Image: Spring scene, Charlottesville, Virginia. April 2016
And almost all things are by
the law purged with blood; and without shedding of blood is no remission
(Hebrews 9:22).
We are
left to ponder the scandal of a crucified Christ, who not only died on the
cross but whose blood was also poured out there for the remission of our sins.
This
has long been an offense.
In 1
Corinthians 1 Paul could speak about the preaching of the cross as foolishness
to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews.
It was
an offense to the early Gnostic heretic Marcion, who wanted a more
sophisticated, non-Jewish religion.
David L. Dungan notes that Marcion claimed Jesus “had not been
crucified. The mob of Jews mistakenly crucified someone else (possibly Simon of
Cyrene) and ignorant Christian writers got the truth completely garbled…..” (History of the Synoptic Problem, p. 48).
This
denial was taken up by Moahmmed in the Koran (Surah IV):
And for their saying, “Verily
we have slain the Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, an apostle of God.” Yet they slew him not, and they crucified him
not, but they had only his likeness.
And it
has been denied in modern liberal theology which preaches the Fatherhood of God
and the brotherhood of man but is embarrassed by the cross. The liberal twentieth century minister Harry
Emerson Fosdick called the preaching of the cross a “slaughterhouse
religion.” The contemporary British
so-called “evangelical” Steven Chalke has called the preaching of the cross a
form of “cosmic child abuse.”
But
the Scriptures still stand bearing witness that without the shedding of blood
there is no remission. It is not an
accident of history that Christ was crucified and that his blood was shed. It is not an embarrassment. It was the perfecting of the new
covenant. It could not have happened any
other way. This was the signature work
as the Mediator of the New Testament.
Grace and peace, Pastor Jeff Riddle
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