Part 1: The Cross Anticipated

There’s not a lot I know about the whole dating game. Just ask my wife. On our first date together I bought her a baguette and then stole her gloves (in fairness there were romantic elements as well). But one thing I remember reading in a book was that there are two key ingredients to a successful date – anticipation and spontaneity. Firstly you need to let them know something about the evening in order to get them excited. Secondly, you can’t tell them everything that’s going to happen, you need to leave room for surprise to keep them guessing. God knows a thing or two about wooing people to himself. We see this in the cross of Jesus, an event that was never plan B, but always part of God’s plan of saving people. What we see is that he leaves us clues in the Old Testament, little signs of the what’s going to happen on the big day, but equally when it finally happened, there was a sense of “wow, I never thought it would happen like that!” We see it clearly in passages like Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, Leviticus 16, and indeed in many others, but who would have guessed that it would be God Himself who would suffer on a cross, who would have imagined that by doing so it would deal with sin of the world and the effects of the fall. Who would have dreamed that it would restore the relationship with God that we were destined for. The passage I preached on a couple of weeks ago was Genesis 22. A ancient story designed to help the people of Israel understand concepts like fearing God and trusting him through the tests of life. But what we see quite clearly is the fingerprints of the salvation strategist, pointing us to what he would do in the future. Check it out for yourself. What we see here is:

1. The Sacrifice of the Father: Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son to God as a test of obedience. He is being asked to show whether he trusts God, and whether he loves his child more than the one who had blessed him with a child in the first place. God, as you might expect doesn’t ask Abraham to go through with it. But God the Father did not allow the same let off for himself. He gave up his Son, Jesus Christ, for us.

2. The Submission of the Son – there are some definite parallels between Issac and Jesus. He is described as the ‘only son’, and we are told he carried ‘his own wood’ upon himself as Jesus did. But what is clear is that Isaac wasn’t forced into this situation. Abraham was an ancient old man, whereas Isaac was a teenager – I’d like to see any Grandad wrestle a ‘Hoodie’ onto an alter. Clearly Isaac trusted and submitted to his father in this situation – he wasn’t forced or coerced, he submitted. Similarly, Jesus submitted himself to the Father when, with blood, sweat, and tears he chose the cross. This wasn’t ‘cosmic child abuse’ as has often been branded about, but a wonderful partnership between Father and Son, working together to restore humanity.

3. The Provision of the Lord – At the last minute an angel appears and tells Abraham he doesn’t have to go through with it. Instead Abraham sees a ram in a bush and sacrifices it instead. What we see here for the first time is the principle of substitution, again pointing to the self-substitution of God who went ‘in our place’, and died the death that we should have died. More on this in other weeks.

4. The significance of the place – why did God make Abraham travel for three days to reach the place of sacrifice? Why didn’t he do it in his garden shed? It’s all to do with the place. It was a place called Mount Moriah. You won’t believe where that place is identified as – only the same place that a greater sacrifice would take place a few thousand years later – yep – it’s Jerusalem, the holy city.

Can you see the plan now? Can you see that this was always God’s intention? To come himself in the person of Christ, to be crucified on a cross as a common criminal, and then to come back to life showing himself to be none other than God in flesh. More to come. Thanks to Derek Tidball for the four points.

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