God cannot make square circles, or married bachelors, or one-ended wood sticks, or make two-plus-two to equal five.
Even the Son of God…Jesus Christ in a human body…cannot live two different life storylines at the same time.
Jesus cannot be the Passover Lamb of God sacrifice for the sins of the world…and at the same time lead a Joshua or King David style military army to defeat the Roman army and rid the nation of Israel of Roman occupation.
Jesus cannot be a resounding Jewish national hero in a worldly sense in restoring military and political freedom to the nation of Israel in the first-century…and at the same time follow the worldly contrary life-script to be the humiliated and disgraced, yet blemish-free, Passover Lamb of God slain on a cross on Calvary Hill in Jerusalem…to inaugurate the new covenant salvation being offered to the entire world…Gentiles included…from that time forward into all eternity…as prophesied to occur in Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.
If we see Jesus…on the cross…as the Passover Lamb of God and our Savior…then we can place our faith in Him to compose our journey of faith life-script with the same creative ingenuity and consistent unity-of-purpose that He composed for His own brilliantly focused life-mission.
If we see Jesus on the cross as a failure and a disappointment in terms of fulfilling the positive, worldly materialistic aspects of the lower bottom half of the American Dream…then we will choose the self-sovereignty of going our own way…having no faith in Jesus Christ as Savior and creative composer of our life-script destinies.
The brilliance of the cross of Christ…that places it creatively outside the reach of human literary invention…is that it surgically separates the dichotomies of self-sovereignty and God-sovereignty…while at the same time maintaining…for mankind…the delicate balance between belief and unbelief…this being a spiritual engineering feat beyond human imagination and contrivance.
The cross of Jesus Christ openly demonstrates the murderous end-point outcome of the autonomous individualism of going our own way apart from God…of self-sovereignty…yet does this in such a clever way that it leaves the open option of rejecting Jesus as Lord and Savior in our lives…at the key decisional fork-in-the-road split between self-sovereignty or God-sovereignty.
The worldly humiliation and the offense…of death by Roman crucifixion…is the very means by which Jesus the Passover Lamb…is slain for our sins.
What reaches the limits of inconceivable depth…light-years beyond what could be the product of human inventive, literary fiction…is that Jesus is the most wealthy and the most successful Person in all of human history…according to any conceivable standard…being the divine Son of God in a human body…the Creator and mastermind of everything in the universe including ourselves…who owns and has power over literally everything.
Jesus Christ can be and do anything He chooses.
If the sin-free, unblemished Passover Lamb of God atoning sacrifice…Jesus Christ…foreglimpsed in the ram caught in the thicket of bushes on Mount Moriah that became the substitute for Isaac (Gen. 22:13)…and depicted in the ancient prophecies of Isaiah 9:6-7 and Isaiah 53…if Jesus can perfectly live a divinely elevated life-script…being the Son of God while enjoying none of the outward advantages of the American Dream (Mt. 8:20)…this then opens up the opportunity to every believer who will accept God’s invitation to follow Him by faith into a biblical-quality adventure of faith…to experience life to the fullest according to God’s perspective (Mt. 5:3-12) within a divinely composed journey of faith for each of us…regardless of social, cultural, or economic status.
A God-composed journey of faith life-script is in an entirely different category…going in a different direction…entering in at the narrow gate of the cross as described in Matthew 7:13-14…as spoken by Jesus in The Sermon on the Mount…in a fundamentally different way of life from pursuing the American Dream…through our own efforts.
This is one of the most important…possibly the most important message coming from the Bible…relevant and applicable to modern, sophisticated mankind today…that Jesus Christ is not only our Savior and King…but also that He is the way, the truth, and the life…because He is the only person in all of existence who can craft journey of faith life-scripts for us that transcend above worldly conventional normalcy and thinking.
Jesus can do this not only because He is our Creator God…who knows each of us intimately…but also because He lived just such an unconventional life-script Himself.
The narrative stories of faith in the Bible are therefore of enormous and incalculable worth.
For this reason they have been under attack for the last three to four hundred years…for their supernatural accounts of the interactions between people and God…and for their accounts of the supernatural events that were and still are today incorrectly criticized for being outside of the supposed closed-system of naturalistic materialism…a filled-with-holes, philosophical paradigm that no longer holds water…that does not stand-up…in this new, Information Age time-period.
The narrative stories of faith in the Bible go way beyond being thrilling bedtime stories for children, covering issues that are deadly serious in their sophisticated applications to life.
The fundamental difference between going our own way in pursuit of the American Dream…and instead partnering with the living God within a journey of faith that may result in an outcome that exceeds the goals, dreams, and aspirations of the American Dream (Gen. 41:37-44; Ex. 12:31-36; Josh. 11:23; 2 Sam. 2:1-4; 2 Tim. 4:6-8)…is a contrasting, discontinuous gap of two choices for human life…two distinct roads to travel…that far outpaces the inventive imagination of human literary fiction-writing.
As the Pharisees, scribes, Sadducees, and lawyers stand around the cross mocking Jesus…their calculus concerning what to do with Jesus after He raised Lazarus from the dead…is something like an ancient version of: “nice guys finish last.”
They are completely unaware that God is using their worldview of self-sovereignty as the tool…through the cross…to provide salvation to all of the upcoming new covenant believers to shortly spring-up within the early Christian church.
Here God is exposing and demonstrating in action the self-indictment and condemnation of Satan…turned brilliantly back against him…in his original attempt to get Jesus to part ways from God-sovereignty…in the subtly and deceptively clothed offer of the power and glory of the kingdoms of this world…in the temptation in the wilderness.
At Calvary…God openly exposed the supposed virtue of self-autonomous individualism…as practiced by Satan…as nothing better than murderous rebellion.
The Cross in the Christian Life 