Why I Believe the Cross of Christ is a Hard to Believe Message

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Good Friday can invoke the mind of the Passion of the Christ. No, I'm not talking about the Mel Gibson movie "The Passion of the Christ" but the very sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Our Lord Jesus became that final sin sacrifice. I want to do some reflection on why I believe the cross of Christ is really that hard to believe as a message of truth. 

John F. MacArthur's book "Hard to Believe: The High Cost and Infinite Value of Following Jesus" writes on pages 26-27 which is is "Chapter 2: The Hard Truth" under the subheading "The Shame of the Cross" the following truths that made preaching the Gospel very hard:

The Greeks wanted wisdom and the Jews wanted a sign. God gave them exactly the opposite. The Jews received a skandalon, a crucified Messiah - scandalous, blasphemous, bizarre, offensive, unbelievable. And for the Greeks were looking for esoteric knowledge, something high and noble and lofty, all this nonsense about the eternal Creator God of the universe being crucified was idiotic (at least to them, emphasis mine).

From both the Greek and Roman points of view, the stigma of crucifixion made the whole notion of the Gospel  claimign Jesus as the Messiah an absolute absurdity. A glance at the history of crucifixion in first-century Rome reveals what Paul's contemporaries thought about it. It was a horrific form of capital punishment, originating most likely, in the Persian Empire, but other pbarbarians used it as well. The condemned died in agonizing slow death by suffocation, gradually becoming too exhausted and traumatized to pull himself up on the nails in his hands, or push himself up on the nail through his feet, enough to take a deep breath of air. King Darius crucified three thousand Babylonians. Alexander the Great crucified two thousand from the city of Tyre. Alexander Janius crucified eight hundred Pharisees, while they watched soldiers slaughter their wives and children at their feet.

This sealed the horror of the crucifixion in the Jewish mind. Romans came to power in Israel in 63 B.C. and used crucifixion extensively. Some writers say authroties crucified as many as thirty thousand people around that time. Titus Veaspasian crucified so many Jews in A.D. 70 that the soldiers had no room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies. It wasn't until 337, when Constantine abolished crucifixion, that it disapepared after a millennium of cruelty in the world.

Crucifixion was a repugnant, demeaning form of execution for the rabble of society. The idea that anybody who died on the cross  was in any sense an exceptional, elevated, nobel, important person was absurd. Roman citizens were generally exempt from crucifixion unless they committed treason. The authorities reserved the crosses for rebellious slaves and conquered people, and for notorious robbers and assassins. The Roman Empire's policies on crucifixion led Romans to view any crucified person was absolutely contemptible. The Romans used it only for the scum, the most humiliated, the lowest of the low.

Soldiers flogged the victims, then forced them to carry their crossbeams, the instruments of their own death, to the crucifixion site. Signs around their necks indicated the crimes they had committed and they were stark naked. Then the soldiers tied or nailed them to the crossbars, hoisted them into an upright post, and suspended them there, nude. The executions could hurry the death by shattering their legs, bcause that left the victims unable to push themselves up in order to fill their lugns with air. If no one broke the legs, the death could last for days. The final indignity was the corpse's hanging there until thes cavengers ate it. 

A few paragraphs later, we can read on pages 29-29 the following words that totally addressed the Jews:

They (the Jews, emphasis mine) saw crucifixion not only as social stigma but as a divine curse. So the stigma of the cross went beyond social disgrace, all the way to divine condemnation. the Meshnah, a second-century A.D. commentary on the latw of the Pentateuch, indicated that blaspheers and idolaters alone were to be crucified; even so, the executioners hung their bodies on the cross only after they were alreayd dead. How could the Messiah be a blasphemer? How could God be a blasphemer of God? The Jews gagged at the idea of a crucified Christ. It made the Gospel unbelievable.

The very Gospel in itself is really hard to believe because it defies the worldview. It's already hard enough to believe that salvation is not by individual effort but by the grace of God. People are so used to seeing their gods as imperfect beings who judged them like civil magistrates. The Greeks believed that Hades (or Pluto for the Romans) would either send them to the Elysian Fields if they were good people or to Tartarus (the equivalent of Hell) if they were bad. There were many gods like Hades around the world like Yama in India and China also served the same function. Yet, the Gospel was declaring that salvation was through Jesus Christ alone. The Gospel's message that salvation is not by one's own effort but by the grace of God was unthinkable. People are so used to salvation in mythology but not to the salvation of Christianity. The salvation of Christianity wrecks the very idea that we're saved by works such as how the pagans believed they were. Even today, that message can be mistaken for Antinomianism or that salvation by grace abolishes the Law. Yes, there are some heretics who teach that and I don't deny it. However, the Gospel message remains the same that salvation is through Jesus Christ alone and that He can change even the worst of sinners. The Pharisees hated that message because they thought that they were good enough. People hate that message for the same reason as the Pharisees. Others hated the message because they thought nothing was wrong with their bizarre religion such as the prevalent sex worship in the form of phallic worship and temple prostitution. 

Accompanied by the message of salvation not by works but through Jesus alone is the cross. The cross is very hard to comprehend. Some people might want to view Jesus as a masochist and ask why He didn't fight back. You can talk hours and hours about obedience to His Father about the sins of mankind and they'll find it absurd. You can say that the Father could've just declared us righteous without having to sacrifice His Son. Yet, the Bible says that blood must be shed for the forgiveness of sins (Hebrews 9:22). Tell anybody that and the reaction is to think God must be a cruel monster who obsesses over blood sacrifice. They might even say believing Jesus saving us by His blood isn't a mentally healthy idea. Crucifixion, as said, was reserved for the worst of criminals. Why do you think the Pharisees wanted Jesus crucified of all punishments? They could've begged Jesus to be stoned. Why crucifixion of all punishments? Why did they want Jesus to die outside the city? It's because they wanted a cursed death for Jesus. The Pharisees were probably thinking that their predecessors were unjustly given the death of the lowest of the low. Jesus is given the sentence of crucifixion, a death only for the worst, which is hard to believe. The fact that Jesus who has no sin getting a penalty for the worst of sinners is just unthinkable. The fact that the sinless Son of God becoming the final sacrifice for sins for the worst of sinners by crucifixion is just unthinkable.  You can gather all the facts and talk about it but skeptics are still bound to ignore it. They dared Jesus to come down from the cross so they'd believe (Matthew 27:40, Mark 15:30). Jesus rose from the dead and what did they do? Later, they decided to bribe the Romans to lie that the body was stolen (Matthew 28:12). Unbelief is still there even in the face of so much evidence.

Just think the Jews had all the Scriptures to point them to the Messiah. They were already told somebody from the Tribe of Judah and the line of David will be the Messiah. Isaiah 51-53 already outlined the rejected Savior. Yet, many of the Jews were still hardened in unbelief. Some of them didn't even believe in Jesus until after the Sunday resurrection. Jesus' own maternal half-brothers didn't believe Him to be the Messiah until the resurrection (Psalm 69:8, John 7:5). A lot of the converted crowd in Acts 2 were complicit in the act of crucifying Jesus. Peter convicted the crowd of their involvement in Jesus' crucifixion before giving them the message of forgiveness. Meanwhile, the Pharisees still continued in their unbelief. Fortunately, Saul of Tarsus was later a Pharisee who became like Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus. Saul of Tarsus later became Paul the Missionary. 

Many of these facts are really hard to believe, right? That's why Jesus during His ministry said that no man can come to Him except by the power of God the Father (John 6:44). The very hard-to-believe truths are beyond the mental comprehension of man. The power of salvation really rests upon the power of God drawing men unto Jesus. You can give anybody the Gospel, present all the facts, and guess what - there's a 99.9% chance that the person will just laugh it off. That's why I really am starting to think the doctrine of unconditional election explains it better. Nobody can easily believe the brutal, bloody message of Good Friday without the supernatural work of God. It would take a supernatural calling or choosing to get the person to believe such a bloody message. 

None of the bloody message's contents make sense to the naturally fallen mind except if the Father draws people to the Son whom He offered us as the once-and-for-all sacrifice for sins. I believe God the Father drew Mattias to become one of the twelve (in place of the apostate Judas Iscariot). I believe God the Father drew Saul to Jesus on that day of the road to Damascus. It was no accident that Saul was on His way to Damascus before getting saved. I believe God the Father drew the eleven saved disciples to Jesus. John 15:16 says Jesus chose the eleven who were saved and that they didn't choose Him. God's election is needed because there is none that seeks God. Instead, Jesus is the one seeking and saving the lost. What the lost need is mercy and not fairness. If life were always fair then nobody will enter Heaven because we all deserve Hell. This doctrine of election sets a huge mark of mercy for people who have no ability to believe apart from Christ. 

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