The Truth Of The Cross

The cross. It is a significant concept in the life of the believer but there are many believers that don’t know what the cross means. Many Christians believe the cross represents personal difficulty or inconvenience. Many would say that their husband or wife is their cross. Or their unpleasant boss at work, or a lingering illness. Many believers can easily fill in the blank with what they believe their cross is.

Provers 9:10 says, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And the knowledge of the Holy One is understand.” The first and foremost thing to do to know the truth of the cross is to ask, “What does God say about this?” Scripture describes the cross as the instrument of Jesus’ death, a cruel and heavy apparatus, on which He was hung shamelessly for every eye to behold. The cross has never been a nuisance. It is and has always been an instrument of death. The cross represents the death of our rights. To bare your cross is to die to the parameters and circumstances of the life you live. Most parents would say that their children are their’s to protect, their’s to teach, their’s to love. The truth of the cross says that our children belong to God and are only given into our stewardship for a time. God can do with our children’s lives whatever He wishes and we have no right to ask Him, “What have You done?” The Book of Job is a great illustration of God’s sovereignty over even the lives of the precious children He gives us. Job bore his cross well when he proclaimed in Job 1:21, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb. And naked shall I return there. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away: Blessed be the name of the LORD.”

The cross can look like heavy slats of coarse timber as it did for Jesus and a few of the apostles He commissioned. The apostles had their lives snuffed out violently for obeying that commission. Their cross was not the difficult people they had to deal with—“For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal … “ (2 Corinthians 10:4)—their cross was to give their lives for a command they had no say in crafting. The cross can also look like leaving your relatives, your home, and everything you’ve ever known for the sake of a word from God that you can’t even explain. The cross can look like willingly opening yourself up to ridicule for the sake of something simply because it is right in God’s eyes. The cross can look like many things but there is one thing that it will always be: death to the illusion of control. I bare my cross well when I submit to the will of Jesus Christ no matter what it costs me personally.