824. Understanding the Shame of the Cross

Welcome to The Daily Platform from Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina.

Today's speaker is Dr. Steve Pettit. I'm going to ask you to take your Bibles and turn with me please to the book of 1 Corinthians. 1 Corinthians chapter 1. We'll begin reading in verse 18 and we'll read down to the end of the chapter.

Paul says these words, For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved, it is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Where is the wise?

Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that in the wisdom of God, the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. For the Jews require a sign, and the Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness. But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

Because the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For see your calling brethren, how that not many wise men after the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble are called, but God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty, and base things of the world and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to naught things that are, that no flesh should glory in his presence. But of him are ye in Christ, who of God is made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, that according as it is written, he that glorieth, let him glory in the Lord. And may the Lord bad his blessing to the reading of his word, and all God's people said, amen. At the very heart and the core of the New Testament is the preaching of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. You could say this way, Christianity is a cross-centered message. However, there is something that is distinctly missing today when we preach the cross, and in one way, we can't help it.

You say, what is that? Well, in 337 AD, 1700 years ago, crucifixion became an obsolete form of execution, because it was outlawed by the Roman emperor named Constantine. So, in effect, crucifixion was eradicated from human culture.

Think about it, when was the last time you saw a criminal executed in public by being nailed to a tree? In other words, it's not a part of our culture, it's not a part of our psyche. So today, when we preach the cross, it's impossible for us to feel or to sense what it would have been like in ancient times. Because in ancient times, crucifixion created a particular atmosphere, and that atmosphere was the atmosphere of shame. The famous Roman philosopher Cicero called the cross the tree of shame.

He said the very word cross should be far removed, not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears. The Jewish historian Josephus called crucifixion the most wretched of deaths. Even the writer of Hebrews mentions the word shame twice in his book with regards to the crucifixion of Jesus. Hebrews 6, 6, if they shall fall away, to renew them again unto repentance, seeing they crucify to themselves the Son of God afresh, and they put him to an open shame. And then probably the most famous verse of all, Hebrews 12, 2, where it says Jesus endured the cross, despising the shame. So, in New Testament times, the atmosphere of shame prevailed the minds of the people with regard to crucifixion.

An atmosphere we do not have today. Today, people put crosses on a wall, or around the neck, or in a church building, or on top of a steeple. But you would have never had that in ancient times. So this morning, I'd like to do the best I can to open up our mind and our emotions to understanding the shame of the cross.

What would it have been like back in the first century? Why is it that when the cross was preached by Paul, people so reacted to it? And then, what is God's intention in having Jesus die on a shameful cross? Let's begin this morning with seeing the crucifixion from the perspective of history. When we go back in antiquity, we see that crucifixion was used for particular purposes.

Number one, it was used to gain political control. Crucifixion was invented six centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ. Invented by the Persians.

It was used by all kinds of different countries for over a thousand years. For example, when countries would wage war against one another, they would wear down a city by sieges, and then they would publicly crucify those that they captured in front of the city walls. You've heard, of course, of Alexander the Great.

He laid siege to the city of Tyre in Sidon, which is in Lebanon today. It's written of Alexander, it said, the wrath of the king presented a sad spectacle to the victors for 2,000 people hung fixed to crosses over a huge stretch of the shore. When they conquered the people, they would crucify their leaders and bring them under the control of fear. It was also used to control slave rebellions. I'm sure you've heard of the famous slave named Spartacus.

He led a rebellion of slaves against Rome in 73 B.C. Eventually they were defeated, and 6,000 slaves were nailed to crosses on a stretch of a road called the Appian Way, leading to the city of Rome for over 200 miles. So, crucifixion was gained to get political control. But it was also used as a means to deter crime.

For example, in the days of Christ, Rome ruled the Mediterranean world. That time was called the Pax Romana. And though the Romans by and large viewed crucifixion as horrifying and disgusting, they still believed in it.

Because they knew it would maintain law and order and protect the people against the violence of criminals and notorious robbers. So because of this, the Romans intentionally made crucifixion as humiliating and as painful as possible. One Roman orator, Quintilian, born about the time of Paul's conversion, praised the crucifixion of criminals as a good work. He said these words, Whenever we crucify the guilty, the most crowded roads are chosen where the most people can see and be moved by fear so that the sight may deter others from such crimes.

What aggravated things further was the fact that its victims were never buried. When you hung on a cross, you rotted on the cross. A Roman philosopher named Seneca writes, who lived during the times of Christ, he said, I see crosses there, not just of one kind, but made in many different ways. Punished with limbs outstretched, they see the stake as their fate.

They are fastened and nailed to it in the most bitter torment, evil food for birds of prey and grim pickings for dogs. So crucifixion was a process that was designed to make death both as humiliating and as painful as possible. So what was the process of crucifixion? Well, first of all, the criminal would be beaten. He would be flogged beforehand. Then the victim would have to carry a beam that weighed upwards to 100 pounds to the place of crucifixion on his back after it had been beaten. Then when he arrived, he would be nailed with his hands outstretched.

He would be raised up. The two pieces of the cross would be brought together. There would be a little wooden peg that would allow the man being crucified to literally sit on that so he could get air in his lungs and it would extend his life and thus extend his suffering.

And during the entire process, the Roman government would allow the executioners to express themselves in the most sadistic ways. So let me read to you John chapter 19 beginning in verse 1 of the crucifixion of Jesus. It said, Pilate then took Jesus and scourged him. And the soldiers twisted together a crown of thorns and put it on his head and put a purple robe on him. And they began to come up to him and say, Hail, King of the Jews.

And they slapped him in the face. And they took Jesus and he went out bearing his own cross to the place called the place of the skull which is called in Hebrew Golgotha. And there they crucified him. And with him two other men, one on either side and Jesus in the middle. So the end result of crucifixion was the creation of an incredible atmosphere of shame.

So think with me. What would it have been like for Paul to go into the Roman world and preach the gospel of a crucified savior? What do you think people would, how would they think? When Paul preached, he went to the centers of Roman power like Corinth and Philippi and Iconium, all Roman colonies. He went to cities like Ephesus and Thessalonica that had Roman governors who followed Roman legal practice, especially in capital cases. They would crucify people. So everybody, Roman citizens, Gentile peasants and slaves, they were all aware of the shame of the cross. So what were the reactions of the people who heard Paul preach? Especially when he said that through this crucified man, you could get eternal life.

What would they do? And that leads me to the second thing and what we see in crucifixion from the perspective of the hearer. Notice the reactions Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 1 and verse 23.

Look at what it says. It says, but we preach Christ crucified unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks foolishness. What Paul is saying is when I preach the message to the Greeks, and by the way the Greeks is not referring to people living in Greece, it's referring to Gentiles. So you have Jews and Gentiles, the only two people races in the world. He said when the message is preached to the Gentiles, they look at it as foolishness. When the message is preached to a Jew, it becomes a stumbling block.

So what were those responses? Well let's look at the response of the Gentile. It says he saw the cross as foolishness.

The Greek word for foolish means moron. In other words, to believe in the cross, you would be a moron. Justin Martyr, who was the earliest Christian apologist, who was born in 103 AD, right after the apostle John, said the Christian message was described as madness.

We would say you're crazy. He writes, they say that our madness consists in the fact that we put a crucified man in second place after the unchangeable and eternal God, the creator of the world. To the Greeks and to the Romans, in their mind, they worshipped immortal gods.

They had a pantheon of gods. They had nothing in common with the cross. How could intelligent people believe that a crucified Jew, who died as a common criminal, be a divine being? It doesn't make any sense. To claim that he's God's son, the creator, the redeemer of man, the coming judge of the world, an educated man would think that this is utter madness. You're crazy.

You're a moron. A famous Roman politician and pagan writer who lived during the time of the apostle John, his name was Pliny the Younger. He described Christianity as a perverse and extravagant superstition. Another Roman orator whose name was Cassilius said, to say that their ceremonies center on a man put to death for his crime and on the fatal wood of the cross is to assign to these abandoned wretches sanctuaries which are appropriate to them and the kind of worship they deserve. They mocked people that believed in the crucifixion. There was a well-known illustration back in ancient times of a caricature of a crucified man with a donkey's head. With this inscription underneath written, Aleximinos worships God. In other words, they viewed Jesus with the head of a donkey. So for the Romans to honor someone as a god who is nailed to the cross by the Romans as a criminal against the Roman government was insanely crazy.

You had to be a moron to believe it. Now think with me a moment. Imagine the burden that placed on the early Christian missionaries. I mean honestly, this is the message you're supposed to preach for people to go to heaven. This is the message. And as soon as you start preaching it, people start reacting violently against it. You would think that maybe at some point you would want to change the message. For 2,000 years, the temptation of the church has always been to change the real message.

Because folks, the real message is this. God's son had to become a man and die on a cross in order for you and I to go to heaven. The shame is not in Jesus on the cross. The shame is that you put him there.

That's the real shame. Jesus died on a shameful cross because we live shameful lives. But that message was considered foolish. And that's why the temptation of the church has always been to change, to modify, to weaken the message, to make a different emphasis instead of having a cross-centered message. Even in the church of Corinth, as a young Christian community, they could not get away from the stigma of the crucifixion. They were wanting to lead the congregation into a more enthusiastic life in the Spirit and the enjoyment of heavenly realities, not in the reality of the cross. And that's why Paul said that the foundation he laid in his preaching was Jesus and Him crucified. So, they saw it, the Greeks, the Gentiles saw it as foolishness. But what about the Jews? What does the Bible say? It says from the standpoint of the religious Jew, the cross was a stumbling block.

So what does that mean? Well the word stumbling block is the idea of causing somebody to trip up and fall. Have you ever tripped up and fall? You know where you feel embarrassed?

Maybe you tripped over a root or something on the ground? Well the idea of stumbling block is this message would actually cause people to turn away. We would put it in terminology today where I would say, I don't buy that.

Or I can't believe that. So the preaching of the cross did not cause the Jew to believe, it actually caused them to turn away. But not only turn away, but turn away violently. In other words, they would react, they would oppose what Paul said.

Why? Why was the Jew so reactionary to the message of the cross? Well two basic reasons. Number one, because of their view of the Messiah. You see the Jewish people believed in a coming king, a coming prophet, and a coming priest all wrapped up in one person. He was called the anointed one, the Messiah, or the word Christ because Messiah and Christ are the same word.

This Messiah would come and he would restore Israel's former glory. It's what the disciples looked for. They followed Jesus believing that when Jesus went to Jerusalem, he would set up his kingdom and they would be with him. They didn't expect the crucifixion. The fact is Jesus told his disciples over and over, he's going to be crucified and they didn't get it.

They really didn't understand it until after he resurrected from the dead. And so for a Jew to believe in a Messiah that would be crucified, it didn't make any sense to them at all. It's the ultimate contradiction, a crucified Messiah. Messiah means power. Crucifixion means weakness. Messiah means splendor. Crucifixion means humiliation. Messiah means triumph. Crucifixion means defeat.

The two don't go together. And so they could not imagine that their Messiah would be hung on a tree and be put to death by the Romans. But then there's another reason why it was a stumbling block and it had to do with an Old Testament text. And that text is found in Deuteronomy 21 verse 23 where the law states that if a man is hung down a cross, he comes under the curse of God. And so it says, his corpse shall not hang all night on the tree, but you shall surely bury him on the same day, for he who is hanged is accursed of God.

So, I mean, think with me. If Jesus hung on a cross, that means he was being cursed by God. How can he be the Messiah? How is it possible for God to curse his own chosen one?

It was inconceivable. So when Paul preached that Jesus was the Messiah and he was crucified, they didn't just sit there, fold their hands as if they were bored with his sermon. And they didn't sit there and say, whatever. But in violence and anger and in rage, they attacked the preachers. And by the way, the very man who wrote this, Paul, was a Jewish Pharisee. And he was the one that led in the stoning of the first martyr of the church, Stephen, because of his preaching of the crucifixion.

Paul was actually a zealot against Christianity. And he hated the cross until he met Jesus and his eyes were open to see the truth. So in ancient times, there was this reaction to the cross.

And you would think that this kind of preaching would sink the church's ship. However, it is the message of the cross that has forever changed the world. And the whole reason you're sitting here today and the whole reason Bob Jones University exists is because of the cross of Jesus Christ. That leads me to the last point and that is this, what then is the right perspective on the crucifixion? We'll take it from the perspective of heaven. And what Paul does is he clarifies God's intention behind the cross.

And there are two things. The first thing is this, that God chose the cross as the way to destroy human wisdom. It's the way God deals with human pride. Look at verse 18, For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness, but unto us which are saved is the power of God. For it is written, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and I will bring to nothing the understanding of the prudent. Paul here is quoting from the book of Isaiah. 700 years before Jesus was born, Isaiah foretold that God would humble man's pride and wisdom by taking something that no mere human being in his right mind would have dreamed up. In other words, nobody is smart enough to figure out salvation through a crucifixion. And so we read in Isaiah 29 and 14, Therefore God says, behold, I will proceed to do a marvelous work among this people, even a marvelous work and a wonder, for the wisdom of their wise men shall perish, and the understanding of their prudent men shall be hid. God said 700 years before Jesus was even born, I'm going to humble man's arrogance.

Do you know what? Human beings, we all here are arrogant by nature. We're all proud, we're all puffed up, and in particular, we all believe that we can do it ourselves. If you were to ask the average person who has no knowledge of the gospel, what do you have to do to go to heaven? Immediately their answer is what they're to do, because they have the assumption that they can work their way to heaven. And do you know what the cross says? The cross says, you can't do anything to save yourself.

God intends through the cross to humble our pride, and God get the glory and honor. It writes in verse 20, where is the wise man? Where is the scribe?

Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? Wisdom is man's thing. The cross is God's thing. The world thinks the cross is crazy.

The cross says God is wise, because man, no man would have ever been wise enough to dream this dream. So why the cross? Because God wants glory. You know why this campus exists?

This campus exists for God's glory, not for your glory. It's not about you. It's not about me. It's not about anybody.

It's about Him. And that's why God said the cross is my way. And then there's a second reason. And that is not only to deal with man's pride, but to demonstrate God's power. Look at verse 21.

For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know God, God was pleased through the foolishness of preaching to save those who believe. Think about it. What can you do with the cross?

I mean, really? What value is the cross to us? What wisdom is there in the cross to us?

To put somebody on a cross and kill them? And what God is doing is God is demonstrating that He has the power to save anybody who believes in the cross. Do you know what God wants to do? God wants to save your soul from your sins.

And the only way you can do that is through the cross. God doesn't save you through the church. God doesn't save you through baptism. God doesn't save you through your good works. God doesn't save you by trying to do better. Because you know what the cross says?

Nobody's done better. You know what the cross does? It shames us for our own shameful life. And what God is saying is, on the cross, I am demonstrating to you how much I love you, because when we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. That's a demonstration of God's love. God must love us to send His own Son to die such a horrible death. For God to be shamed for your shame is not just about His justice, but it's about His mercy. And when God says, I save man, I do it for my own glory. And that's why He says in verse 22, look at these words. For indeed, Jews ask for signs and Greeks seek for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified. To the Jew a stumbling block and to the Gentiles foolishness, but to those who are... Would you notice the word called?

Both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and wisdom of God. What does it mean by calling? Calling is what God does in your life to bring you to salvation.

Let me put it this way. On the one hand, nobody really decides I'm going to come to Jesus. Because in your own self, you would never come to Jesus. The word calling there is actually referring to the way God works in your heart to bring you to salvation. And the word calling has basically an outside and an inside call. The outside call is the preaching of the gospel.

Jesus Christ went to a cross, died on the cross to save you from your sins, and you need to trust and put your faith in the cross and in Jesus to save you. That's the outside call. That's calling you to make a decision. Everywhere Jesus went, he called people to make decisions. Today, I'm going to call you to make a decision. What are you going to do with Jesus?

Are you going to accept him or reject him? You either believe or you don't believe. That's the outside call. But you know what?

That's not sufficient. Because that's not going to change your heart unless there's an inside call. And that's the work of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one who's able to make the unwilling willing because nobody here is willing to come on yourself.

Let me put it this way. Unless the Spirit of God does a work in your heart, you would never believe at all. The Bible says that unless the Father in Heaven draws you, you would never come to the Son. And so he is telling us that the miracle of the preaching of the cross is that a message that is foolish to the world and a stumbling block to the Jew, you preach that message and what does God do?

A miracle. He draws people and he takes the unwilling and he makes them willing and they come and they believe. That's the glory of God. Because I didn't come to Jesus because I just wanted to.

Because you know what? I don't want to. The first time I heard the Gospel, I was a 17-year-old teenager here in South Carolina. I didn't want to get saved. I wanted to go to Heaven, but I didn't want to get saved because I didn't want my life to change. And so over the next two years, God worked in my heart through various messages that I heard and through circumstances. And on Easter Sunday 1975, my freshman year of college, listening to the crucifixion and the message, the Spirit of God drew me and I came.

And do you know what? It's that kind of salvation that God gets glory in because he does it by his grace. So there's some of you sitting here today. You're not saved. If you died today, you would wake up in Hell. Christ died on the cross of shame for you. Would you believe that?

Would you embrace that? Not just as facts in the head, but in the complete dependence in your heart. I'm trusting Christ on the cross in his death alone to pay for my salvation so that the shame of the cross becomes the glory of the cross for the believer. Would you bow your head with me please as we pray? Father, we thank you for the cross that is our glory. And we thank you that you bore our sin on the cross and paid for our sin in full that we could have eternal life. O Lord, may the cross be always the center of our message here at Bob Jones. And may the result of that cross-centered preaching produce a people that are not only converted, but they're humble. And they are grateful. And they hate sin. And they love sinners. In Jesus' name. Thanks for listening and join us again tomorrow as we study God's Word together on The Daily Platform.