God's Love for us

God's Love Shown in the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ There is a question that sits at the heart of the Christian faith, a question that every honest believer has wrestled with and that every skeptic has used as an objection: if God is love why did He allow His Son to suffer and die in the most brutal way the ancient world had devised? How can the crucifixion, an act of such extreme violence, such deliberate cruelty, such complete human degradation, be described as an act of love? How can the cross, the symbol of Roman execution at its most savage, be the place where the love of God is most completely and most powerfully demonstrated? These are not questions to be dismissed or deflected. They are the right questions, the questions that lead, when pursued with intellectual honesty and genuine openness, to the most extraordinary and most personally transforming answer available to any human being. Because the cross is not despite God's love, it is the fullest and most complete ex...

Why Barabbas Was Released Instead of Jesus Of all the details surrounding the trial and crucifixion of Jesus Christ there is one that is simultaneously the most legally bizarre, the most humanly unjust and the most theologically profound, the release of Barabbas. A man guilty of insurrection and murder goes free. The innocent Son of God is handed over to be crucified in his place. The guilty man walks out of prison. The innocent man walks out to Golgotha. And in this exchange, so stark, so unjust and so seemingly incidental to the main narrative, is contained in miniature form the entire theology of the substitutionary atonement that the cross accomplished for every human being who has ever lived. Matthew 27:15-26, Mark 15:6-15, Luke 23:13-25 and John 18:38-40 all record the Barabbas incident, all four Gospels considered it important enough to include. Understanding why it matters, what it reveals about the nature of what Jesus was doing on the cross and what it means for every perso...

The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ Everything in the Christian faith stands or falls on two events. Not on the quality of Christian ethics, though the ethics of Jesus are the most extraordinary moral vision ever articulated. Not on the beauty of Christian community, though at its best it is the most transforming human community on earth. Not even on the power of Christian prayer or the comfort of Christian hope, though both are genuine and extraordinary. Everything stands or falls on two historical events that happened within three days of each other in Jerusalem approximately two thousand years ago: the crucifixion and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15:17 states it with absolute clarity: "And if Christ has not been raised your faith is futile; you are still in your sins." Paul is not being dramatic, he is being precise. The Christian faith is not primarily a set of moral teachings that would be valuable regardless of whether Jesus rose from t...

Jesus' Journey to Jerusalem Luke 9:51 contains one of the most understated and most profoundly significant sentences in the entire Gospel: "As the time approached for him to be taken up to heaven Jesus resolutely set out for Jerusalem." Eight words in the original Greek that describe the most consequential journey in all of human history. Jesus set His face toward Jerusalem. He turned from Galilee, the familiar territory of His ministry, the place of the crowds and the miracles and the enthusiastic reception, and He headed toward the city that killed the prophets. Toward the arrest, the trials, the torture and the cross that He knew were waiting for Him there. Resolutely. Deliberately. Without hesitation. The journey to Jerusalem is not merely a geographical transition in the Gospel narrative, it is a theological event of the first order. It is the moment when the ministry of proclamation and healing gave way to the ministry of sacrifice and redemption. It is the moment...

The Transfiguration of Jesus Christ There is a moment in the Gospels when the veil between the human and the divine was momentarily, deliberately and breathtakingly lifted, when the Jesus who walked dusty roads in Galilee, who was tired and hungry and who wept at the tomb of His friend, allowed three of His closest disciples to see something of what lay beneath the ordinary human surface of His life. That moment is the Transfiguration, and it stands as one of the most extraordinary and most theologically significant events in the entire Gospel record. Matthew 17:2 describes it with language that struggles against the inadequacy of human words: "There he was transfigured before them. His face shone like the sun and his clothes became as white as the light." The word transfigured, metamorphothe in the Greek original from which we get the English word metamorphosis, describes a fundamental change of form, a transformation from one appearance to another. For a brief, shining, u...