One of the compelling arguments for the divine origin of this cross element in the biblical narrative stories of faith…the displacement of our own plans by the plans of God in a tightly scripted, God-composed journey of faith…is this absence of any wiggle-room for alternative self-sovereignty and our own self-ruled contrivance to change the details of the script.
This element of God’s plans…that removes us off the thrones of our lives in the key critical area of the course and direction of our lives…is as contrary to humanistic thinking and the pride-fueled, worldly expectation of entitlement to conventional normality…as is imaginable.
This is the originally novel concept that is seamlessly integrated into the narrative stories of faith in the Bible…starting with Abraham…that precludes any rational pretense that these stories are human-generated or the product of inventive mythological fiction writing.
The cross element of displacing our ways with God’s higher ways is the most offensive and infuriating part of the biblical gospel message…to worldly conventional thinking…and produces the most agitated and violent pushback from people committed to self-autonomy and worldly self-validation.
As discussed in the previous sections…the entire life-script of Jesus the Son of God and the eternal Word (Jn. 1:1-2) was designed in such a way as to expose the huge gap between self-sovereign self-interest…and God-sovereign unselfish service.
This gap is differentiated using the universally recognizable currency of human-esteemed high social status…as a measurement of worth and value…on the one hand…versus the contrast of a God-engineered, radically self-effacing humility at a divine level on the other hand (1 Jn. 2:15-17)…which was below the resolution level and comprehension as a valued character trait…by worldly standards.
The Pharisees, Sadducees, lawyers, and scribes were never going to follow the preaching of John the Baptist at the river Jordan (Mt. 23:25), never going to follow Jesus the lowly carpenter from Nazareth (Jn. 7:27), and never going to join themselves to the new Christian church in Jerusalem.
The low social status of Jesus Christ was so off-putting to these ruling elites in Jerusalem…so low on the respectability scale regarding their concept of who and what the Messiah should be like…so below the cut-off line of their expectations according to worldly conventional thinking…they did not even bother to ask Jesus…or His mother Mary…the preliminary starting messianic question of the city of His birthplace…Bethlehem…not Nazareth.
The life-script for Jesus the Son of God was brilliantly crafted to create the greatest reaction of violent offense to self-sovereign self-autonomy…to facilitate the appointed place and date of destiny for Jesus the Messiah to be the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for sin…through His utter and total rejection (Ps. 22; Isa. 53).
Jesus failed to satisfy the requirements for the long-awaited Messiah according to worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
The people who instigated the crucifixion of Jesus Christ…by doing so demonstrated a complete lack of respect for Jesus…the placing of zero value upon His person and His life in the most emphatic and clear-cut way imaginable.
The worldly disgrace and de-valuing of a human life by execution through Roman crucifixion…actually exposes and condemns as unrighteous, unloving, and devastatingly counter-intuitive…the rebellion component in its worst rendition…in this example of misdirected human self-sovereignty (Jn. 5:23).
From A Popular Defense of the Bible and Christianity
The Cross in the Christian Life 