How We Avoid the Cross - 03/20/2016

WARNING PREACHY

I prayed Psalm 2 this week; 

“You are my son;
    today I have become your father.
⁸ Ask me,
    and I will make the nations your inheritance,
    the ends of the earth your possession.^”

And the alarms of illusion to Christ rang loud in my soul.

At the Baptism of Jesus Matthew 3:17 tells us that Jesus is the Son of God.

 ¹⁷ And a voice from heaven said,

   “This is my Son, whom I love;

      with him I am well pleased.”

And then Matthew 28:18 tells us that Jesus possessed all of the earth.

¹⁸Then Jesus came to them and said,

   “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”

But my summary of the illusion was not a neat and tidy as it appears here.

After Jesus had been baptized He was declared by God as His Son but before he arrived at the cross on Golgotha the devil tempted him to avoid the cross altogether.  The last temptation of Jesus in Mathew 4:8 tells us that the devil offered Him what God had promised Him way back in Psalm 2.  And the devil’s offer avoided the pain of the Cross.

⁸ Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ⁹ “All this I will give you,” he said, “if you will bow down and worship me.”

It must have been tempting to take the devil up on his offer.  This was quite literally a get-rich overnight scheme that was a guarantee.  It was better than one of those Facebook promises of wealth if you will just Like or Share a certain post.  All Jesus had to do was bow down and worship the evil one.

Sometimes when we think of “bowing down and worshiping Satan” we often think of dark covens of witches, human sacrifices, and tattoos, piercings, or our personal flesh cutting.  Such images of our minds have been propelled by the arts for many centuries and solidified and cemented for us during the middle-ages.  The reality, however, is that all it takes to worship the devil is to avoid the cross.  According to Jesus’ prayer in the Gethsemanean Garden, He even asked God to allow him to avoid the cross.  So I am positive that part of the lure of the devil’s proposition was the avoidance of the shame and pain of it.


When I think of it, I wonder how many times I choose to avoid the Cross in my own life  and how often I inadvertently bow a knee to the devil in order to gain that which God had already promised me.  I know that I have done it – and do it still.

So I am reminded that my words and my attitude need to be that of my Lord’s when he says in Mathew 16:23.

“Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; you do not have in mind the concerns of God, but merely human concerns.”