Through the cross

There’s something that keeps bubbling up to the surface of my heart and wanting to be shouted from the rooftops, so here I am…buckle up. :)

One of the greatest deficits I see in the Body of Christ in America, is this odd phenomenon of people accepting Jesus as Savior in word, but in action denying Him as Lord. Meaning, one claims salvation, but this decision for Christ has no bearing on how they live their life or what they do with their heart moving forward. Because I accepted Christ in my early 20s and with it came a complete transformation of my life and heartbeat, I have always struggled to understand how encountering Jesus can leave someone unchanged. I also recognize that we each have our own stories, so that is not a statement made out of judgement, but genuine curiosity.

I wanted to share with you an image that the Lord gave me during worship a few months ago. In this image, Jesus hung upon the cross with his arms stretched out wide. One end of the nails protruded from his hands and the other stuck into the wood; and as your eyes followed the course of where the nail was pointing out the other side of the beam, it found a second set of hands. Standing behind the hanging body of Jesus with His arms outstretched, His hands upon the bleeding hands of His Son, was the Father. With this image came this call: Run through the outstretched arms of the Son, and you will find yourself in the arms of the Father.

But how many of us lay down our lives at the foot of the cross, and forget to pick up the life Jesus died to give us? Jesus isn’t ON the cross anymore. On the other side of the cross is the empty tomb and the torn veil; past the foot of the cross is the invitation to lay ourselves down at the foot of the throne; through the death of the cross is eternal life for us to live out now and forever. Are you coming to the cross and observing the price of salvation in the bloodstained wood…only to turn around and walk home without receiving what was paid for?

1 Corinthians 15:17,19 “If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins…If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.”

If to us the work of salvation is simply Jesus dying for our sins, we are hopeless; we will simply turn and sin again. Salvation is a two part thing, we die with Him and we are raised with Him: His death is our death, His resurrected life is our life. But if we never step through the extended arms on the cross, we will miss the extended arms of the Father…because Jesus didn’t primarily die to save us FROM hell, He died to save us FOR Himself and FOR an eternal, forever and for always freedom, joy, peace and life in His presence.

I think one of the biggest reasons the Body of Christ has been left unchanged is because we have missed the Father. We want to separate the Triune God and singularly choose the Godhead who demands nothing from us but gave all for us. The cross is approachable…on it hung a man like us; it’s where the serpent “crushed the heel”…where the “weakness of God” proved itself stronger that the power of man…we can wrap our heads around something weak and crushed and human…we can put into words what we find at the cross. But what we find through the torn veil…that is something altogether other…for who would even approach the Holy throne of the Living God but the one who by faith trusts the arms of the One who sits upon it. Yahweh is too glorious for human eyes to look upon, His Spirit moves in mysterious and miraculous ways…in His presence words fail…and hearts soar! It is there, in robes of white with new breath in our lungs, laid down a second time at the foot of the throne that we learn a whole new delight, not just that He is our Savior and also that we get to have Him as our Lord.

There is no better way to live.

And in truth, there is no other way to live forever.

A blind song.

I read Exodus 31–33 today in my reading plan, and I am undone. I choked my way through the children of Israel asking Aaron, the leader while Moses was up on the mountain with God, to make them a new god since Moses might not return. And then Aaron obliged them and fashioned a golden calf for them to worship, and I sobbed my way through his attributing the works of God to a shiny object fashioned by his own hands, and then with those defiled hands, making sacrifices to this idol on an altar. I wept and wondered at the relationship between Moses and the Lord; how he without hesitation placed himself between God’s wrath and God’s people—leaning on the promises from God’s own mouth. Tears ran down my face as I delighted in his desire to know God more; building upon his face-to-face friendship with God a desire to never live apart from His presence and to gain ever clearer vision of His glory. A terrible, beautiful read for sure.

But tucked into the middle of these verses, I found a sobering warning that I want to share with you.

While Moses was up on the mountain with the Lord as He wrote in stone His law, and while Aaron and Israel were worshiping an idol at the bottom of the mountain in their camp…somewhere in between stood Joshua. Unlike the rest of Israel, he was still waiting for Moses to return, his eyes were still looking up and his knees had not bowed to the calf of gold. And when Moses walked down the mountain to lay eyes on Israel’s rebellion, he met Joshua who said to him these chilling words: “There is a noise of war in the camp.” But he said, “It is not the sound of shouting for victory, or the sound of the cry of defeat, but the sound of singing that I hear.” (Exodus 32:17b–18)

Joshua didn’t know what was going on, but he recognized it as the noise of war. Israel DID know what was going on, but did not recognize that it was the noise of war.
To Joshua, the noises of war should have been clear—shouts of victory or cries of defeat. He was confused that while he recognized a war was going on, its sound was unfamiliar. Those in the war were singing. Why were they singing?

Because they didn’t recognize they were in a war.

Israel had folded to their fear and given themselves over to their true enemy. They had thrown away their faith in the God of Israel and given themselves over to their sight without a fight, and while they should have been crying out at their defeat, they were blind in their own rebellion and rejection of the Lord and instead danced around singing as the wrath of God threatened to pour down.

And that’s sobering. I feel like that’s a good consideration for today; we dance around our idols (anything—good or bad—that we place above the Lord), rejoicing in their shiny surfaces, singing praises to gods of our own making…not realizing that we are in a war and we are neglecting the fight. But if we don’t open our eyes, in the end there will be no collective shout of victory, instead there will be crescendoing cries of eternal defeat.

Open up your eyes, Church! Are you holding your place in the battle? Or have you chosen instead an empty song?