous views of the cross is an orchestrated attempt to remove the atoning aspect of the cross. Oh they may “allow” for the substitution atonement to have a place as one view, but that is rancid condescension that we must reject immediately as a placating conduit through which heresy can be brought forth. All of it is worthless sacrilege and those of us who know the cross and have been hung there with our Savior realize completely the image of the sin bearing Lamb of Atonement is utterly clear.

We know that the mystery of God bruising His Son for us is true, even if we surely cannot fathom a love such as this. The heart of the gospel has now been pulled from its Biblical roots and is now being doctrinally operated upon through words of enticing wisdom and the humanistic machinations of carnal men who hold not the cross in high esteem. And this is a doctrinal heart transplant, and the gospel heart they attempt to sew back into the Biblical cavity of truth is not the true heart of the gospel at all. It is a mechanical heart, a cross that has been manufactured by men’s imaginations and forged in the strange fire of unbiblical musings about different theologies. The gospel heart, the cross, is dying in these teachings and in the hearts of many who follow their pernicious ways.

There is much more to the atonement in the cross that I will deal with in the coming days, however I wanted to present a Biblical connection that reveals the glory of the cross for what it is against the onslaught of doctrinal attacks that are becoming legion in these perilous times. Stand fast and humble, and seek to deepen your devotion to our Savior’s cross, not just doctrinally, but devotionally in our own personal walks before our Great God. Reject the new teachings and run from anything emergent or liberal, stay the course and ask the Spirit to lead us into depths of revelation that doesn’t alter truth but substantiates it. It is not worth the contamination to find a nickel in the spittoon that is called emergent and emerging, especially when treasures of great worth are found elsewhere. Let all the great and swelling conversations continue, but we must be about our Father’s business. Devotion is God’s plan while reinvention is of the enemy. Many will fall away, but you my brethren, you must cling to that old and rugged cross.

The cross is the heart of the gospel, may it continue to beat life into our spirits as we seek to lift up the Savior and His wonderful sacrifice offered to the entire world!!