Jesus Christ’s crucifixion displays, more than any other event in history, the extraordinary character of the one true and living God, our Creator and our Sustainer, in whom we live and move and have our being, the Judge of the whole earth. The very essence of the Christian faith is found in Jesus Christ and Him crucified. 

However, many in the professing church and in its pulpits are baffled by the cross. When they consider that the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, was nailed to a cross outside the walls of Jerusalem about two thousand years ago, they regard this event with sheer sentimentalism. After decades of attending church, teaching Sunday School, and living exemplary moral lives, they are still ignorant about the very heart of Scripture’s claims concerning the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.

How different is that grievous reality from the magnificent conviction of the first disciples of Jesus Christ, those witnesses of His life, crucifixion, and resurrection. The apostles not only documented Jesus’s life, miracles, and appearances, but also His humiliation and death. They did not shrink from thoroughly and accurately documenting the Last Supper, the garden of Gethsemane, and the arrest, trials, whipping, crucifixion, and burial, of the Lord Jesus.

Nevertheless, these were not sentimental or discouraged disciples. They were dynamic men filled with a divine energy. “The people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits” (Dan. 11:32). It is the message of the cross that creates this strength of character and life. That message bifurcates the response of all who hear it: it is either total folly, like belief in the Loch Ness Monster, or it is the most relevant and life-transforming reality possible for men and women living on this planet. The apostle Paul stated that “the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18).

We might have expected Paul to write that the word of the cross is the wisdom of God, or the love of God, or the mercy of God, or the grace of God, but he says that the proclamation of the crucifixion is the power of God. What God did on Calvary was far more than all that the brilliant achievements of mere man could ever accomplish.

The transference of guilt from the souls of an innumerable company to the God-man required not only vast mercy, but also unimaginable divine energy. It required that same omnipotent love and might that made a cosmos by a divine word. The daily transformation of all who claim, “I was crucified with Christ” can be affected only by omnipotence.  

All the evangelical church is wringing its hands about a crisis stemming from a felt lack of power in her pulpits. Christians feel marginalized as their presence and opinions are brushed aside and ignored by the watching world. Popular speakers and church revitalization specialists offer many suggestions as to how a powerful, living voice from heaven may be heard again in our gatherings. However, Paul tells us that this renewal cannot occur apart from the word, the logic, the doctrine of the cross. It is the one declaration that God will always accompany with His power.

In contrast, the absence of the cross—as it is revealed to us in the New Testament—will always result in a vacuum at the heart of our worship. Cross-less preaching and cross-less worship are like Shakespeare’s Hamlet without the Prince, like Van Gogh’s paintings without the sunflowers, like the history of American baseball without a mention of Babe Ruth, like the victory of the Second World War without Churchill. Without the cross, the sermon becomes a display of the wisdom of man, a hopelessly insipid collection of religious and moral comments.  

I do not mean that our worship should be characterized by the vain repetition of a phrase like “Jesus died for our sins,” but rather by the rich, multifaceted declaration and explanation of what was occurring on the green hill far away. The professing church will always be quite impotent and powerless without this big declaration of the accomplishments of the Son of God on Golgotha.

Christianity claims that there is one true understanding of the cross, and it causes a radical response in favored men and women. No other understanding can create that change in thinking and values. No other message contains such extraordinary power. We are claiming that there is but one valid understanding of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Once that understanding has grabbed you, it means that things are never the same again. As a direct consequence, you begin to love God as never before; you love your neighbors quite selflessly, and you deny yourselves.

The apostles gave their lives to spread the word of the cross throughout the known world. That word transformed the lives of many hundreds of thousands of people. It is just as relevant and life-transforming today as it was twenty centuries ago. In fact, it is only the cross that has transformed the destiny of the universe and will continue to change the lives of millions until the end of the world.

The article above is adapted from Geoffrey Thomas’s newest book, “Knowing the Cross.”