The Amazing Disappearing and Reappearing Cross

That is how the cross disappears from our messages. But how do we get it to reappear?

We do not have to. The cross is already there on every page of the Bible. All we have to do is to display and highlight the message of redemption that is inherent in every passage we preach.

The cross is there in biblical prophecy and symbols. The Old Testament presents pictures of Christ to us in many places. He is the rock that followed the Israelites in the desert, the cloud by day, the brazen serpent. He is there in the pattern of the tabernacle, the suffering servant, the fourth man in Daniel’s furnace, and so on.

But ultimately, typology is not the best way of showing Christ. Typological associations with Christ are welcome additions to a Bible story, but they are not the story itself.

A better place to see the cross is in the pattern of sin and God’s redemption. We see examples of redemption in the stories of the Bible—in Boaz’ redemption of Ruth, in the sacrifice of Isaac, in the prophetic suffering of David in Psalm 22, in the prodigal son, and in the good Samaritan. In these stories we see parallels to His nature, revealed in Christ.

The cross is also revealed by the incompleteness of our morality. We should never preach moral behavior as if it can save us or even make us a better person. The more we understand biblical morality, the harder it is to keep without God’s help.

The Law is an incomplete sentence, a subject without a predicate. If we name the sinner—“murderers,” for example—we must fill in the rest or we have not finished: “Murderers are forgiven on the cross.” The condemnation of the sin of murder leads to the murderer’s redemption in Jesus.

Likewise, when looking to the future, our hope is in God’s redemption—not our own perfectibility. The mistake of self-help and positive-thinking preachers is not that they are wrong but, again, that they are not complete. Christ alone will bring in the millennium. Until then, we live in a messy world where good people are treated unfairly, bad people are rewarded for being bad and whistling in the dark does not keep bad things away. The only thing that will keep us from disaster is God’s grace.

One thing above all will make the cross appear in our messages—if it is embedded in our own lives. The real reason the cross disappears from our sermons is because we allow it to slip out of the central place in our own lives.

Inside every evangelical Christian preacher is a legalist who wants to get out. Evangelical culture contains more than its fair share of legalism. Preaching the cross and the cross alone is never entirely comfortable to us. This is why we need the cross so much—because we are sinners like everyone else.

As the world becomes more complicated, our need for the cross becomes more necessary. Temptations are greater, inter-personal relationships are more difficult and the issues of the world are increasingly difficult. The one certainty we have in an uncertain world is that Jesus loved us and died for us on the cross. It is the one, true hope for change in an ever-devolving world. 

 If we keep the cross before our congregations, we will see lives changed. If we leave the cross out, or obscure it through concentrating on peripheral issues, then we will lose all possibility of positive change. The cross is the one, true remedy we have to offer a broken world. Let us be sure to display it proudly.

1. Bryan Chapell, Christ-Centered Preaching (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1994), 284.