Regional Synod of Canada - Reformed Church in America

Pioneer Christian Monthly

Date - May/93

Contributor - Ron Sikkema

Title - The Centrality Of The Cross

Topic - Meditation

The sun is warming the earth to bring out its fertile potential for the summer coming. We have just passed through the remembrance of Christ's death and resurrection, which equally provides a fertile place for growth in faith and its fruits in the Church.

I am reminded of Paul's insistence that his message as a church planter be focused on the cross. According to Paul, preaching is always within a context of "worldly wisdom" which vies for credibility. He determines to preach "Christ crucified" (I Cor. 1.23). He even goes so far as to say, "For I resolve to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified" (I Cor. 2.2).

This message of Christ crucified was the starting point and staying point for Paul. Starting points are important because they will always determine where you will end up. Throughout the centuries of the Church there have been a variety of starting points, all of which are biblical, but which differ from Paul's. When the Church has started from a different point, it has ended up in a different point. Disagreements, splits, formation of movements and denominations have occurred as reactions to what are perceived as false doctrines and practices within the Church or the local church. Many of these perceptions have been legitimate. Many have not been. Divisions within the Church and churches have most often caused a reactionary shift in the starting point.

Movements and denominations have emerged from a variety of starting points. I don't pretend to be inclusive in this list, but only illustrative. For most of those within the Reformed and Calvinistic history, the sovereignty of God has dominated as the original starting point. Later, the holiness of God as the starting point influenced the pietistic movement. The eminence of God may be the starting point for the "Charismatic" movement. Each movement has corrected something they saw as inadequate or wrong, and in the process, has most likely moved the starting point.

Each of these characteristics of God, which can be the starting point for a church or group of churches, will influence their ethics and what has been traditionally labeled as piety. The starting point shapes the church's world view, the way it lives out its Christian faith, the attitudes towards ethics, evangelism, church polity and church discipline. These starting points and attributes of God are certainly all biblical. The simple (simplistic) list above is well documented in revelation and is defendable as forming, the axes around which all other thoughts should revolve.

Conservative Christians (which, unfortunately, often means you and me - and I'm not too sure about you) will usually go back at least as far as their personal experience takes them, or at most as far back as their learning of history takes them. This means we are all tempted to use, as a standard starting point, a place which has shifted from the starting point of Scripture. Perhaps there is no alternative. At least we need to acknowledge that our faith, ethics and piety has been informed and shaped by our own personal and collective experiences. To be conservative" should always imply going back to the world view or at least the starting point of Scripture.

What did Paul mean when he said that he determined to know nothing among his newly forming Christian believers than Christ and Him crucified? He certainly said a lot of other things which define the faith and practice of those who follow Christ.

I believe that Paul was laying the cornerstone for the Christian faith in the centrality of the cross. From that cornerstone - the cross - the rest of the structure will be developed, including both faith and practice.

The cross, first and foremost, describes God. God acts in history through the cross. In the cross we see the heart of God laid bare, initiating the only way God dealt with evil and its effects on all creation, and especially its effects on human lives. In the cross, God was in Christ, restoring what had been destroyed by evil.

Throughout his recorded ministry, we see God in Christ confronting the footprints of evil. They led through homes broken and destroyed, bodies racked with pain and deformity, political and religious systems which were designed to bring and support life and instead were bringing captivity and death, personalities short-circuited and dominated by demonic presence, and even in the elements like the storm on the Sea of Galilee. God, in Christ wept at the effects of evil in the hardened hearts of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, for the footprints of evil led into the Temple and the court of the Sanhedrin.

How could this distortion, this evil, come to occupy the very centre of "chosen" Israel? The same way it happens in us. Addiction. We may call it sin. But what it means is that we can take anything fundamentally good and twist it so that it becomes evil. The Pharisee had, as the starting point of his faith, the holiness of God. All his ethics and piety were born of that central attribute of God. That starting point convicted Jesus, the Messiah, to death by crucifixion.

Was there any other way than the cross to break the addiction of and to evil? No. Education in the truth doesn't do it. If it could, Jesus would not have to die. Self-discipline couldn't do it. The Law was effective only in bringing a knowledge of sin, not freedom from it. Everywhere the Evil One went he poured out his cup of poisoned addiction which is ultimately death; and when Jesus asked if there was any other manner in which the addiction could be broken, He was told no. He must drink the cup as one himself addicted. God so loved the addicted that God gave the cup to Jesus, that through Him the cup of death became the communion of deliverance and life to all who drink His blood. On Good Friday the Heart of God died out of love for the addicted ones.

That is the heart, the centre, the core, the starting point of our message to each other and the world. If it starts at any other point it will end up as destructive. The root of all things is the cross. The fruit is salvation, justification, sanctification and glorification. If we make any of the fruits the root or the starting point, we are going to end up somewhere other than where God ends up.

The starting point is the cross of Jesus Christ. The value system of the culture will not "take" to it because it makes sense, but as many as the Spirit moves to take the cup of Christ, the cross will deliver and bring life ever lasting. To take up our cross means we give whatever God has given us and use it in the opportunities at hand to communicate the heart of God. With the Spirit going before us to prepare the way, cross bearing is the easiest and most joyful task in the world.

Happy cross bearing and sharing!

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