26: The Life of Jesus: The Cross

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father- daughter duo Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie, and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Episode 26. We are in our life of Jesus series and today we’re talking about the cross.

Hello, Father.

[00:31] Marcus: Hello, Daughter. It’s good to be chatting with you about the life of Jesus. This will be fun.

[00:37] Stephanie: Always, it’s such a good thing to chat about. To discuss deeply about and meditate upon and all the good things. How are you today?

[00:49] Marcus: I’m doing well. We’ve got a nice, classical, overcast winter day here.

[00:58] Stephanie: I live in a basement and I heard this morning when I was on the phone with you, that it was bright and sunshiny, and then it became overcast where you are. And I’m just looking out of my basement saying, “Hmm, it’s a nice wintry white day out there.” I haven’t actually left the basement. I’ve just been working today.

[01:16] Marcus: But yeah, we should let people know that I don’t keep you trapped in the basement. You’re actually in a different house someplace.

[01:23] Stephanie: Yes, indeed, indeed. Yes, no trauma. I live in a fabulous house with a very godly couple who are wonderful, a very wonderful living situation. So anyway, we’ve been covering the life and ministry of Jesus. Today we come to the literal crux of our faith of his incarnate life, the cross. You have another acrostic for us today Father, and it is aptly CROSS. However, before we get to this helpful acrostic, could you bring us into the “boots on the ground” context of the crucifixion?

[02:07] Marcus: Yeah, that’s what we’re talking about today, the meaning of the crucifixion. How do we know what it means? We got into this a little bit when we talked about Isaiah 53. And you know, every christian needs to know this because it interprets the cross for us. So let me give you the context for that final day. And if you think about the Jewish calendar system the day starts at 6:00 p.m. So in the Genesis story it says there was evening and there was morning one day, day one, and day two. And the idea is that the day actually starts at 6:00 p.m.

So if you look at the last 24 hours of the life of Jesus at 6:00 p.m., he and his disciples are gathering for the last supper. Three hours later at 9:00 p.m. they’re on their way to Gethsemane. Three hours later at midnight, he’s being arrested and Judas is betraying him with a kiss. Somewhere between 3:00 a.m. and 6:00 a.m. he meets with Annas the high priest, and he’s put on trial. By 9:00 a.m. he’s on the cross. The crucifixion began at 9:00 a.m. and at noon, three hours later, darkness came over the whole land. And then at 3:00 p.m. he dies right just before the end of the day, so he is buried by 6:00 p.m.

So within one 24 hour period, he goes from the last supper to Gethsemane, to the arrest, to the trials, and to the crucifixion. Darkness covering the land, dying, and being buried, it’s a really climactic thing. And I realized it was actually one calendar day in the Jewish system. So I always find that helpful to kind of get that in my head of how much transpired during that pivotal 24 hours.

[03:50] Stephanie: When they say, a lot can happen in a day, yeah, a lot can happen in a day. Wow.

[03:56] Marcus: Yeah.

[03:57] Stephanie: All right, go ahead.

[04:00] Marcus: No, it’s true. It just really hit me how much he went through in such a quick span of time. And one of the things that always amazes me about Jesus, (and we talk about this with Rare Leadership) is his ability to remain himself, act like himself, and stay relational through the whole process. You think about everything he went through, how many people he had to interact with, and how many upsetting things he had to go through. How much pain and everything else, and yet he acted like himself. He stayed relational. He acted like himself and he returned to joy. He helped other people return to joy. He did it all. So he is “that model” of enduring hardship well on the cross.

[04:39] Stephanie: I love that you brought that up. Oh my goodness. I still remember the first time I read the first draft of Rare Leadership. I got to that chapter that starts with looking at Jesus acting like himself on the cross. And I don’t have very many experiences where my mind just feels blown. I don’t know if it’s the benefit of growing up with you and just being desensitized to “mind blowing things” because you’re awesome.

But I read that and was like, “Whoa! Mind blown. That’s amazing.”  What a picture of Jesus acting like himself and remaining relational, even on the cross. Okay, sorry. I’m just reiterating it all over again, but it’s so cool. While we’re talking about that, could you linger on some other areas when Jesus did that? Not just on the cross.

[05:41] Marcus: Not just on the cross, but when he remained relational and acted like himself. Think about how often he was confronted. He spent the week before this being confronted in the temple. And part of acting like himself is that it was like him to make a whip out of cords and clear the temple, right, it was not okay. And he knew when it was time for that versus, oh, come to me and let me comfort you. He was the proper response in every occasion.

So even when he was saying, this generation will not pass away before the temple’s destroyed, and God sends an army to wipe this whole thing out, he was still himself when he was doing it. In some ways, even the woes to the Pharisees, he was trying to wake them up. If you’ve got people who are that hardened, how do you get their attention? And so this was his attempt. And you can kind of walk through almost any story from the life of Jesus you want and you will find these rare qualities at work.

[06:52] Stephanie: I just keep thinking, is it Jim who was like, oh, yeah, and that one time when Jesus was so angry that he healed someone?

[06:59] Marcus: Yeah. That’s a Jim’s story for sure. Like, he got really angry at the Pharisees and told the guy to stretch out his hand so he could heal it. He got angry but still acted like himself.

[07:12] Stephanie: Yep. I love it. All right, very good, very good. Thank you.

[07:19] Marcus:  A little bonus content.

[07:23] Stephanie: So now let’s dig into the points of your acoustic. So it spells CROSS, covenant, ransom, ownership, subjugation, substitution. So, Father, tell us how you developed this acrostic and then we’ll explore each point.

[07:37] Marcus: The question that comes up is, what did Jesus actually accomplish on the cross? And there’s a lot of different paradigms that have been used through the years to try to explain it. So I just started assembling them, collecting some of the classic ways people have tried to explain what Jesus accomplished on the cross. When we take communion we say, “This is the new covenant in my blood.”

So it was his shed blood on the cross that created the new covenant, so we start there. We talk about ransom, a ransom’s a payment for sin. There’s a payment that was taking place here so that Paul could say, You’ve been bought with a price. So the blood of Jesus is the price that paid for us, so that’s the ransom. That brings us right into ownership. I am not my own anymore, I belong to Jesus. So discipleship starts with bowing the knee to the king and that my life is not my own anymore. I was bought and paid for at the cross. The ransom has to do with any claim that Satan had against me, Jesus is taking care of that at the cross.

When we come to subjugation we’re talking about the demonic spirits being subjugated. We’re talking about the principalities and powers being brought into subjection to the authority of Jesus Christ so that it could be said, That all authority in heaven and on earth has been given unto me. That happened at the cross. So Paul says in Colossians two that the written document that gave Satan a claim against us was nailed to the cross. It was taken away.

That’s all part of this subjugation, where Jesus is placed higher than the principalities and powers. And then there’s substitution. Which is the classic Isaiah 53 interpretation of the cross that he died as our substitute. He died in our place and all of our sin was placed on him, our iniquity was laid on him. So these are the classic ways in which people have tried to explain what Jesus accomplished on the cross.

And so what I did is I took those classic ways and I just tried to boil them down to one word. And once you realized that you’ve got four of the five letters, it wasn’t hard. You know, subjugation was the one I had to struggle with a little bit. How do you get what Jesus did at the cross into an “S” word, but that was it.

[10:03] Stephanie: Let’s move into covenant.

[10:08] Marcus: When we take the Lord’s supper we always hear these words, This is my body. This is my blood. This cup is the new covenant in my blood. So the idea here is that the old covenant was ended and made way for a new covenant. Now, this gets really messy for some people. The old covenant had to come to an end. And so that’s why it says John the Baptist was the greatest of all those under the old covenant.

But now we’re under the new Covenant. And he says, I tell you, the least of those who are under the new covenant is greater than John. Why? Because the least of those is still under this covenant of grace. We still stand before God fully pardoned. Fully belonging to the family of God, full citizenship in heaven, and full sainthood. There is so much of what is true about us in the new covenant that was simply not true of those who were under the old covenant. It was foreshadowed in the old covenant but it wasn’t there yet.

So at the cross Jesus fulfilled the law. He fulfilled what the prophets had said about the law, but he also ended it. Which is why Paul could say in Ephesians that Christ in his death, tore down the dividing wall of hostility that divided Jews and Gentiles, taking it on in his body.

So there is this end that happens with the old so that the new can come. And the author of Hebrews says the same thing, something isn’t new unless it’s replacing what is old. Every covenant of this is anchored in blood. So when Moses brought in the old covenant it was with the blood of bulls. He took part of the blood of a bull and put it in on the altar, part of it in a bowl, and sprinkled some of it on the people. And through the blood of the bull people entered into the covenant. Now it’s through the blood of Jesus that we are sprinkled.

And that brings us into a covenant. And what a covenant does is it defines our relationship with God. So you know how people kind of struggle? Like, where do I really stand with God? How do I know where we stand? Well, we struggle with that because we’re trying to stand on the basis of performance. And if I feel like I haven’t been good enough yet to know where I stand with God, that’s old covenant thinking. That’s performance based thinking.

New covenant says you can know where you stand with God because it is a gift to you through Jesus Christ. Here it is, it is the gift of grace. So I use the acrostic PACT to remember the essential things that grace has given us in the new covenant. We’ve been pardoned, we’ve been adopted, we’ve become citizens of the kingdom, and we have a new title, we’re saints. I said that fast because we already did a whole series of podcasts on those. But again, pardon, adoption, citizenship, and title. All these things are ours in the new covenant and because of that we can know where we stand with God.

[13:17] Stephanie: Yeah, we talked about that in the FISH series, right?

[13:20] Marcus: I think that was on identity, yep.

[13:23] Stephanie: Yeah. Acrostics within acrostics.

[13:26] Marcus: Yeah. They layer on top of each other.

[13:31] Stephanie: Very good. Are we ready for ransom?

[13:34] Marcus: I think we’re ready for ransom.

[13:35] Stephanie: All right.

[13:36] Marcus: Obviously, we could spend a long time on any one of these topics. Let’s start with ransom. The background for the idea of ransom is slavery. In the roman world over half the population were slaves. Basically if you were a prisoner of war, and a lot of prisoners of war from specific battles got sent off, you became slaves. Well, Rome conquered a lot of people. They had a lot of prisoners of war from the other armies.They would often take a city and kill the men and they enslave the women and children. So I say all this because at the time that the New Testament was being written, slavery was a dominant worldwide system with which everyone was familiar. That’s largely how prisoners of war were handled. So you picture this as that I am not only a slave but I am a prisoner. I am in a prison trapped by sin and my master is sin.

So in the slave image my master is sin. In the prison image I am enslaved by sin. And what Jesus did on the cross was he set us free. He said he paid a ransom which would be the price to buy us from our slavery, or to set us free from our imprisonment. So ransom is the price that purchased our redemption.

So we hear this word redeem all the time, to be redeemed. Ransom is basically the price that buys our redemption. So I look at it this way. If I’m in a prison house of sin, it says in Romans 11 that God has locked everybody up in a single prison through sin. But he did that so that he can set everyone free with one key. And that is what Jesus did on the cross. And so that’s the idea that Christ’s ransom purchases our redemption and that’s part of what he did at the cross. He buys our redemption by his ransom. And so this is a significant part of what Jesus did on the cross that’s good for us to understand.

[15:46] Stephanie: Kinsman, Redeemer. Yeah. All right, “O”, ownership.

[15:53] Marcus: Ownership. So related to ransom is this idea of ownership. And 1st Corinthians 6:20 and 7:23 says, we were bought with a price. And because we were bought with a price Christ is our master. He says to people do what you do as if you’re doing it for Christ. And he was talking to slaves in the Roman world and saying, if you’re a christian slave, you don’t spend your day being bitter and miserable, this is your lot in life.

He’s like, remember that you’re a slave of Christ. And he says specifically to them, in Christ you are freed. And he says to the free people, in Christ, you’re slaves. So understand that you’re no better than anybody else. So Paul does have quite a bit that he talks about in his letters, and having the mindset and the identity that comes from being bought with a price.

Because I’m bought with a price which is the same ransom that bought my redemption, I have gone from being a slave of sin to a slave of God. From a slave of sin to a slave of righteousness. And so this has changed everything and it changes my core identity of who I am. So from this day on I live to please my master, and my master is now Christ. So this is a foundation that part of what he did on the cross was to make us his own.

And let me back up here a little bit. When you look at these first three things, what all of these things have in common is what all of the elements of the cross have in common, reconciliation. And what I mean by this is that they all have to do with attachment. God wants an attachment with us. He wants us to be reconciled. Now, we are apart from him and he wants us to be brought near. That’s the essence of reconciliation, right? We’re alienated from each other, we’re not in unity, and he wants to bring us together so that we are bonded.

And God wants us to be joy bonded not just not fear bonded. So he wants us to have this really deep attachment with him. And so to do that first he has to set us free from what enslaves us so that we can form an attachment with him. He gives us a covenant which defines the nature of our attachment with him. He says, you now belong to me.

So ownership is this idea of belonging and belonging is the heart of attachment. And so he’s like, you belong to me. We belong to one another. In fact, the covenant defines the fact that we belong to each other and that we are one. I think it’s important to understand that probably the big idea above all of them would be reconciliation.

And at the heart of reconciliation is this idea that God wants a deep attachment with us. And that’s why we talk about salvation as attachment a lot here at Deeper Walk. Honestly, it was Jim Wilder who really helped open my eyes to the role of attachment in salvation and kind of put all the pieces together in this way well.

[19:02] Stephanie: And it fits so well. We are Deeper Walk because we want to have a deeper walk with God. What is walking with God? It is being in relationship with him and walking in his ways. And it’s the whole story of the Bible. Like you said in one of those points, this changes everything. That could be the subtitle to this episode. This changes everything because now the problem of the separation of not being able to attach to God as he intended, that veil is torn down. Through Jesus we can attach to God in a way that he intended.

[19:44] Marcus: Yeah, exactly. You put your finger right on it. The point of a deeper walk is actually the relationship. And what Jesus did on the cross makes that relationship possible, it establishes the relationship. And as we die with Christ, as we live as those crucified with Christ, that means that we’re walking in freedom. We’re walking out of our covenant identity. We’re walking as those who belong to Christ. So all of these things are connected and they all relate.

[20:18] Stephanie: All right, are we ready to move on to the “S” that stumped you?

[20:23] Marcus: Yeah, subjugation. I almost went with spiritual warfare but that was two words. So we wanted to keep it simple. So the idea here is that Jesus disarmed the principalities and powers according to Colossians 2:15. And this idea of disarming as he also says, he led captivity captive and he had a triumphal procession. Because after the cross when he was resurrected that was his triumphal procession as a victorious general, putting on parade all of these enemies that he had just defeated.

So again, in the Roman culture they’re very familiar with the idea that a conquering general would come back to Rome, and in this triumph he would display the wealth that he had brought to Rome by his conquests. But he would also put on display many of the prisoners that he had. And he would put the most noble and most famous of the prisoners at the end of the procession. And then he would kill them all of course at the end of that.

Jesus conquered his enemies, the devil, and all of those who are allies of the devil. They were defeated at the cross because they were disarmed. And he specifically disarmed them by paying the debt required by law. Colossians 2:15 has fascinating imagery here. It says there was like this piece of paper that the Greek word used for it is specifically the word used for a debt. It’s like this is a letter of debt.

It might say that you owe your student loans, you owe your car loan, and you owe these loans. If you couldn’t pay your loans in that culture what happened to you, you became a slave. So you are a slave because you can’t pay your debts. And so what Jesus did at the cross is he took this letter of all of our debts and he took it away. He erased it, he erased our debt. He took it away by nailing it to the cross.

And in taking that away what happened is that he took away the devil’s claim on us. Because now the devil can’t say, but wait, look at the debt, he owes me. And I said, no, that’s paid for, Christ has taken that away. So by taking that away he has disarmed the principalities and powers. And I think this is what Jesus was talking about when his last word on the cross, the Greek word is tetelestai. So tetelestai is, it is finished.

Now, it wasn’t his pain that was finished or his suffering that was finished, or even his life that was finished, but all that’s included in there. But what’s interesting is on these bills of debt, on the parchments of debt, when a debt was paid off the word that was written on it was tetelestai. It was written on the bill showing that it was paid in full, there is no more debt to be collected. So I believe that Jesus had that in mind that it is finished like the old covenant is finished. It has fulfilled its purpose. It is time for the age of the Messiah to begin.

The age of law is over and the age of grace is beginning. There’s a lot of things that are finishing and a lot of things that are beginning. But I think part of it was that a debt was being paid and that it was paid in full. Because of that the enemy had lost their claim on us. And also in conquering the enemy he was now leading them in triumphal procession. And therefore the Father gave him a name above every name and seated him at a place far above the principalities and powers. So again, this is a huge part of this. And this thing is sometimes called the Christus Victor, interpretation of the atonement of Christ and what he did at the cross.

[24:29] Stephanie: Amen. This is awesome. All right, final “S”, substitution.

[24:35] Marcus:. All these things are connected at some level which makes sense. So, again, let me go back to Isaiah 53. It says, all we like sheep have gone astray. Each one of us has gone his own way. But Yahweh laid on him the messiah, the iniquity of us all. So to lay our iniquities on Christ is to take what is on us and give it to him and to lay it on him. And I like the picture of exchange, which is sometimes called the “great exchange.”

I am taking my sin and giving it to Jesus and he is giving me his righteousness. Let’s have an exchange here. You give me your sin and I’ll give you my righteousness. I’m like, okay, that’s a pretty good deal, I will take that. The Greek word that really kind of embodies this is the idea of ˈhīpər which is we where get our word hyper. But n this case it’s ˈhīpər.

So 1 Corinthians 15:3 says, “I deliver to you as a first importance what also I received that Christ died, who “‘hīpər our sins.” He died on behalf of our sins or in place of our sins. Romans 5:6 same thing.”At just the right time when we were still weak, (asthenos is a Greek word) still sick and weak, Christ died, (ˈhīpər ) for the ungodly.” Meaning on behalf of or in place of the ungodly. Then Romans 5:8, “God demonstrates his own love for us, that while we were still sinners, Christ died (ˈhīpər) for us on our behalf, in place of us.” This idea of substitution is embodied here that we deserve death.

But Christ died in our place and he took upon himself our sin, and he also took upon himself the penalty for our sin. I want to point out here that he did more than take the penalty, though he did take the penalty for our sin. He also took the sin itself and removed it which is kind of the idea of purification. He gave purification for sins not just paying the penalty for our sins, he did both.

Romans 3:25, God presented Christ as the hilasterion, which is a great Greek word. Hilasterion is actually the Greek word for the cover on the ark of the covenant. Now when you think about what happened at the covering of the ark of the covenant, it is where people would ask for mercy. It’s called the mercy seat. So you pour blood out on that and it was above the hilasterion, the covering of the ark, where the glory of the Lord dwelled overshadowing and covering the ark. In presenting Christ this way it’s bringing it altogether.

This is one of the ways in which he fulfills the Old Testament that the pathway into the presence of God has been opened for us, because Christ himself is the sacrifice that has opened that door. So there’s a lot of things embodied in this idea of substitution. And I think the two main things I would camp on is that substitution both purifies us and it pays the penalty for our sin.

[27:59] Stephanie: Amen. And how did we think we could do one episode on the cross?

[28:04] Marcus: I don’t know. We’ll probably have to come back here during the Lenten season.

[28:12] Stephanie: We’ll come back and back but, yeah, so much good stuff. And I always when we talk about the cross, want to talk about the resurrection. But luckily that’s our next episode, next week we will be looking at the resurrection. So for now, any final thoughts on this whole episode, Father?

[28:29] Marcus: Yeah, it is a big topic. I think when the Bible talks about meditating in the Old Testament it used to tell us to meditate on the Torah. Those who meditate on the Torah their lives are anchored. Then Jesus said he is the new Torah. And so he told people in the sermon on the mount that whoever hears these words of mine and puts them into practice, he’s building his life on the rock.

Well, then when you get to the finished work of Christ on the cross now you’ve got a rock on which our lives are built. And so the Christian is called to meditate on what it is that Christ has done for us. That doesn’t just mean how much he suffered.

Sometimes you can watch a movie like The Passion of the Christ and just think that meditating on the cross is about meditating on how much he suffered. Which is part of it, a part of demonstrating his love for us, but understanding what he accomplished there and dwelling on that. As we meditate on that we also talk to Jesus about it directly and talk to God about it directly. And we say, God, make these things more alive for me so that my life is truly built on the foundation of what you did for me at the cross.

And I think as we learn to do that and dwell on that regularly, it’s one of the reasons why Christ has asked us to have communion on a regular basis, to practice the Lord’s Supper. We do this in remembrance of him because there is a lot to remember here. There’s a lot to reflect on and it’s good for us to do this regularly.

[30:01] Stephanie: Amen. Thank you Father. And thank you all for joining us on the trail today. Deeper Walk International is a nonprofit organization, and we partner with people like you in order to do what we do. Some are on the trail with us as official Trailblazers who commit to donating $25 or more per month.

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