THE NECESSITY OF THE CROSS
Charles Wesley was born in 1707. He was the 18th child! His parents had one more child after him. If it was today, the Wesleys would have been in the news! 19 children is exceptional. Charles Wesley’s father, Samuel Wesley, was the rector of the local church. Charles Wesley also trained to be a priest in the Church of England, and he became a priest at the age of 27. As far as anyone knew, he was a Christian. But three years later, something changed. On May 21st, 1738, he had a conversion experience. He wrote in his journal, ‘I now found myself at peace with God.’
Historians are pretty sure that almost immediately after that, Charles Wesley wrote one of his most famous hymns. It starts ‘And can it be.’ Can anyone remember how the hymn continues? ‘And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour's blood? DIED HE FOR ME who caused him pain…?’
Two weeks on Friday it will be Good Friday, the day of the year when we remember that Jesus died on a cross. Charles Wesley believed that JESUS DIED FOR HIM. Was he right? Did Jesus die for him? Did Jesus die for US?
That’s what the Bible says. Paul wrote to the church in Rome that: ‘God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, CHRIST DIED FOR US’ [Romans 5:8]. He wrote to the church in Corinth: ‘CHRIST DIED FOR OUR SINS in accordance with the Scriptures’ [1 Corinthians 15:3]. John wrote about Jesus, that ‘HE is the propitiation FOR OUR SINS’ [1 John 2:1]. So, yes, CHRIST DIED FOR US. That’s what the Bible says.
Leon Morris was a scholar of the New Testament. He wrote a book titled, ‘The Cross in the New Testament.’ In it, he wrote, ‘The cross dominates the New Testament.’ But why? Why was the cross necessary? Why did Jesus have to die for us? That’s the question we are looking at today. What was our situation, that it could be solved by Jesus dying for us?
Further on in Charles Wesley’s hymn he describes his situation. This is how verse 4 starts: ‘Long my imprisoned spirit lay…’ Wesley thought of himself as imprisoned. It wasn’t that he was physically in prison. His spirit was imprisoned. Then he continues: ‘fast bound in sin…’ Sin had bound him and held him fast.
Wesley is certainly not the only hymn writer to describe his situation this way. In 2006, Chris Tomlin wrote a variation on the hymn ‘Amazing grace.’ He added a chorus which starts, ‘My chains are gone, I've been set free.’ Probably a hundred or more songs have been written with the idea of being imprisoned. Are Wesley and Tomlin and these other hymn writers right? Is this the situation we’re in? Are we imprisoned by sin? Is this an idea we find in the Bible?
It certainly is! Actually, the Bible has two ideas. It has the idea of sin keeping us out, and sin imprisoning or enslaving us.
How does sin keep people OUT? Almost at the beginning of the Bible we read the story of Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve disobeyed God. Then Genesis tells us that God ‘drove out the man [that is, Adam], and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim and a flaming sword that turned every way to guard the way to the tree of life’ [Genesis 3:24].
We don’t know exactly what cherubim are. Later, the people of Israel made carvings of cherubim, and gave them wings, so I suppose they are a kind of angel.
There were no locks in those days. But Adam and Eve were certainly barred from the Garden of Eden. No more walking with God for them! No more talking with God for them! And definitely, no getting to the tree of life for them. The cherubim would make sure of that.
Sin resulted in Adam and Eve being driven OUT of God’s presence.
How does sin IMPRISON or ENSLAVE people? Jesus once told a group of Jews, ‘Truly, truly, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin’ [John 8:34].
Let me describe two kinds of slavery.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, on average almost 80,000 slaves were brought each year to the Americas. The slave traders and slave owners had power over them, but it wasn’t because of anything the slaves had done.
Today, the most common kind of slavery is debt bondage. It’s illegal in every country of the world but it still happens, especially in India and Pakistan. Someone borrows some money. They can’t repay it, so the person who lent the money forces the person who borrowed the money to work for them.
In the first example, the slave owner has power over the slave. But the second example is most like the slavery that comes from sin. When we sin, we put ourselves in sin’s power. We give sin a claim over us. In the Garden of Eden, God told Adam, ‘You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, FOR IN THE DAY THAT YOU EAT OF IT YOU SHALL SURELY DIE’ [Genesis 2:16-17].
But Adam and Eve ate from the tree God told them not to eat from. They would die. Sin had imprisoned them. It’s the same for all of us. No wonder Charles Wesley wrote, ‘Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin.’
Is there hope? Is there any way in which a person can be released from this bondage? Is there a key which can unlock this door?
On the face of it, there was no way. ‘The wages of sin is death’, Paul wrote [Romans 6:23]. Sin demands our life. But in the Old Testament, God started to reveal his plan. We get a foretaste of it in the sacrificial system. The people of Israel would sacrifice an animal – one without any defect – and God would accept the death of the animal in place of the death of a person. But this was only a foretaste of God’s plan. Later, the prophet Isaiah grasped what God would do. Ultimately, it wouldn’t be an animal that would die in our place. It would be God’s only son. Isaiah explains this in one of the most famous passages in the Bible. He wrote:
‘All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all’ [Isaiah 53:6].
Because God would lay our iniquity – our sin – on HIM, it would no longer be on us.
When the people of Israel left Egypt, they made a tent – they called it the tabernacle – to be the centrepiece of their worship of God. The tabernacle had a courtyard. Inside it, there was a ‘Most Holy Place’ separated by a curtain. The people of Israel embroidered cherubim into the curtain. When the people of Israel built the temple, it also had a Most Holy Place and a curtain and that curtain also had cherubim worked into it [Exodus 26:31,35; 2 Chronicles 3:14].
When Jesus died, the curtain of the temple was ripped from top to bottom. Jesus had paid the debt of our sin. And now that was paid, it was possible to come past the cherubim and the flaming sword, back into God’s presence again.
Why did Jesus have to do the job of dying in our place? Was he the only person who could? Yes, he was. Only a person who had no sin of their own could take our place – and only Jesus met that condition. He was the only person to ever live a perfect life.
Peter gave a great summary of what Jesus did. He wrote, ‘He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed’ [1 Peter 2:24].
No doubt I could give you a longer explanation. But this is the main idea. How did Jesus fix our problem? He took our sin on himself. He paid the debt we could not pay. He was the only key which could open this door so, praise God that he did.
Before I finish, I’d like to touch on one other thing. The wages of sin is death. We should have died, but Jesus died in our place. But did Jesus have to die such a horrible and painful death? Death on a cross is one of the most painful forms of execution ever invented. Did Jesus really have to suffer this way? The Bible says that Jesus had to die. But he also had to suffer. Why was that?
Paul wrote about Jesus: ‘And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross’ [Philippians 2:8]. By accepting such an awful death, Jesus showed the greatest example of humility and obedience.
The writer of the Letter to the Hebrews wrote, ‘For it was fitting that he, for whom and by whom all things exist, in bringing many sons to glory, should make the founder of their salvation perfect through suffering’ [Hebrews 2:10]. Jesus’ suffering somehow made him perfect!
But I think there are two other reasons why Jesus had to suffer so much on the cross.
The Bible tells us about God’s wrath. God is angry with humankind for all the sin we commit. On the cross, God’s wrath landed on Jesus. It must have been incredibly painful for him. It seems to me that Jesus’ physical suffering reflected something of the spiritual suffering he was experiencing.
I can see one more reason why Jesus suffered so much on the cross. God is an amazing God, but he can’t make one plus one equal three. When God decided he would give humankind free will there would be consequences he couldn’t prevent. Cain killed Abel. Abel suffered and God couldn’t stop that. In a world in which there is free will and people chose to do wrong, suffering is unavoidable. God knew very well that people would disobey him. He knew there would be suffering. But on the cross, Jesus joined us in our suffering. He didn’t stand remote from the suffering. He experienced it too.
Where does this leave us? What do we do? I’ll tell you what Charles Wesley did. Here’s the fifth and final verse of ‘And can it be’:
‘NO CONDEMNATION NOW I DREAD,
Jesus, and all in Him, is mine:
Alive in Him, my living Head,
AND CLOTHED IN RIGHTEOUSNESS DIVINE,
BOLD I APPROACH TH’ ETERNAL THRONE,
And claim the crown,
through Christ, my own.’
Jesus was the key who released Wesley from his imprisonment. Now, there was no condemnation! Now, Wesley, clothed in righteousness divine – Christ’s righteousness – could approach the eternal throne. He could come into God’s presence! Wow!
And because Jesus died on the cross, this is what we can ALL do. We can all come to Jesus. We can all say sorry for our sins. We can all accept Jesus as Lord. And we can all step through the torn curtain, past the cherubim guarding the way into the presence of God – and come into the relationship with Jesus that we were created for, which Jesus gave his life for us to have.
Hallelujah! Now THAT is Good News!
TALK GIVEN 30TH MARCH 2025, 10.30 A.M. SERVICE, ROSEBERY PARK BAPTIST CHURCH, BOURNEMOUTH, UK
