Dear friends,
Holidays are always marvellous opportunities to relax and catch up with friends, but the Easter holiday is even better because it gives us time to think about the greatest weekend in human history: when our Lord and Saviour died and rose again. The death of Jesus was so great that I would call Friday not just good, but the best Friday.
Yours,
Phillip
Phillip Jensen: Welcome again to Two Ways News. Friends, if you wish to contact us at Two Ways News, you can email us at respond@twm.email and one of our team will get back to you. Thank you to those who have given us some feedback. We enjoy knowing what some of you are thinking about and where possible, being able to answer questions that you raise. In this episode and the next one, we're talking about Easter - actually about Jesus and his death and resurrection, which Easter celebrates. Do you like the Easter holidays?
Peter Jensen: Yes, and it's right to say that Good Friday and Easter Day are the two greatest events on our calendar. It's precisely because of this that every day is Good Friday, and every day is Easter Day. So significant are these events that the Christian life is lived, circling, if you like, the cross and the resurrection.
Phillip: But you like Christmas much more than I do, don't you?
Peter: Well, it's a good time to have a holiday, yes. I love Christmas, it's true, but Good Friday and Easter Day are the great days.
Phillip: Why would you say that's the case?
Peter: They are the points at which the salvation of the world took place. Of course, it wouldn't have happened without Christmas, without the birth of our Saviour. But it does happen at that point. And hence, it's the greatest moment, at least to my mind.
Phillip: The Christian year no longer dominates our Western society, but Christmas and Easter have been retained thanks to the commercialisation of our holidays.
Peter: Indeed. We brought our kids up with a sort of Santa Claus, for example, and things like that, seeing them as fairly harmless in the sense that we didn't take them too seriously. I can remember going on a walk with my firstborn, Michael, when he was about six and saying to him, “Michael, you do know that Father Christmas is not real, don't you?” He looked up at me and said, “Of course not. It's you and Mum, I know that.” Well, in other words, he was never deceived, not for a single moment.
But in other words, for us, those things didn't get in the way of the joy of Christmas, the coming into the world of our Saviour, Immanuel, God with us, Jesus, who would take away the sins of the world. But I agree with you about the commercialization of both Christmas and Easter.
Phillip: It's one of our differences. Our children didn't have Santa Claus.
Peter: They're poor, deprived children.
Phillip: In part, it’s my reaction against the cultural Christianity with which we were raised, not just the commercialized, but the cultural Christianity, because I bought into it completely as a child. When coming to Christ, I realized it just confused and misled me. And I disliked it. I remember growing up, our family didn't eat meat on Good Friday, and we had to be quiet at home. We weren't allowed to play in the backyard on Good Friday. It was a very sombre day that you couldn't say was celebrated. It was much more like Bad Friday than Good Friday. It was fast time, not feast time.
Peter: You've just said something that may need to be justified. You said something like, Good Friday is the greatest day of the year, or it memorializes the great event. Is it? Can you say that without Easter Day? Is there something special about the cross that sets it apart almost as the crucial point?
Phillip: You can't separate the two. If Jesus hadn’t risen from the dead, the cross would have been a failure. If he hadn't died for our sins, then there would be no resurrection. So, our separation of the two for intellectual reasons is unwise and unhelpful in a sense. But it's fascinating that the New Testament keeps writing about the cross. The gospel is the gospel of Christ crucified. When you read the book of Acts and notice how they preach, they don't preach the atoning death of Jesus; they preach the resurrection of Jesus. Especially to the Gentile world, but even to the Jewish world. But when they talk about what they're preaching, ‘we preach the Christ crucified’. That's the great emphasis that comes in Paul's explanation of what he was doing. And so the cross becomes the great symbol of Christianity. It might be just that it's hard to wear a kind of open grave as a piece of jewellery, whereas the cross is an easy thing to put into jewellery. The cross is the great sign by which people know Christianity, and it's an offensive sign. So Christians invented the Red Cross out of Geneva. But if you read their description of their history, the Red Cross organization is no longer willing to acknowledge its Christian foundation, but it was a very Christian foundation. Muslims insisted on having the Red Crescent because they saw the centrality and importance of the cross. I can't separate Good Friday from Easter Day, but on the other hand, it is the best day.
Peter: Why may that be the case?
Phillip: At the cross, my sin is dealt with, and the more conscious we are of our sinfulness, the more gloriously we will embrace the cross. It is not just that the cross has dealt with sin; the cross has dealt with my sin, and my awareness of my sinfulness is great. The older I get, the more aware I am of it. Not that I am more sinful than I was; it's just that I am more conscious of the reality of my utter sinfulness. Therefore, to have it dealt with and the burden taken away is a tremendous relief for me and for anyone conscious of their sinfulness. However, it is more than that. It's the fact that God should love us so much that he would bear our sin. He takes our sin and justice so seriously, and yet he is so generously merciful that he doesn't just sweep our sin under the rug. He deals with it fully and completely, and so that makes the day such a good day. It took me some years to learn why it was a Good Friday, but once you understand the cross, it is Good Friday only because you can't call it Best Friday.
Peter: You remind me of John Newton, the man who wrote Amazing Grace. He once said, “These two things I remember: that I am a great sinner and that Christ is a great Saviour.” Here's a man who did so much good. He was responsible for many wonderful things, including helping Wilberforce to put an end to slavery. But he saw himself as so deeply sinful that his only hope was the cross of Christ.
Phillip: But he was publicly so sinful in that he was a slave trader.
Peter: Yes, before he was converted to Christ.
Phillip: I've heard recently of a church that is now banning Amazing Grace because of cancel culture. That shows the difference between the cancel culture of the world and the amazing grace of the death of the Lord Jesus Christ. That we, in our self-righteousness, don't sing the songs of a slave trader because that man sinned, so we will remove him. As if I am not as sinful, or as if I would never do such a thing if I lived in the same situation, the same time, and the same place.
I'm conscious that lack of opportunity and imagination are two great saviours of my sinfulness. If you understand your true sinfulness at its depth, then who am I to be pointing the finger at a slave trader? And especially one who, by the grace of God and the mercy of God, turned his life around so totally as to help bring the end of slave trading.
It’s more than just repentance. I remember talking to a Muslim friend and presenting to him the problem of God. I said, if God is all justice, he would as a Muslim say he is, and if God is all merciful, as again, a Muslim would say he is, then how can he be both? And how can I be assured that I will receive his mercy and not his justice? He said, 'Well, by my repentance.' And I said, 'Your repentance is insufficient to pay for all your sin; your repentance is crossless. No one is paying for your sin. God cannot be all just and forgive you.' And if he is not all merciful, it doesn't work, does it? But here in the cross of Jesus, we see the full mercy of God and the full forgiveness of God. And that impacts our Christian life in terms of assurance of forgiveness.
Peter: It does, and you've put your finger on something profoundly important and somewhat forgotten in a fair bit of Protestant Christianity - the depth of our sin. As the old song says, ‘Nothing in my hand I bring.’1 And people have dealt with the sin issue in different ways. But one of them, and it's not unpopular in Protestant circles, is to say that we mustn't exaggerate our sin and perhaps define sin differently. Evil desires are not included as part of our sin, but rather only if we act upon those things. Excluding evil desires, in the end, takes you away from the cross because the cross then becomes less significant than it was. The reverse side to that is that if to some extent you are responsible, perhaps by your own free will or whatever it is, for your own salvation, you can't have fundamental assurance. Your assurance is based on something in yourself. In the Catholic system, the Council of Trent, which is the definitive council from the 16th century, really indicated that assurance was not possible because, if you weaken your view of sin to make way for good works in some way, then how can you be sure you've done enough? So assurance becomes very difficult.
Phillip: Assurance of what, Peter?
Peter: By assurance I mean an absolute confidence that God has forgiven you your sins and that you are walking with the Good Shepherd. It's another name for faith, but a faith that can say, I cling to the cross of Christ, and therefore I know that I am his.
Phillip: Does it mean you know that you are saved?
Peter: Yes. And that you will be saved.
Phillip: A lot of people say that's arrogance to think that you're going to be saved.
Peter: It's the reverse of arrogance. If I believed that somehow I contributed to my salvation, it would be arrogance because I'd be building on my own good works. But if I recognize that it is solely the work of Christ at the cross, then it's not arrogance but humility. Matthew 11:28 says
Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
There has been an assurance deficit in the Protestant churches over the last few years, and that assurance deficit, that uncertainty about our salvation, has resulted in a new openness to miracles and spiritual experiences. This can be taken to mean that all is well because God has done this for me or done that for me. But although we do draw immense comfort when we see God answer prayer, if we rely upon those things, we will not have profound assurance. In the end, it has to be based on the sheer fact that Jesus died for me.
Phillip: On many gravestones, you see the letters RIP, Rest in Peace. But for someone who has confidence and faith in the death of the Lord Jesus, the headstone should say At Peace. It's too late to be praying for peace, and that's part of the reason why we don't pray for the dead. That the decision is now made, and it's made in the death of the Lord Jesus.
Part of the problem that you're speaking of is not just the lack of awareness of sin, but it's also a shift in our thinking away from retribution. As a society, we have given up on the concept of retribution because it's painted as being reactionary vengeance when we are more enlightened than that. So, we've created harm minimization. In our state here in New South Wales, where our city, Sydney, is the capital (for those of our overseas friends), I think in about the 1980s, we gave up the title of the Department of Prisons. We now have a Department of Corrective Services, which, frankly, I think sounds like Joseph Stalin. It's utilitarian in its view; we don't put people in prison because they've done something wrong. After all, we're not punishing them. We're putting people in prison to correct them, to protect society from them, and to warn society not to do the kinds of things they're doing.
In other words, it's the government's social engineering. If your whole philosophy of life has removed right and wrong, removed wrongdoing, and removed punishment for wrongdoing and replaced it with social engineering, not only do you wind up with the horrors of Stalin, but you don't understand the cross. Jesus dying on the cross no longer is a punishment being paid for; Jesus dying on the cross now is an example of love, which it is, but it's much more than that. Therefore, my sin is never actually dealt with.
It is challenging to see families calling for justice outside courts while our system is exercising social engineering; it jars every time you see it in the media because the sense of justice is critical. You can actually lock up people without them doing the wrong thing if you're really into social engineering, but justice requires punishment, and that's what Jesus takes. 2 Corinthians 5:21
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Peter: I agree with all you've said, and I'd like to add an observation. In the New Testament, I can immediately think of two places, but I think there are three or four, where the death of Christ is referred to in terms of the love of God. Galatians 2:20
I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Whereas you and I would write ‘loves me,’ he writes ‘loved,’ past tense. It is a clear indication that saying ‘Jesus loves me’ is only because you know that he loved you and gave his life for you. Jesus said in John 15:13,
Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends.
If you want to know whether Jesus loves you, you need to know that he loved you.
Phillip: It's in John 3:16 too, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son.’
Peter: Yes, of course, the resurrection, but the cross has to be the critical turning point. It's interesting that Samuel Zwemer who in the 19th century was a great missionary amongst the Muslims, has a sentence in one of his books in which he points out that the cross is the sinner’s test point, the turning point for the gospel. I think it is, and it’s no accident that many of our Muslim friends don't believe Jesus died on the cross, for the very points that you made before about retribution and grace and the possibility of being forgiven despite the fact that you are a sinner.
Phillip: You can't be forgiven unless you're a sinner.
Peter: And I don't think you could be forgiven unless there's retribution possible.
Phillip: That's right.
Peter: The two things go together.
Phillip: It must be the case that we can know that we're forgiven because the price has been paid.
Peter: By the person who forgives us by not taking vengeance, for example, and paid in full, ‘a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world,’ as the Book of Common Prayer says.
Peter: Phillip, just one last thing to change the focus here a little. Wherever you go throughout the world, the cross is recognized as the symbol of Christianity. Why would the cross, the equivalent of the hangman's noose or the electric chair, have so captured people's minds and hearts that it has now become universally recognized? Wasn't the idea of the cross ludicrous?
Phillip: Yes, the cross was a recognised symbol in Jesus' day. It was the recognised symbol of Roman conquest, of shame, of ignominy, and of painful torture. We get a little caught between two things here. One is spending Good Friday thinking of the historical activity of what happened when Jesus was crucified. And the other is understanding what God was doing in the death of his Son. The cross is such a reality of humiliating, shameful defeat and pain that when it comes to Good Friday, people try and reenact it to try and capture what it was that happened. But that misses the point. The point is that God was in Jesus reconciling the world to himself. To keep talking about what the significance of the cross is without talking about the historicity of the cross is a big mistake because it was a real man, on a real cross, on a real hill, who did suffer and die. But to appropriate that is by faith and repentance, thanksgiving for the salvation that was won on that occasion. So, when people heard of the cross, they made fun of it. There's that old graffito in Rome. What was that again?
Peter: Yes, it's probably dated from about 200, and it displays a cross and a man on the cross and a man worshipping in front of the man on the cross. But the man on the cross has a donkey's head, and underneath it are the words ‘Alexamenos worships his God.’ It was meant to make fun of Christians. Paul says the same thing in 1 Corinthians 1:23
But we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles.
One of the fascinating things about the spread of Christianity is how you would never, ever choose that message if you could avoid it.
Phillip: This is the great central thesis in the book Dominion,2 that the cross has conquered the world, but no one in their right mind would conquer the world with a cross. It's the opposite of what you expect. The Romans, the Persians, the Germans, whoever has tried to conquer the world has done it through power, strength, and violence. And here is the man who has conquered the world by the violence that he endured for us. It's the exact opposite of the other conquerors. They killed in order to win. He was killed and has won.
Peter: And he was called the Prince of Peace.
Phillip: Good Friday is the best of days.
Rock of Ages, Augustus Montague Toplady
Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind (Basic Books, 2019)
Scripture quotations are from The ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Links & Recommendations
For another talk on this topic, check out this sermon by Phillip on Mark 14&15.
https://phillipjensen.com/resources/my-god-my-god-why/
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