Christ-Centered Means Cross-Centered

J. I. Packer remembers:

Some sixty years ago, Dr. D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones addressed a pre-term conference of the Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (OICCU), Oxford's Inter-Varsity chapter, of which I was a member. I had not heard him speak before, but he had the reputation of being Britain's supreme gospel preacher, and I listened to him with intense interest. He dug into the first two chapters of 1 Corinthians, which he described as perhaps the two most important chapters of the Bible for mid-twentieth-century Christians. I well recall how he began his message on Christ crucified according to 1:17-31. He told us that the hymn he had had us sing to start the session was the only one he could find in our hymn book that focused directly on the meaning of the cross in and of itself, as distinct from the blessings that flow to us from it and the grateful adoration it evokes. He said that this reflected the modern weakness of celebrating benefits from the cross without seeking clarity as to what Christ's dying had done to achieve them for us.

The hymn in question was the following, written by Fanny Crosby (Mrs. A. R. Cousin). Physically almost blind from bad surgery in childhood, she saw and stated the biblical significance of the cross with great precision. I had never met the hymn before, and I have never forgotten it since; it anchors my heart and fuels my praying still.



O Christ, what burdens bowed thy head!

Our load was laid on thee;

Thou stoodest in the sinner's stead,

Didst bear all ill for me.

A victim led, thy blood was shed,

Now there's no load for me.



Death and the curse were in our cup:

O Christ, 'twas full for thee!

But thou hast drained the last dark drop,

'Tis empty now for me;

That bitter cup, love drank it up,

Thy bruising healeth me.



Jehovah lifted up his rod;

O Christ, it fell on thee!

Thou wast sore stricken of thy God;

There's not one stroke for me.

Thy tears, thy blood, beneath it flowed;

Thy bruising healeth me.



For me, Lord Jesus, thou hast died,

And I have died in thee;

Thou'rt risen-my bands are all untied,

And now thou liv'st in me;

When purified, made white and tried,

Thy glory then for me!

Along with that hymn, I have since come to treasure this one, by the more rhapsodic Charles Wesley, which covers similar ground from a similar standpoint and with a similar thrust.



All ye that pass by

To Jesus draw nigh;

To you is it nothing that Jesus should die?

Our ransom and peace,

Our surety he is,

Come, see if there ever was sorrow like his.



The Lord in the day

Of his anger did lay

Our sins on the Lamb, and he bore them away;

He died to atone

For sins not his own,

The Father hath punished for us his dear Son.



Love moved him to die,

On this I rely;

My Savior hath loved me, I cannot tell why;

But this I can tell,

He loved me so well

As to lay down his life to redeem me from hell.



With joy we approve

The plan of his love;

A wonder to all, both below and above!

When time is no more

We still shall adore

That ocean of love, without bottom or shore!

To anyone who is flagging in prayer and fellowship with God, I would recommend meditation on such words as these. A renewed sighting of the cross will always invigorate and motivate. Let me quote another of my favorite hymns on that.



We sing the praise of him who died,

Of him who died on the cross;

The sinner's hope let men deride,

For this we count the world but loss.



Inscribed upon the cross we see

In shining letters, "God is love";

He bears our sins upon the tree,

He brings us mercy from above.



The cross! It takes our guilt away,

It holds the fainting spirit up;

It cheers with hope the gloomy day,

And sweetens every bitter cup.



It makes the coward spirit brave,

And nerves the feeble arm for fight;

It takes its terror from the grave

And gilds the bed of death with light.



The balm of life, the cure of woe,

The measure and the pledge of love;

The sinner's refuge here below,

The angels' theme in heaven above.

I do not see how Christian devotion can sustain itself if we lose sight of the cross-that is, the cross-work, as we may call it-of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Centrality of Christ

The cross of Christ, thus understood, is, as the preceding chapters have argued, the heart of the apostles' gospel and of their piety and praise as well; so surely it ought to be central in our own proclamation, catechesis, and devotional practice. True Christ-centeredness is, and ever must be, cross-centeredness. The cross on which the divine-human mediator hung, and from which he rose to reign on the basis and in the power of his atoning death, must become the vantage point from which we survey the whole of human history and human life, the reference point for explaining all that has gone wrong in the world everywhere and all that God has done and will do to put it right, and the center point for fixing the flow of doxology and devotion from our hearts. Healthy, virile, competent Christianity depends on clear-headedness about the cross; otherwise we are always off-key. And clear-headedness about the cross, banishing blurriness of mind, is only attained by facing up to the reality of Christ's blood-sacrifice of himself in penal substitution for those whom the Father had given him to redeem.

Why then is it that in today's churches, even in some professedly evangelical congregations, this emphasis is rare? Why is it that in seminary classrooms, professional theological guilds, Bible teaching conferences, and regular Sunday preaching, not to mention the devotional books that we write for each other, so little comparatively is said about the heart-stirring, life-transforming reality of penal substitution? Several reasons spring to mind.

First, we forget that the necessity of retribution for sin is an integral expression of the holiness of God, and we sentimentalize his love by thinking and speaking of it without relating it to this necessity. This leaves us with a Christ who certainly embodies divine wisdom and goodwill, who certainly has blazed a trail for us through death into life, and who through the Spirit certainly stands by each of us as friend and helper (all true, so far as it goes), but who is not, strictly speaking, a redeemer and an atoning sacrifice for us at all.

Second, in this age that studies human behavior and psychology with such sustained intensity, knowledge of our sins and sinfulness as seen by God has faded, being overlaid by techniques and routines for self-improvement in terms of society's current ideals of decency and worthwhileness of life. It is all very secular, even when sponsored by churches, as it often is, and it keeps us from awareness of our own deep guilty and shameful alienation from God, which only the Savior, who in his sinlessness literally bore the penalty of our sins in our place, can deal with.

Third, in an age in which historic Christianity in the West is under heavy pressure and is marginalized in our post-Christian communities, we are preoccupied with apologetic battles, doctrinal and ethical, all along the interface of Christian faith and secularity-battles in which we are for the most part forced to play black, responding to the opening gambits of our secular critics. Constant concern to fight and win these battles diverts our attention from thorough study of the central realities of our own faith, of which the atonement is one.

Fourth, heavyweight scholars in our own ranks, as we have seen, line up from time to time with liberal theologians to offer revisionist, under-exegeted accounts of Bible teaching on the atonement, accounts which in the name of Scripture (!) play down or reject entirely the reality of penal substitution as we have been expounding it. The effect is that whereas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century evangelicals stood solid for penal substitution against unitarianism (Socinianism) and deism, and taught this truth as no less central to the gospel than the incarnation itself, today it is often seen as a disputed and disputable option that we can get on quite well without, as many already are apparently doing.

What in the way of understanding our Savior and our salvation we lose, however, if we slip away from penal substitution, is, we think, incalculable.

The Centrality of the Cross

Early in the visionary chapters of the book of Revelation, where images are prodigally piled up, one on another, in order to convey thoughts to readers' minds, the Lord Jesus is announced as "the Lion of the tribe of Judah" who will open the scroll for the consummation of world history (5:5). But the Lion appears not as a lion but as "a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain" (v. 6 ESV). The Lamb appears thereafter twenty-eight more times, battling, conquering, shepherding, and finally functioning as the lamp that gives permanent light to his bride, the holy city, new Jerusalem, that is, the church perfected in glory (21:23, cf. 22:1-5). In this book, then, the slain Lamb is a key image for the Lord Jesus Christ. Where did it come from? Clearly, from (1) the Passover lamb, the blood of which shielded Israel from the destroyer at the time of the Exodus, plus (2) the God-prescribed ritual of killing a lamb, with the transgressor's hand on its head, as a sin offering (Lev. 4:32-35), plus (3) the required daily sacrifice of two lambs as sinful Israel's offering to its holy god (Ex. 29:38-42; Num. 28:3-6), plus (4) Isaiah's description of God's servant, the vicarious sufferer who became a sin offering, as being led "like a lamb . . . to the slaughter" (Isa. 53:7), plus (5) John the Baptist's identification of Jesus as "the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world" (John 1:29, 36). And for the Lamb to be the lamp of the city of God means that the thought of the Son of God made flesh and slaughtered for our sins in order to save us will never leave the minds of glorified saints as they fellowship with the Father and the Son and will frame all their thinking about everything else.

So all we who hope for the life of heaven ourselves, and especially those among us who as pastors are statedly committed to prepare others for that heavenly life, will do well to adjust our thinking here and now to the absolute and abiding centrality of the atoning cross in Christian life here and hereafter and to labor to express this awareness in all our preaching, teaching, and modeling of Christianity, day by day.