Necessity
I think sometimes it is easy in today's culture to embrace the love and the mercy and the grace of Christianity and close our eyes to the utter, gruesome brutality of the cross. Love, kindness, and acceptance, are all words that the world wants to hear, *needs* to hear, but it is a vital part of our salvation that we also see, and at least in some small part understand, how it was achieved.
Because the cross was brutal. It was agonizing, unbearable torture, even just the physical aspect of it. If you've seen Mel Gibson's "Passion" you have some small taste of it, but the real thing may well have been even gorier, and I am sure being there and witnessing it happening to a real person there in front of you and not just an actor on a screen would give us one inch closer of a glimpse of just how terrible it really was. But the physical wasn't even the most torturous part of it; Jesus had to face the spiritual pain, *our* spiritual pain earned by our sins, of separation from the Father God with whom he had been in eternal, continual, perfect unity from before the dawn of time. That is a spiritual pain that none of us is equipped to even imagine.
But why do I bring this up? Why is it so necessary for us to see this horrible, horrible thing? Because we must look at it and face the reality of WHY. You see, it is so easy in our world of tolerance to say that all roads lead to Rome, that all forms of worship are pleasing and all religions will get you to heaven or whatever other eternal reward. But Christianity, when you try to place it in that set of rules, does. Not. Work.
You see, if there were other ways that people could be with God than Christ's death, if his suffering and crucifixion were not necessary as the ONLY way to reconcile a sinful people who had separated themselves from God, then that makes the whole gory scene simply unnecessary. Think about what that means. God sent his Son, supposedly so beloved to Him, to be gruesomely tortured and die. God turned his back on His own Son, would not even look upon Him. ...Unnecessarily?
A God who would put His Son through that kind of torture unnecessarily is a cruel and sadistic god, despicable even. A God who would turn His back on His Son, not because that Son bore the sins of the world which a Holy and Righteous God could not look upon but simply as "one option," is a capricious and terrifying God, far from a loving father whose embrace we would seek. A Christianity that says Christ's death is just one of many roads...I just can't reconcile it. It makes everything about Christianity just terrible.
Because the cross was brutal. It was agonizing, unbearable torture, even just the physical aspect of it. If you've seen Mel Gibson's "Passion" you have some small taste of it, but the real thing may well have been even gorier, and I am sure being there and witnessing it happening to a real person there in front of you and not just an actor on a screen would give us one inch closer of a glimpse of just how terrible it really was. But the physical wasn't even the most torturous part of it; Jesus had to face the spiritual pain, *our* spiritual pain earned by our sins, of separation from the Father God with whom he had been in eternal, continual, perfect unity from before the dawn of time. That is a spiritual pain that none of us is equipped to even imagine.
But why do I bring this up? Why is it so necessary for us to see this horrible, horrible thing? Because we must look at it and face the reality of WHY. You see, it is so easy in our world of tolerance to say that all roads lead to Rome, that all forms of worship are pleasing and all religions will get you to heaven or whatever other eternal reward. But Christianity, when you try to place it in that set of rules, does. Not. Work.
You see, if there were other ways that people could be with God than Christ's death, if his suffering and crucifixion were not necessary as the ONLY way to reconcile a sinful people who had separated themselves from God, then that makes the whole gory scene simply unnecessary. Think about what that means. God sent his Son, supposedly so beloved to Him, to be gruesomely tortured and die. God turned his back on His own Son, would not even look upon Him. ...Unnecessarily?
A God who would put His Son through that kind of torture unnecessarily is a cruel and sadistic god, despicable even. A God who would turn His back on His Son, not because that Son bore the sins of the world which a Holy and Righteous God could not look upon but simply as "one option," is a capricious and terrifying God, far from a loving father whose embrace we would seek. A Christianity that says Christ's death is just one of many roads...I just can't reconcile it. It makes everything about Christianity just terrible.