The blood that Jesus Christ shed on the cross is not just to improve our moral performance in the areas of honesty, integrity, tolerance, and the capacity for unselfish love…because the ancient goal…the prime target…the foremost, primary reason for the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice…is to focus and home-in on the remedy and removal of sin.
If God is not internally consistent in this fundamental moral concept of freely choosing God-sovereignty over self-sovereignty…in Gethsemane and at Calvary…within the Trinity of the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit…then justifiably God could not ask us to make the difficult, Holy Spirit assisted transition from self-sovereignty to God-sovereignty in the course of our lives (Jn. 3:14-21)…of allowing God to displace our ways with His higher ways and thoughts (Isa. 46:9-10; Jn. 12:24)…to achieve in some measure in our lives this same divine unity-of-purpose (Jn. 17:21)…after the pattern of the biblical narrative stories of faith.
God identifies for us in the Garden of Gethsemane…that Jesus Christ is operating at the apex…at the highest pinnacle of morality and virtue…when God reveals with incredible honesty and candor His own difficulty…performed at the far outer-edge of virtuosity…the unique and singular challenge in all of time…past, present, and going forward into eternity…of offering Himself as the loving sacrifice for our sins…in order to restore our severed relationship with Him…on the highest terms of true and right justice yet at the greatest cost to Himself…the death of Jesus Christ on the cross and His resurrection three days later.
Because this entire scenario of truth, challenge, and drama soars far above the capacity of human literary fictional invention…in my opinion…this answers the question of how we would know with certainty that Jesus Christ is the Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice for mankind’s sins…being morally perfect and having sinless virtue.
A popular defense of the Bible and Christianity…should start at some point…with the biblical uniqueness of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ…paramount in importance and at the very zenith within the broad array of moral concepts.
God-composed life-scripts for the people of faith in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible…eventually over time lift them up into the victorious positions of becoming overcomers (1 Pet. 5:10)…but not in the worldly conventional sense of self-validation and worldly pride…that is centered upon oneself.
God’s elevation of people into high positions…Abraham the “father of faith”…Joseph the governor of Egypt…Moses the great prophet and deliverer…Joshua the military leader…the Israelites conquering their homeland…Peter the leader of the early Christian church…and Paul the missionary evangelist to the first-century Greco-Roman world…to name a few…are for unselfish service to other people…and not for self-validation and personal achievement.
God-composed life-scripts in the biblical narrative stories of faith…are designed to fix things…to the most radical extent required…at all costs…at the micro-level in the moment…and at the macro-level over the long-range duration of human redemptive history…extending into eternity.
The biblical narrative stories of faith are about enabling God to set-up and manage a program throughout human redemptive history…that allows God to actualize events and circumstances into reality…to fix our world and our lives…from the viewpoint of eternity (1 Jn. 2:17).
This is an elevated program…that will run above and often contrary to the culturally accepted direction of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking (Mt. 5:3-12, 6:25-34).
This element of elevated unconventionality explains Abraham waiting in faith for the birth of Isaac…Joseph’s unusual MBA preparation in the house of Potiphar and the prison of Pharaoh…the Israelites in bondage in Egypt…and the advance preparation of Moses as a shepherd of sheep in Midian.
It explains David being pursued for his life by the jealous King Saul…Peter utterly failing in the courtyard of Caiaphas during the night trial of Jesus…and the incredible conversion of Saul/Paul on the road to Damascus…creating the radical humility needed for a highly educated Pharisee to take the gospel message that Jesus is the Messiah to the larger Greco-Roman world…without looking down his nose in disdain at the polytheistic, idol-worshipping Greeks and Romans of his day.
These are the scenarios composed by God to fix our world and the problem of sin in our lives…from an eternal perspective.
The brilliantly creative capacity of God to get His arms around the vast stretch of human experience…of Jesus maintaining consistent fidelity to God-sovereignty in the midst of the lowest failure and the highest success… allows every person of faith that accepts Jesus Christ as Savior, King, and Tour Guide through this life…to get to know God personally from the least to the greatest…as prophesied roughly 2,600 years ago by the prophet Jeremiah…in anticipation of new covenant believers (Jer. 31:31-34) not offended by Jesus on the cross…all energized by God-sovereignty rather than being fueled by the pursuit of individual achievement according to the tenets of worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
The cross and the resurrection of Jesus were in service to mankind…at the peak and pinnacle of moral perfection…the purest essence of virtue.
The cross and the resurrection of Jesus were and are radical measures in the extreme…designed by God to fix the human problem of sin…fundamentally defined as going our own way in autonomous individualism.
God-composed journey of faith life-scripts…as patterned for us in the biblical narrative stories of faith…creating similar unity-of-purpose partnerships between God and people…is the antidote to the individual autonomous rebellion of going our own way.
When this uniquely biblical reality is separated-out and highlighted from amongst the broad array of existing moral concepts…this provides a compelling basis for accepting Jesus Christ into our lives…for accepting a God-composed journey of faith applied and interwoven into the course of events in our lives.
This humanly inconceivable, acid-test of the consistency of God-sovereignty within the Trinity…faithfully and seamlessly exhibited by Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane and on Calvary Hill…also actualizes within the biblical narrative stories of faith…and actualizes within the God-composed life-scripts for Spirit-born Christians today.
This validates the argument that the Bible cannot be the creative invention of human literary imagination.
This also provides us with a huge reveal…a unique and innovative tell…of the real truth about God.
The Cross in the Christian Life 