The Cross

THE CROSS

Text: 1 Corinthians 1:17-25, 1 Corinthians 2:1-6

OPEN WITH PRAYER AND THANKSGIVING

I love studying God’s Word. I absolutely love it. I would rather study God’s Word than watch football or go to a UFC fight, which is saying a lot, because I enjoy both of those things. I would rather study God’s Word than go fishing, which is also saying a lot, because fishing is one of my favorite things to do. Fishing is probably a close second… but its still way behind studying Scripture. But something else that I like to study is history – specifically Greek and Roman history. And one of the things about history that is just fascinating to me, is the brilliance of ancient man. And sometimes people hear me say that and they go, “Say what? Weren’t they all living in caves, wearing animal skins and carrying clubs?” And I have to tell them, “Nope! That’s not what ancient man was like at all. This notion that ancient man was some kind of brutish cave man, is all but gone from most upper level scientific understanding… sure it’s still taught to public school kids, but the scientific community – if they’re being honest, will tell you, “No that’s not accurate.” Cave men did not build ziggurats and pyramids. Mathematicians did. Cave men did not build Stonehenge, Astronomers did. The ancient city of Mohenjo Daro – that ancient city in the Indus Valley… it wasn’t built by cave men. It was built by amazing engineers.

Now one of the most brilliant minds of the ancient world was a guy named Archimedes. In 212 BC Archimedes wrote a book and dedicated it to the king of the city of Syracuse, which is on the southern coast of Sicily… And in this book, Archimedes calculated how many grains of sand it would take to fill the entire universe. Now why did he do that? Why did he take the time to calculate that, and then write a book about it? I DON’T KNOW? Maybe he just had too much time on his hands. Maybe because his brain was advanced he had to do something like this in order to keep himself occupied. I don’t know why he did it, but he did, but I also know that about 20 years ago, our modern physicists tried to calculate the same thing – how many grains of sand it would take to fill the entire universe, and they came up with nearly the same answer as Archimedes did more than 2000 years ago. Archimedes wrote this book just a few years before he died. What happened was the Roman Empire came to sack the city of Syracuse. They were under the command of a general named Marcus Claudius Marcellus. And what he did was sail a massive fleet of ships towards southern Sicily, along the coast. But what’s interesting about that battle, is that the coasts of Sicily were lined with cliffs. And for Marcus Claudius Marcellus to get to Syracuse, he would have to sail past those cliffs. What he didn’t know was that Archimedes had designed a couple of war machines that would prove very difficult to overcome. The first one was catapults. As the Roman navy approached they started getting hammered by huge boulders being launched by those catapults. Once they got close, they weren’t out of the woods yet. As they drew near the cliffs, the Roman sailors were mortified, when a huge crane situated at the top of the cliffs reached down, snatched up a Roman ship, picked it up, raised it up into the air and dropped it on the rocks. It happened over and over again… Brilliant engineering!

Marcus Claudius Marcellus was able to rally his troops, and he eventually got them on shore, and they managed to take the city. Now the general of the Roman armies told his men, “Do not kill the engineer who designed these war machines.” But one of the soldiers disobeyed that command because he was angry that this engineer had designed the machines that had killed his comrades and he found Archimedes, working – doing mathematical equations, and he struck him down on the spot.

Now I bring all that up because it was Archimedes who said to the king of Syracuse, “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I can move the whole world.” He didn’t know it at the time, but a little over 200 years after he had made that statement, a lever was found that was long enough to move the world. IT was a cross – about 10 feet high, and it was placed on a hill called Calvary, and that cross was the lever that turned the world upside down.

It was the cross that revealed the greatest mind ever… not Archimedes, as brilliant as he was, his mind is nothing compared to the mind of an Almighty, All-knowing, Sovereign God. As intelligent as Archimedes was, it was the mind of God that had conceived the plan of redemption before time even began. It was the mind of God that conceived the cross, and like I said, it would move the entire world.