-The Message Of The Cross

The Message Of The Cross “The message of the cross ... to us who are being saved it is the power of God.” 1 Corinthians 1:18 NIV

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There is nothing like the cross. It stands in all its solitary greatness and grandeur in the center of eternity. It stands as the wonder of every intelligent creature, and the pillar upon which is indelibly inscribed the evil and hatred of the fallen being, and the goodness and love of God. Out from amid the shadows of the past it looms in all its brightness and blackness, truth and treachery, sunshine and shadow, faithfulness and falseness, righteousness and sin, judgment and mercy, compassion and cruelty, love and hatred. By its light the heart of heaven is revealed, and the deepest depths of the abyss of evil are discovered. The blessing and the curse lift their voices together. There tosses foul the inky sea of human guilt, and there the undefiled ocean of divine grace swallows up everything with its swelling tide. Nothing in the past can compare with it, neither can anything in the future arise to rival it. There appears the greatest sin the creature ever committed, and there is the mightiest display of infinite mercy on the part of God. There man is tested in every spring of his moral being, and there the compassions of God are sounded to their depths.

It is where the hostile, fallen creature lifts impious hands, and strikes at his Creator with deadly intent, and it is where the answer of the Creator was given in unspeakable and infinite love. It is the witness of wickedness impossible to be exceeded by man, and it is the evidence of favor which God Himself could never repeat. The volume of wrath, curse, judgment and woe which encircles Golgotha, the regions of the lost could not enclose; and heaven itself shall not be vast enough to circumscribe the love, the grace and the mercy which have been there expressed.

By J. W. H. Nichols

With permission to publish by: Sam Hadley, Grace & Truth, 210 Chestnut St., Danville, IL., USA. Website: www.gtpress.org

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