The Cross of Christ: Why Did Christ Die?

This week’s reading for Reading Classics Together at Challies.com was the second chapter of John Stott’s The Cross of Christ, Why Did Christ Die? In a nutshell, Stott says the same thing as Peter does in Acts 4:27-28: 

…for truly in this city there were gathered together against your holy servant Jesus, whom you anointed, both Herod and Pontius Pilate, along with the Gentiles and the peoples of Israel, to do whatever your hand and your plan had predestined to take place. 

Stott, of course, goes into more detail than that, explaining exactly who bears the blame (and why) for Jesus’ death on the cross. There are

• the Roman soldiers 
• Pilate
• the Jewish people
• the Jewish leaders
• Judas

And this list should include be me, too. 

[W]e ourselves are also guilty. If we were in their place, we would have done what they did. Indeed, we have done it. For whenever we turn away from Christ, we “are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace” (Heb. 6:6)…. [T]here is blood on our hand. Before we can begin to see the cross as  something done by us (leading us to faith and worship), we have to see it as something done by us (leading us to repentance).

Yet it’s not really as simple as that. Yes, Jesus’s death was caused by human sin and we all share the blame for it, but there’s another way to see it, too. Jesus gave himself up for us; he died voluntarily and according to God’s plan. Stott writes:

On the human level, Judas gave him up to the priests, who gave him up to Pilate, who gave him up to the soldiers, who crucified him. But on the divine level, the Father gave him up, and he gave himself up, to die for us. As we face the cross, then, we can say to ourselves both, “I did it, my sins sent him there,” and “He did it, his love took him there.”

And it’s at this second way of looking at the cross that the next chapter will examine. What makes the crucifixion so important that God planned it and Christ voluntarily submitted to it?

The Cross of Christ: The Centrality of the Cross

Today was the first day of the most recent Reading Classics Together at Challies.com. This time around, we’re reading John Stott’s The Cross of Christ, and the assigned reading was the first chapter, The Centrality of the Cross. 

So far, this is one of the most orderly and easy to follow books I’ve read in a long time. Stott writes methodically, and I like that. He starts this first chapter with a section on the cross as Christianity’s symbol. The use of this symbol is early, from the second century at least, and persists to the present day, despite the fact that the cross was widely considered to be “the most humiliating form of execution.” That the cross

became the Christian symbol, and that Christians stubbornly refused, in spite of the ridicule, to discard it in favor of something less offensive can have only one explanation. It means that the centrality of the cross originated in the mind of Jesus himself.

Stott goes on to show that this is exactly what we find in scripture. Jesus knew and taught that dying was his central mission. Jesus knew he was going to die for these three reasons:

1. Because of the hostility of the Jewish leaders. Jesus knew that they would eventually succeed in killing him.
2. Because that’s what scripture said would take place. Jesus understood from scripture that “vocation of the Messiah was to suffer and die…”
3. Because of his own choice. He was resolved to do the work given him by the Father.

So then, although he knew he must die, it was not because he was the helpless victim either of evil forces arrayed against him or of any inflexible fate decreed for him, but because he freely embraced the purpose of his Father for the salvation of sinners, as it had been revealed in Scripture.

Next Stott surveys the teaching on the cross in the New Testament, starting with early sermons of the apostles recorded for us in Acts and on through the epistles of Paul, Peter, and John, to show us that the cross of Christ was also central to the apostles the teaching on the cross in the New Testament. Paul, for example, puts the cross of Christ as a matter “of first importance.” It’s in 1 Peter that we find the words, “He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree.” In Revelation, John tells us “nothing less than that from an eternity of the past to an eternity of the future the center of the stage is occupied by the Lamb of God who was slain.”

It’s doubly fitting, then, that the cross should be our symbol and sign, for it was central to both Christ and his apostles. It’s our tradition, yes, but it’s a tradition that is faithful to the priorities disclosed in scripture. 

To Christians, the cross of Christ is a glorious thing, but this is not a view shared by everyone. Writes Stott: 

There is no greater cleavage between faith and unbelief than in their respective attitudes to the cross. Where faith sees glory, unbelief sees only disgrace.

The world in general finds the true Christian teaching of Christ and his cross ridiculous, but believers are compelled, still, to insist on it’s centrality to our faith. “Christian integrity consists … in personal loyalty to Jesus, in whose mind the saving cross was central.”

Can God Die?

From God Who Is There, The: Finding Your Place in God’s Story by D. A. Carson:

By and large, the New Testament does not talk of God dying. It speaks of Jesus being the God-man, and it speaks of Jesus dying. Never is there a hint that the Father dies. Of course not: he is not a human being that he could die. Only the Son can die, only the “Word made flesh.” Jesus can die because he is a human being, a man. But if he is also confessed to be God and worshiped as God (see for example John 20:28), is there not a sense in which we may speak of God dying?

By and large the Bible avoids such choice of words. Once in a while, however, we find passages that come so close to this. When the apostle Paul gives a speech to some church elders from Ephesus, he says, “Keep watch over yourselves and all the flock of which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. Be shepherds of the church of God, which he bought with his own blood” (Acts 20:28, emphasis added). Isn’t that remarkable? “God … with his own blood”? Now, of course, if pressed, Paul could parse that a bit. He could say, “Of course, the person I have in mind is not God the Father but the Son of God, Jesus, who is himself God and because he is God and because he does give his life and shed his blood, therefore, it is appropriate to say that God sheds his blood .” If you want to unpack it, that is what Paul means.

Nevertheless, do not let the shock of the language stop you. This is God’s action in Christ Jesus, the man who is also God. This is not the death of one human individual and no more. It is a human individual who is also the living God who hangs on that cross, not because he is forced to do so by circumstance but because he is fulfilling in himself all the strands of the Old Testament’s sacrificial system, the temple system—all the strands from the fall and the promise of the seed of the woman coming to crush the serpent’s head by his own death. Elsewhere Paul can write, “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8, emphasis added).  As the old hymn says,

Bearing sin and scoffing rude,
In my place condemned he stood.
Sealed my pardon with his blood!
Hallelujah, what a Savior!

Philip P. Bliss

It is appropriate to speak of the God who dies.