It’s Easter, and sometimes it’s better to use another’s words to describe this game-changing day.
“In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering.” – Hebrews 2:10
*Because suffering is a universal human experience, God saw fit that Jesus (our intermediary) would experience the most excruciating pain. The “curtain” into God’s presence is Christ’s body. It was this suffering that caused prominent British pastor John R. W. Stott to reach this conclusion:
I could never myself believe in God, if it were not for the cross…In the real world of pain, how could one worship a God who was immune to it? I have entered many Buddhist temples in different Asian countries and stood respectfully before the statue of Buddha, his legs crossed, arms folded, eyes closed, the ghost of a smile playing round his mouth, a remote look on his face, detached from the agonies of the world. But each time after a while I have had to turn away. And in imagination I have turned instead to that lonely, twisted, tortured figure on the cross, nails through hands and feet, back lacerated, limbs wrenched, brow bleeding from thorn-pricks, mouth dry and intolerably thirsty, plunged in God-forsaken darkness. That is the God for me! He laid aside his immunity to pain. He entered our world of flesh and blood, tears and death. He suffered for us. Our sufferings become more manageable in light of this. There is still a question mark against human suffering, but over it we boldly stamp another mark, the cross which symbolizes divine suffering. “The cross of Christ…is God’s only self-justification in such a world” as ours. (interview with Dr. Peter Kreeft)
John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ (Downers Grove: IL: InterVarsity, 1986), 335-36, the last sentence quoting P.T. Forsyth, Justification of God (London: Duckworth, 1916), 32.
