“God provides a way of redemption for us that is not limited to an intellectual elite, but is so crass, so crude, that the primitive person can comprehend it, and, at the same time, so sublime that it brings consternation to the most brilliant theologians. But I particularly like the second word, obscene. It is a most appropriate word because the cross of Christ was the most obscene event in human history. Jesus Christ became an obscenity. The moment that he was on the cross, the sin of the world was imputed to him like it was to the back of the scapegoat. The obscenity of the murderer, the obscenity of the prostitute, the obscenity of the kidnapper, the obscenity of the slanderer, the obscenity of all those sins, as they violate people in this world, were at one moment, focused on one man. Once Christ embraced that, he himself became the incarnation of sin, the absolute paragon of obscenity.
“It is an obscene symbol that we display to the world, the symbol of the cross. There is a sense in which Christ on the cross was the most filthy and grotesque person in the history of the world. In and of himself he was a lamb without blemish—sinless, perfect, and majestic. But by imputation, all of the ugliness of human violence was concentrated on his person.”
[Sproul, R. (1996, c1991). Following Christ. Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers.]
No comments:
Post a Comment