The Necessity Of The Cross

Over fifteen hundred years ago, on Good Friday, Ambrose the Bishop of Milan ascended to

his pulpit in the Cathedral of Milan and said to his congregation, "I find it impossible to

speak to you today. The events of Good Friday are too great for human words." Centuries

later the great English poet John Milton sat down to write a poem on the cross and the

atonement. After 8 introductory lines he stopped, and he wrote this note which is included in

his collected works: "This subject the author finding to be above the years when he wrote it,

and nothing satisfied with what was begun, left it unfinished."

Here was a great preacher and a great poet who could not finish their works on the cross.

Fortunately, for us and all mankind, sermons and poems and the works of men on the cross

are not a necessity. What was a necessity was for Jesus to finish His work on the cross.

Infinite and eternal loss would be ours if Jesus had stopped short of the cross. No words

were ever more essential than the words Jesus spoke from the cross when He said, "It is

finished." The cross is the greatest of all necessities. The worst that can happen if we are

deprived of all other necessities is death, but because of the cross we still have eternal life.

But deprive us of the cross and all is lost. The cross is no luxury. It is the greatest of

necessities.

It you buy a cross at the jewelry counter, you pay a luxury tax on it. Such a cross is not

The Cross. Crosses you can buy are luxuries, and they are irrelevant to life, death, sin, and

salvation. The symbol of the cross often has no relationship to the cross of Christ. Some

years ago controversy broke out in Russia over the new fashion of wearing a cross on a chain

around the neck. Provda said that an investigation discovered that the fashion had been

started by two 20 year old girls who were clerks in a store in Moscow. Neither was a

religious believer, and both were members of the Young Communist League. They just

found that people were eager to follow a fad, and that there was profit in it. The cross was

nothing to them but a luxury completely unrelated to the necessary cross of Christ.

In the little village of Chabham near London an accountant erected a 270 dollar cross in

the local pet cemetery for his Great Dane. Here again the cross was totally a luxury, and of

no necessity. A man asked another why his church had a cross on it, and he replied, "Well, I

don't know of a better way to decorate the top of a church. Do you?" When it costs so little

to be a Christian there is a tendency to think of the cross only as a luxury and a ornament.

People let the necessity of it fade from their minds, and they do not realize that they could

better do without air and food than without the cross.

Whoever heard of listing the necessities of life and putting the cross at the top of the list?

Yet, that is where it belongs. Without the cross there is no salvation, and without salvation

life is worse than meaningless. There would be no hope, but only the guarantee that no

matter how bad things are, they will be worse. We would have to face a holy God with

nothing but the filthy rags of our own righteousness, and be cast into eternal darkness where

there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Unfinished sermons and unfinished poems on

the cross need not disturb us, but we desperately need a finished plan of salvation. We need

an atonement for our sin, and so we need the cross. That is why it is such a joy to see Jesus

committing Himself to finishing His work on the cross. He tells us in this passage that the

cross is a necessity for 3 reasons, each of which is vital to our salvation. We want to look at

these reasons. First of all the cross is a necessity for-

I. THE MAGNIFYING OF THE FATHER.

The work of Christ was to glorify the Father, and there was no way to do this but by

means of the cross. No one wants to die, however, and no one wants to die at 33, and still less

does anyone want to die at 33 on a cross. Jesus was no exception. If there was any way to

accomplish God's will and save man without the cross, Jesus wanted to take it. John does not

tell us of Jesus in Gethsemane where He prayed, "If it be possible let this cup pass from me."