religiousaffections

At Northwake Church, our pastor and elders have been preaching through the doctrine of the atonement.  What a beautiful doctrine to study as the corporate body of Christ!  This is an excerpt from R.C. Sproul’s book entitled The Truth of the Cross.

“When Jesus took the curse on Himself and so identified with our sin that He became a curse, God cut Him off, and justly so.  At the moment when Christ took on Himself the sin of the world, His figure on the cross was the most grotesque, most obscene mass of concentrated sin in the history of the world.  God is too holy to look on iniquity, so when Christ hung on the cross, the Father, as it were, turned His back.  He averted His face and He cut off His Son.  Jesus, who, touching His human nature, had been in a perfect, blessed relationship with God throughout His ministry, now bore the sin of God’s people, and so He was forsaken by God.  Imagine how agonizing that was for Christ.  To experience the curse, according to Jewish categories, was to experience what it means to be forsaken.

I’ve heard sermons about the nails and the thorns.  Granted, the physical agony of crucifixion is a ghastly thing.  But thousands of people have died on crosses, and others have had even more painful, excruciating deaths than that.  But only One received the full measure of the curse of God while on a cross.  Because of that, I wonder whether Jesus was even aware of the nails and the thorns.  He was overwhelmed by the outer darkness.  On the cross, He was in hell, totally bereft of the grace and the presence of God, utterly separated from all blessedness of the Father.  He became a curse for us so that we one day will be able to see the face of God.  God turned His back on His Son so that the light of His countenance will fall on us.  It’s no wonder Jesus screamed from the depths of His soul. 

Finally, Jesus said, “It is finished!”  What was finished?  His life? The pain of the nails? No.  The lights had come back on; God’s countenance had turned back.  So Jesus could say, “Father, into Your hands I commit My spirit.”  The hard reality is this: if Jesus was not forsaken on the cross, we are still in our sins.  We have no redemption, no salvation.  The whole point of the cross was for Jesus to bear our sins and bear the sanctions of the covenant.  In order to do that, He had to be forsaken.  Jesus submitted Himself to His Father’s will and endured the curse, that we, His people, might experience the ultimate blessedness.”

Get it, read it, love it: In My Place Condemned He Stood by J.I. Packer & Mark Dever