Misunderstood Cross

"Hey, welcome. I am married to a lovely woman, Vandy Alombs. I'm supposed to do this right now." Although, it shouldn't have counted. It should not have counted. I mean, that stuff never happens for Vandy. But it happens. It happens. And we'll take it. But I don't get like a half a win on that one. But welcome to Midtown 12 South. My name is Elliot on the Pastor here. And it's a joy to be with you this morning. We are nearing the very end a couple more weeks in our almost nine or ten-month sermon series through the Book of John. And we've been looking through the lens that John has for us at Jesus. He's got several that he would want to show us Jesus through. One of them is Jesus everywhere. He goes in the Book of John is the misunderstood Messiah. That from his friends, from his enemies, from the political leaders, from the religious leaders, everyone is confused by Jesus and his kingdom. They don't get what he's trying to do. He is from another world. And they hate him. And they abandon him. And they reject him. And all along in that journey for Jesus says he is continually misunderstood through all his teachings and his miracles and his mission. He stays locked in on what he came to do. And this morning, we come to the thing he came to do. He did lots of things. He established a kingdom and he brought a kingdom and he taught and he healed. And all that plays a role in the kingdom that he came to establish. But Jesus here is being coordinated. The king is being coordinated in his death. And what's amazing about the way that John presents the death of Jesus to us, and really every gospel right represents the death of Jesus to us, is that this is the part of the story that every other part has been pointing to, that every other paragraph in the book of John has been leading to this. This is what the story is about, the crucifixion of the Son of God. So if you will, turn with me and your Bibles are on the screen to John chapter 19. We're going to be reading verse 16 through 30. John 19, 16 through 30 says this. So he, that's pilot, delivered him. That's Jesus over to them. That's the crowd of the mob, the leaders, to be crucified. So they took Jesus and he went out bearing his own cross to the place called the place of a skull, which an aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him and with him two others, one on either side and Jesus between them. Pilot also wrote an inscription and put it on the cross. It read Jesus of Nazareth, the king of the Jews. Many of the Jews read this inscription for the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city and it was written in aramaic in Latin and in Greek. So the chief priest of the Jews said to pilot, do not write the king of the Jews, but rather this man said I'm the king of the Jews. Pilot answered what I have written, I have written. When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his garments and divided them into four parts, one part for each soldier and also his tunic. But the tunic was seamless, which means expensive. It was woven in one piece from top to bottom. They didn't want to rip it up. So they said to one another, let us not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it shall be. This was to fulfill the scripture, which says, they divide in my garments among them and for my clothing, they cast lots. So the soldiers did these things. But standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother's sister Mary, the wife of Clopus and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing nearby, he said to his mother, woman, behold your son and he said to the disciple, behold your mother. And from that hour the disciple, it's John who's writing it, took her Mary to his own home, John took care of Mary. Verse 28, after this, Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said to fulfill the scripture, I thirst. A jar full of sour wines stood there so they put a sponge full of the sour wine on a his-up branch and held it to his mouth. When Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, it is finished. And he bowed his head and gave up his spirit. So we're Lord. Amen. Okay, the crucifixion, what we just read is covered in all four gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And all of them have a lot to say about it. John has a few different colors he paints with to add a little bit of reality that he witnessed to the account. But here's what all four gospel writers agree on. One, it's massively important to them. And we know this because in the ancient world, the way that you highlighted something, the way that you emphasized something in writing, they didn't have highlighters, they didn't have exclamation points, they had the ability to give more words and more air time to something. So something may get a sentence or two or a paragraph or two in an account in a historical document in a letter. But if you spend a lot of time on something, it's your way of saying as the writer, like pay attention to this, pay attention to this. And across the four gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, of all the material that they wrote down for us. One third of all that material deals with this, deals with the final days and final hours of Jesus' life. The passion, the suffering, the torture, and the crucifixion stories are captured in such a way in the gospel accounts that the gospel writers are trying to tell you, this is the most important thing that has ever happened. And there are also, I mean some scholars would say this, that everything that has happened up until this moment in the gospel accounts, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, were almost like prologues to really what Jesus came to do. And they're not really going to make a whole lot of sense if you don't understand this part of what he came to do. No one was colluding or collaborating and saying, like, hey guys, we got to make sure that we cover the crucifixion. It's that these eyewitnesses were saying, like, we cannot believe that this happened. We need everyone that hears about Jesus and reads about Jesus to know that this happened. The crucifixion is the climactic moment of Jesus. The resurrection of Jesus is also huge, is the victory stamp. It's the mic drop on the crucifixion. It's that it worked. Each gospel will tell you this is the main event of the life of Jesus. And so as we walk through John's account, briefly, slightly briefly, we're going to look at three things. And this guy needs to use a three point outline when I've got too much to say, okay, it's trying to keep us on track. And I worked really hard on this alliteration. So you're welcome to try to make this about a 30 or so minute time, but let's see what happens. Three things are going to see the brutality of the cross, the bounty of the cross, and the beauty of the cross, the brutality of the cross, the bounty of the cross, the beauty of the cross. Not sure why I was stuck on B's, but here we go. First, the brutality of the cross. Look with me again at verse 16 through 18, says this. So he, Pilate, delivered him over as Jesus to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus and he went out, bearing his own cross to the place called the place of a skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him. And with him two others, one on either side in Jesus between them. Okay, if you're a first century reader reading John's account, if you're watching, you know, hearing this happen, you have seen enough crucifixions and witness enough crucifixions to know that they took going to be crucified. That, that stills in a whole imagination for those that first read this account and heard that Jesus crucified, they knew what a crucifixion was. We don't. And so it's important for us to try to understand what just took place in that kind of simple two sentences that says, there they crucified him. What was going on? Well, the torture of the crucifixion is, it's tough for us to really imagine it, but it is preserved for us in our language that one of the most descriptive ways you can describe pain is with the word excruciating. Excruciating pain, that Latin root word is crux, excruciating, C-R-U-X. That's the Roman, that's the Latin word for cross. Like we've tried to even preserve the pain of it and the torture of it through our most painful description. Excruciating is excross-seating. It's, the cross is what makes that word painful. Josephus, Jewish historian from the first century, said that it was the most wretched of deaths in the Roman Empire. It was meant by the Romans. It was used by the Romans to instill not just shame in the victim, but horror in the witnesses. Like it was meant to shock them, to keep them tampered down. Cicero, the Emperor, Cicero, said about crucifixions. It is our most cruel and terrible penalty, incapable of description by any word for there is none fit to describe it. Crucifixion was so dehumanizing, it was so brutal that Roman citizens weren't even allowed to be crucified. It's so, it's so stripped them of all dignity that Roman citizens were protected from undergoing it. Now, they had other executions that they would undergo that weren't like flowers and rainbows, but this was so brutal that they didn't let Roman citizens be crucified because it stripped them of everything that made them worth anything. Here's how it happened. The victim was stripped naked and they were beaten to a pulpy weakness. We looked at that last week, the flagging with pilot, where pilot sentence is to be flagged. But the flagging was always included in a crucifixion. So the naked victim, the naked guilty party was condemned and then forced to carry not the entire cross but the the horizontal cross beam kind of tied to their wrist, and they had to carry that cross piece from the place of their condemnation, the court of pilot or the court wherever they were condemned, carry it through the streets as a public display naked and bloodied, walking through the streets with a sign above them tied to the horizontal piece of what they had done to deserve this. Pilate says, "King of the Jews." And the Jewish leaders are like, "Hey, he's actually not our king, so please don't say that." Say this guy said he was the king of the Jews and pilots like, "Go pound sand." Okay, it says what it says. And so Jesus is walking through the streets, bloodied, naked, carrying his cross beam, and he gets out to the place the execution site, which is called Golgotha, which means the skull. You know it better as Calvary, because the cross of Calvary, Calvary was the Latin word, Calvary was the Latin word for skull, so in the Latin vulgate, kind of the first translation of Jewish and Hebrew and Greek text together, they used that word in all four gospels. He was crucified at a place called Calvary, Calvary means skull. No one quite knows why Golgotha, why Calvary was called the place of the skull, but you can imagine you can do the leap to get there, that a place that does crucifixions often had it would have a name like the place of the skull. And the prisoner gets there with their horizontal cross beam, and they are attached to a vertical cross beam that kind of lived there. They would lower that down, or they would hoist them up, and they would attach, then the victim's arms by nails, usually, to the horizontal cross beam, and then they would attach the horizontal cross beam to the vertical cross beam, and then they would lift that up and drop it in the ground. And while they were hanging there, they would then come nail, they would tie the feet together, and they would nail the feet together through the vertical beam, and then they would come in, and they would put a little footstool underneath on the vertical beam for the victim to rest their feet, and you go, "Oh, how nice of the Romans." It wasn't nice. It wasn't a merciful thing to do, because here's what happened. The victim was left there to die. And the way they died was not from blood loss, where they died was from suffocation. They died from asphyxiation, because the nails couldn't hold them up long enough for their lungs to intake enough oxygen, and so they would begin to sink down in order to not even get any oxygen in their lungs, they would have to pull themselves up by the wrists to get a breath, and then they'd sink back down, and so the little footrest was put there under their feet, not to make it easier, but to make it keep lasting, because the involuntary body that is in survival mode is doing whatever it can to get any oxygen, and so their suffocation would last longer. They were literally drowning in real life. They were out of oxygen, and they were just left there to die. Historical record would tell us that the victim would sit there naked, hanging, suffocating, in the hot sun for hours, sometimes even on record for days. That's the method and the horror and the brutality of the cross. Do you know that crucifixions were literally meant to erase the victim? Like they're left there to die, and no one wanted to be associated with a crucified victim, and so they were just left there, and after they suffocated to death, the Romans were coming by and giving them a proper burial. The vultures and the wild beasts would just come and eat these people, and so they were left there to be forgotten. It was the Romans way of squashing down revolutions and insurrections. The point of the crucifixion was to wipe the victims from memory and from history. So if the point of them being wiped out, if the point of the crucifixion was to wipe them from memory, how come we're still talking about it? How come we're still talking about one crucifixion thousands of years later? Here's what one scholar said. Of no other death in human history can this be said, the cross of Jesus stands alone in this regard. There were tens of thousands of crucifixions in Roman times, but only the crucifixion of Jesus is remembered, and is remembered as having any significance at all. Meaning this. Legend would have it that Peter the Apostle was also crucified, some say upside down. Maybe he was, probably he was. But the only crucifixion, the only crucified victim that you are certain you know the name of is Jesus. Because everyone else has been wiped from history. That was the point. But there's one crucifixion we're still talking about. So with all this brutality, with all the shame and the horror of it to wipe a victim out, why are we still here 2,000 years later talking about this event? Well, there's two little lines that begin to shed a little light on that for us in our passage. Two obscure little aside phrases that John says, he says at verse 24 and in verse 28, these random things, seemingly random details are being told to us by John, like the soldiers are like casting lots for his expensive tunic. And then there's this other moment where Jesus is hanging from the cross and he says, I'm thirsty. And in both of those situations, John says, is this little aside, he goes, this was done to fulfill the scriptures. This was done to fulfill the scriptures. You can't read John's account and not hear him repeating himself to like, with all these little details he's telling you is going, just so you know, that's taking place to fulfill all the scriptures, that phrase to fulfill the scriptures is a biblical shorthand way of saying, do you know that the things you're reading right now were predicted in prophesied long ago? For centuries, there have been predictions and prophecies mapping out every detail of what's taking place to Jesus right now. It says, if John is saying, when you read the account of Jesus's brutal death, don't for one second think that this wasn't planned a long, long time ago. In fact, the book of Revelation, later on in the New Testament, which John also wrote, we studied a few years ago, he gets this crazy vision, but one of the things that Revelation says is that do you know that the Lamb Jesus was slain, crucified, before the foundation of the world? Which means that the cross has been the plan since before time began. It's almost as if something cosmic is happening. It's almost as if something has been planned for a really long time. And John won't let you read his story, won't let you read his account, his eyewitness account because he's there, without you also knowing, hey, don't, don't miss this. It's seemingly random, it's seemingly happening like two Jesus and he is a victim, but don't mess this, don't get it in your brain that this was all just Jesus being a victim. God was planning this, this was happening to fulfill the scriptures. So why did God plan all this? Because of what it accomplished. Which brings us to the second point, the bounty of the cross. It's really proud of that B word, it was really proud to find one that worked out, worked on it for a while, bounty of the cross. Bounty, the reward of the cross, the treasure of the cross, the extravagance of the cross, the bounty of the cross. If you know the story of the crucifixion from the four gospel accounts, you know that there are well known and famously the final statements of Jesus across the four gospel accounts. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the last words of Jesus, they're known as the seven last words of Jesus. He speaks seven times across the gospel accounts. In Matthew, Mark, he says one thing and it's the same thing. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? That they kind of focus on that phrase from Jesus from the cross. But then Luke gives three unique words from Jesus from the cross and John gives three unique words of Jesus from the cross. So, Vandy grads, three plus three plus one is seven. There we go. Good job, anchor down. There are seven final statements of Jesus from the cross. John records for his three unique ones. And the first one is, it's really beautiful and there's a lot in there, we're not really going to talk about it. Jesus looks at John, the one who wrote it, the disciple whom he loved, and to marry his mother and basically says, take care of each other. And there's this beauty in like he's forming the church, like y'all are going to be a family now, my people. And there's a lot we can say about that. And then he says, a couple of sentences later, I'm thirsty. And again, that was to fulfill the scripture, Psalm 22 and also Psalm 68. There's lots that he's referring back to, but we're not really going to focus on it, but just showing the humanity of Jesus, the longing of Jesus, the pain of Jesus, and we could camp there for a while. But then, everything in John, everything from John 1-1, everything leading up to this moment is this culminating final sentence from Jesus that John the Apostle heard with his own ears because he's standing up the foot of the cross. John tells us in verse 30, the final words of Jesus before his death is this, and Jesus had received the sour wine, he said, it is finished. He bowed his head and gave up his spirit. At the end of his life, hanging in excruciating pain and shame, the suffocating Jesus lifts up one more time and says it is finished. That's three words in English, the Greek word there is to tell us, die. One word from Jesus. It is finished is fine translation, it's true, but semantically when we hear that word, it's like, oh, I finished. I finished eating a piece of cake or I finished smelling the lawn, and I kind of like did this menial thing. I finished a race, and I finished my homework, and it's true, but the word to tell us die is way deeper and way more complex than that. And to tell us, die is way more about, like. So someone who has a purpose, like a macro meta purpose or mission, and they've been assigned something like a mercenary or a king, they have a truckload of meaning and purpose and intentionality behind them. And when they get to the end of that, they say to tell us that I did what I accomplished, or I accomplished what I set out to do, I accomplished the mission for which I was sent. And so what Jesus is saying when he says to tell us to eye with his last breath is this, he's saying, "Yes, my life is over, but my mission has been fulfilled." The entire significance of his earthly life had come down to this moment. His purpose in coming at all was being accomplished, so what was Jesus' purpose? That now he is saying, as he's dying, to tell us that. What's he saying that for? Well, it would take the whole Bible to answer that question and to tell that story. So turn to Genesis. We're going to start. No. It's too much. It's like it takes the whole Bible to tell the story of what Jesus accomplished. In every aspect, every thread, every theme, every shadow, every prediction, everything is coming together. And Jesus is like absorbing all of it, all the sacred text of the Old Testament that had to do with the Messiah and had to do with the sacrifice and had to do with the atonement. Everything he's taking on to himself and he's saying, "It's accomplished now." A couple of them that each could be their own sermon, but they won't be. But Jesus is taking on these kinds of massive themes and threads and images that he's the Passover lamb from Exodus. He's the day of atonement from Leviticus, the curse of sin from Genesis 3, the ransom paid, the substitute, Christus Victor, meaning Christ the victorious one, did defeat his enemy, the new Adam, the new humanity, the wedding dowry, the down payment for the wedding that's coming is being paid. That was just like seven of them, so many threads that are all coming into Jesus and he's saying, "A all of that is being accomplished by my death." John would tell us that in Jesus' final triumphant word to tell us die, he's saying everything has been accomplished. Now, what's bound to fold about that? See how good that B word was? What's bound to fold about that? Is that Jesus is not an over exaggerator? He's not like us. Jesus is not hyperbolic. Jesus really did accomplish all the work needed for your redemption, for your righteousness, for your forgiveness, for your adoption, for your status, for your identity, for your homecoming, Jesus accomplished all of it. To tell us die, it is finished. So apply that bountiful non-hyperbolic statement from Jesus, apply it like in the macro sense I want to apply it to our life. If it really is finished, if it really is accomplished then what's left to do by you and by me, what must we do to accomplish and secure those realities for ourselves, our redemption, our identity, our status, our homecoming, our forgiveness? What's left to be done? Nothing. Well, there is one thing that you would be united to him by faith. You would be hidden with Jesus, which requires no merit or effort on your own. Nothing is required by you because Jesus has already accomplished everything. It's finished. It's done. Why is that just like a little offensive? And why is that hard for us to receive? So an article this week from New York Times about the death of yoga? I read a lot of yoga pieces, okay? No, but I'm not like on all the yoga blogs, but it was a really interesting article, death of yoga, and it's not saying no one does yoga. I know Fahrenheit is right down the road, okay, we're good. But like nationally, memberships are down, studios are closing, it's like yoga kind of had its day, and now that day is kind of going away. It's like frozen yogurt, you know, kind of had its day, and now it's gone. But, and so this journalist, she's asking like, what happened to yoga? Why did it go away? And her premise is this, is that people right now are obsessed with life-maxing. Like monitors and rings and sleep trackers and heart rates and nutrition and ingredients. And it's literally what she says is 24/7 self-improvement. And yoga may be a piece of someone's self-improvement, but here's the problem with yoga. It's too slow. Like it doesn't actually, like in the hour, it would take me to do a yoga class, like I could have been doing a lot more, and it doesn't give me the return on my time, and I got to be maxing out everywhere, I can't afford to do yoga, I can't, I can't like spend time on something that's this slow and seemingly doesn't accomplish enough. She says this, she says yoga tends to be about letting go of the ego, yoga tends to be about about letting go of striving and about surrender, and then she says principles that don't quite fit into a culture obsessed with optimization. In fact, in this year's report from the Global Wellness Summit, so I've never been to, suggested that the interest in maximizing every moment for people has actually begun to have the opposite effect on us. The report says optimization itself has become a stressor, like you're anxious about all the optimizing that you're not doing, and are you optimizing enough, are you maxing enough? I humble max, but that's all I do. I don't, like I'm like the best at it, no I'll show you, no I'm kidding, someone's leaving, I'm sorry, yeah, yeah, I would walk out too, I'm so sorry, yeah. Even itself has become a stressor, maximizing, optimizing, climbing, achieving. It's not just in like health and wellness and nutrition and working, it's all those things, it's also like your career, your resume, the letters after your name, your networking, the things you've accomplished, the things that you've done lately, the things you want to prove, like all of it is this, I have to be maxing out and optimizing myself and my life and my worth and my value and my legacy, I have to maximize all of it. Do you have any idea, not just the effect that that premise or that mentality is having on you and me, do you know what it actually says about you, like what does it say about us that we are a people who want to do that stuff, is that we are a people who suffer from what psychologists and therapists would call the illusion of self-sufficiency. We are people who think we are self-made, we are people who think with every hour and with every opportunity and every accomplishment that I can become more and more self-actualized, I can become more and more self-reliant. We think we control our destinies, we think we control our futures, we think it's in our hands and we kind of want it to be. And that premise, that approach to life, yes, it plays out in every secular sphere, like your job, your career, your family, your health, your body, it plays out everywhere. Do you also know what's driving that? The place where that reality drives you more than anywhere is in your religious and spiritual self, like we all believe in our spiritual self and our religious self that we must be self-made, we must achieve our standing, we must prove something before we can attain something, we must earn something before we deserve something. We have to have something to show so that if we ever finally do arrive, if that ever happens, we will be able to look at our arrival spiritually speaking and say, "I got here myself, I did it, I was disciplined, I therapist, I read, I maxed out, I didn't waste a second, I got there and I got there on my own." And we're exhausted from it. I mean, we're exhausted, we're depressed, we're apathetic, we're hopeless. And then we double down on it. And so no wonder, optimization becomes a stressor. It's wearing you out to try to optimize and max out your life because it's never enough. Do you know you can never do enough, optimize enough, max out enough, achieve enough, deserve enough? You can't do enough to ever feel steady and secure, you can't. It will not be enough, it will not deliver, you will not finally exhale on the other side of it. And then Jesus comes along in his suffocating final breaths and says to the deepest place in you that it's finished, it's done, it's been accomplished, it's been done for you. That the work required for you to be secured and safe has been done by Him. There's nothing left for you to do and you don't have to lift a finger. Now your pride will block at that and your fear, like can I trust it? But if you're exhausted enough and weary enough, you'll receive that bounty joyfully. Maybe that's why Brandon Flowers laid singer of the killers. New Americana record, thrasher, if you came out like a month or so ago? It's so good. Anyone listening to that record? We have no Christians in here. Who is listening? Thank you, Struin, one artist and heart. Thank you. Two people I know. It's a solo album, but the track plans, good, Lord, plans hits deep, it's one of the singles. Listen to what he says, he says, "So hold me in your arms, I think I'm going under. Take your time with my heart, it's been rattled by the thunder of the all you got engine. Always bound for the big show, drowning out the plans I drew up years ago, one, that's a great line. But two, do you know what he's saying? Do you know what he's belting out? This is not where I thought I'd be. I didn't want to be this maxed out, I didn't want to be this overworked, I didn't want to be this anxious, I didn't want to be this, I didn't want to be this way. But the all you got engine that doesn't stop is wearing me out, and it's drowning out the plans I drew up years ago, like it's not where I wanted to be, but I'm exhausted from it. I'm running so fast, I'm pushing so hard, I'm unable to rest, I'm incapable of receiving and the bounty of the cross speaks to that place, like you don't have to do it anymore. You don't have to run so hard, you don't have to prove so much, you don't have to earn anything. You don't even have to show Jesus how serious you are now, that's its own version of maxing and optimizing, you just get to receive, because it's done, he's already done it. Here you're suffocating Jesus with one final word of completion to tell us die. All of you're scurrying and maxing and racing and optimizing and trembling and swallowed up in the final word of your dying Lord to tell us die. And we could close there, it is finished, my sermon's not, because we could close, but I want to invite you into seeing this from one more perspective, and I hope it's a little bit reorienting or disorienting to your perspective. Is it so easy and so common, we're going to talk about the beauty of the cross now? It's so easy and so common with everything, like looking at a picture, going to a party, or reading scripture, to have the first thing we ask when we come to it, to ask it this way. What's this saying about me? What's this doing for me? How does it speak to my psyche right now and the thing that I'm going through, and if it doesn't really speak to it, then I'm kind of done with it. If I'm not really in that picture, I'm not really interested in it. If I don't look good in that take, then I can throw it out. And slowly but surely, here's what we do in many areas, but especially with scripture, we come to it and we become the focal point of it. Like what's about me in this, but what if that's not scripture's primary goal? What if scripture is not primarily about you? What if scripture is telling you the story of a king and his kingdom? What if scripture's primary purpose is the display in the revelation of who God is and what God is like, that the point of coming to scripture is to behold him. Not bend the words on the pages to see how they're about me. Several times in the New Testament, I can name for you like six of them right now that are explicit, explicit with no confusion about the full divinity of Jesus. So if theology 101, Jesus was fully man and he was fully God. And the full divinity of Jesus, a couple of those places, Colossians 1 says, Jesus is the image of the invisible God. He makes the invisible God visible. And then Hebrews chapter 1 says that Jesus is the exact imprint of God's nature. Jesus was fully God. Philippians 2 does it too. There's lots of places. Ephesians 1, but here's what's amazing. I just went and studied Colossians 1 and Hebrews 1 because to ask the question, I wonder what God's like. Here's what the Bible's answer would be for you. Look at Jesus. If you want to know what God is really like, look at Jesus because he is the image of the invisible God and he is the exact imprint of his nature. Okay. That is theology 101. Jesus was fully God. Do you know what's remarkable about all of the passages, but Colossians 1 and Hebrews 1, that say that truth to you, they all immediately, like in the next sentence, say, and don't forget the cross. Like once you've kind of settled, okay, Jesus was fully God, if you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus, every New Testament author is saying and look at the cross. It's almost as if the New Testament is adamant about telling you not only that Jesus was fully God, but that God went to a cross. You want to know what God's like? I'm sure you have a billion questions and you should. We all do and Jesus welcomes your questions. I'm not telling you to check any of your questions at the door. Here's what Scripture would encourage you to do. Filter all of those questions, all of them through this. The Jesus is showing you what God is like and God went to a cross. Please see Jesus here, flagged and beaten, carrying his own crossbeam, drinking sour wine, being mocked, suffocating his way to death, accomplishing everything and do not miss the fact that it is trying to show you what God is like. The God of the Bible was brutally murdered and unjustly executed. That's what God is like. The God of the Bible suffocated for you. The God of the Bible bore his own wrath. The God of the Bible died and you will find that in no other religion. He suffocates for his people. I have a crush on an 85 year old woman. Her name is Flemingerite Lidge, my wife's cool with it, she is, I love everything she's ever written. I want to meet her before she enters into glory, I don't know if that will happen, but I have read everything she's ever put out. Her magnum opus is a book on the Crucifixion. It's called Crucifixion. It's 600 pages and if you want a copy, I'll buy it for you. There will be a test to prove that you read it, but I would love to buy you a copy. I've got copies in my office. Listen to what Fleming says in her intro about the Crucifixion. Christianity is unique. The world's religions have certain traits in common, yes, but until the gospel of Jesus Christ burst upon the Mediterranean world, no one in the history of human imagination had conceived of such a thing as the worship of a crucified man. To say the same thing in another way, she says, to say the same thing in another way, the death of Jesus in and of itself would not be anything remarkable, what is remarkable is that the creator of the universe is shown forth in this gruesome death. Yes, the cross was brutal and yes, there is a bounty of what it accomplished for you, but please see this text and please see what it is showing you about Jesus. It is showing you that the creator of the universe is being shown forth, is being revealed in this way and he would say this is my coronation. What does it tell you about this God? What does it tell you about this King? And the more you ponder it and the more you behold it, something really mysterious begins to happen. The more you let this text be all about Jesus, the more you let this story be all about revealing to you what God is like, here's what you begin to see. You begin to see that this God, this Jesus, made his whole life for you. This whole life was about you and you don't get there by going, oh, what does this cross say to me? about me and what I'm experiencing, there's plenty of room for that and there's plenty of scripture about that, but let this text show you what God is like and then behold the God who made his whole life about you. If you see Jesus for who He truly is, you will be melted and you will be transformed. Fleming Rutherford tells this story as well in the crucifixion about American writer Joseph Mitchell, he wrote for the New Yorker for like 60 years, from like the 30s to the 90s. And Joseph Mitchell was having a conversation, he became a Christian much later in life in the city at Fleming's church and he's sitting with his dying sister on her deathbed. And as she lay dying, she asks him, she says, "Jo, what does Jesus' death on the cross a long time ago have to do with my sins now?" And Joseph sat in silence for a few moments trying to find the right words but finally said to her sweetly, "Somehow cis he took our place. Some how cis he took our place." And there are so many threads that we could unpack the theology and the richness and the bounty of what Jesus accomplished in his atonement and his forgiveness and his kingdom and his purchase of you. All that's true, but leave here pondering this, God took your place and let the bounty speak but let the beauty captivate you. What Jesus is saying to you here is, "I came to take your place." Let's pray. Jesus, you took our place. And that's what God is like. That's what you're like. There's so much to unpack and so many threads and so many themes that we could spend the rest of our life studying what that means but might we be captivated by the beauty of it instead? And our suffocating Jesus accomplished everything to show us what God you're truly like. Would you give us the faith to believe it? Would you give us the courage to rest in it? We pray in your name. Amen.