The Shame of the Cross: When the Gospel Shocked the World

Talking about the shame of the cross, and I think we lose sight of this sometimes.

You know, we preach a shameful message when we preach of Jesus on the cross.

Being crucified, let me just break this down for us. Being crucified was a degrading insult.

And the idea of worshiping someone who had been crucified was absolutely unimaginable.

Of course, we don't see people being crucified now as Paul's listeners did in the first century.

So the impact, I think, is somewhat lost on us, right? It's not a common thing

that occurs in our world.

But Paul knew what he was up against. 1 Corinthians 1.18 says,

For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing.

You got that qualifier, right? To those who are perishing.

For Jews request a sign and Greeks seek after wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified,

to the Jews, a stumbling block, and to the Greeks, foolishness.

And that's verses 22 through 25 there of 1 Corinthians 1.

The message of the cross, in other words, is foolishness, literally in Greek,

moria, from which we get the word moron.

And verse 22 and 23 tells us the Jews were actually looking for a sign.

You're the Messiah, they said to Jesus, so give us a sign.

They were expecting some great supernatural wonder that would identify and attract

them to the promised Messiah.

They wanted something flashy, you know?

I always think about Jasmine when I think about that because,

I mean, she loves glitter. You know what I'm saying?

Everything that's glitter is awesome. them. It's like, dad, why don't you love glitter the way I do?

I don't like glitter. It gets all over the place, right? I mean,

we were in Lowe's walking a while back and Dakota and I actually saw it first.

And then Jasmine and them saw it later on when they were walking,

but it was like this little, little bucket thing in Lowe's that was all glittered on the outside.

And Jasmine, when she saw it, had to have it. And when I was walking with Dakota,

I said, Jasmine's going to want that right there.

And sure enough, when she was in there, it's like something she had to buy,

but it's just flashy, and that's what they were looking for,

something that was flashy, something that attracted them, right?

And even though Jesus had given them miracle after miracle during his ministry,

they wanted some sort of super miracle that they could all look at and say,

hey, that's the sign right there.

That's the proof, you know, that this is the Messiah at last.

The Greeks, on the other hand, weren't so much interested in the miraculous.

They weren't looking for a supernatural sign. They were actually looking for wisdom.

They wanted to validate a true religion through some transcendental insight, some elevated idea,

some esoteric knowledge, some sort of spiritual experience, in other words,

maybe even an out-of-body experience or another imaginary emotional event.

The Greeks wanted wisdom, and the Jews wanted a sign. God gave them exactly the opposite.

The Jews actually received, literally in Greek, skandalon, a crucified Messiah,

scandalous, blasphemous, y'all, bizarre, offensive, unbelievable.

And for the Greeks who were looking for that esoteric knowledge,

something high and noble and lofty, all this nonsense about the eternal creator

God of the universe being crucified was idiotic.

That's truly how they viewed this. From both the Greek and the Roman points

of view, the stigma of crucifixion made the whole notion of the gospel claiming

Jesus as the Messiah an absolute absurdity.

And I want you all to know that because 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 barbarians used it as well,

the condemned died an agonizingly slow death by suffocation,

gradually just becoming too exhausted and traumatized to pull himself up on

the nails in his hands or push himself up on the nail through the feet,

even to take a deep breath of air.

And King Darius crucified 3,000 Babylonians.

That's a big number, isn't it? Alexander the Great crucified 2,000 from the city of Tyre.

Alexander Janius crucified 800 Pharisees while they watched soldiers actually

slaughter their wives and children at their feet as they were being crucified.

So this sealed the horror of crucifixion. I want you to get this in the Jewish mind.

Romans came to power in Israel in about 63 BC and used crucifixion extensively.

And some writers actually say authorities crucified as many as 30,000 people around that time.

And Titus Vespasian crucified so many Jews in AD 70 that the soldiers,

it was reported, had no room for the crosses and not enough crosses for the bodies.

It wasn't until 337, when Constantine actually abolished crucifixion,

that it disappeared after a millennium of cruelty in the world.

So get this picture. Crucifixion was a repugnant, demeaning form of execution

for really the rabble of society, if you will, the lowest of the low.

The idea that anybody who died on the cross was in any sense an exceptional,

elevated, noble, important person was absurd, moronic.

Roman citizens generally were exempt from crucifixion unless they committed treason.

And the authorities reserved the cross for rebellious slaves and conquered people,

and for notorious robbers and assassins.

And the Romans' empire's policies on crucifixion actually led Romans to view

any crucified person as absolutely contemptible.

The Romans used it only, in other words, for the scum, the most humiliated, the lowest of the low.

So soldiers first flogged the victims, then forced them to carry their crossbeams,

and the instruments that were of their own death to the crucifixion site.

And signs around their necks indicated actually the crimes that they had committed.

And on top of all this, they were stark naked.

And then the soldiers tied or nailed them to the crossbars and hoisted them

up on the upright post and suspended them there, again, nude.

The executioners could hurry death by shattering their legs.

Because you can think that that left victims unable to actually push themselves

up in order to fill their lungs with air.

And if no one broke the legs, the death could literally last for days.

And the final indignity was the corpses actually hanging there until the scavengers

ate the bodies off the cross.

By the way, I got to remind y'all, just as it was prophesied,

Jesus' legs were not broken, right?

No broken, nothing broken.

And he chose the time of his death when he said it is finished.

He didn't go for days and days, right?

Well, the historian Josephus described multiple tortures and positions of crucifixion

during the siege of Jerusalem,

and pain suffered in every possible angle and through every possible part of

the body he described, even unmentionable parts, okay?

Gentiles also viewed anyone crucified with the utmost contempt as well.

It was a virtual obscenity. I mean, polite society simply didn't discuss crucifixion.

Cicero wrote, this very word cross should be removed not only from the person

of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, and his ears.

So y'all probably starting to

get an idea of how shameful this message was that Paul was talking about.

And in the face of all that, Paul came, and all he ever talked about was the cross.

We can see something of the deep disrespect the Gentiles had for anybody crucified,

in some of the pagan statements people made about Christ.

Graffiti scratched on a stone in a guard room on Palantine Hill near,

I believe it was Circus Maximus in Rome, shows the figure of the man with the

head of an ass hanging on a cross.

And below is a man in a gesture of adoration. and the inscription says,

Alexa Manos worships his God.

Such a repulsive depiction, y'all, of the Lord Jesus Christ vividly illustrates

to us as well pagan disgust for anybody crucified,

and particularly a crucified God, they thought.

I mean, Justin's first apology in AD 152 actually summarized the Gentile view of this,

a quote he says they proclaim our madness to consist in this that we give to

a crucified man a place equal to the unchangeable eternal God nonsense that's what he said,

and so if the Gentile attitude was bad.

The Jewish attitude was worse and even more hostile. They detested the Roman

practice and scorned it more than the Romans did.

In their view, anybody who ever ended up on a cross fulfilled Deuteronomy 21-23,

his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, for he who has hanged is accursed of God.

Does that mean the eternal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,

the Lord himself, was cursed?

How could God curse God? It's absolutely, y'all, unthinkable.

The Messiah cursed by God? To the Jews, it was impossible to imagine.

They saw crucifixion not only as a social stigma, but as a divine curse as well.

So the stigma of the cross went beyond social disgrace, all the way to divine condemnation.

The Mishnah, 2nd century AD commentary on the law of the Pentateuch,

indicated that blasphemers and idolaters alone were to be crucified.

Even so, the executioners actually hung their bodies on the cross only after they were already dead.

How could the Messiah be a blasphemer?

How could God be a blasphemer of God? The Jews actually gagged on the idea of crucified Christ.

It made the gospel, y'all, unbelievable. You think you've got problems getting

the gospel across today?

Imagine the early Christians. If they told the truth, guess what?

They faced a massive obstacle.

Their claims were insane, scandalous, you know, blasphemous, unbelievable.

And Paul, as y'all know already, Paul was not an easy believism preacher, was he?

God himself, in the form of the crucified Christ was the biggest obstacle to believing in God.

And frankly, it doesn't seem that God, y'all, I just got to say it,

could have put a more formidable barrier to faith in the first century.

I can't think of a worse way to market the gospel than to preach that, Brother Ronnie.

The Gentiles called the Christian gospel a perverse and extravagant superstition and a sick delusion.

Martin Hegel, in his book on the crucifixion, I'm going to quote,

he says, To believe that one preexistent son of the one true God,

the mediator at creation and the redeemer of the world, had appeared in very

recent times in out-of-the-way Galilee as a member of the obscure people of

the Jews, And even worse, he said, he died the death of a common criminal on a cross,

could only be regarded as a sign of madness.

The real gods, little g, of Greece and Rome could be distinguished from mortal

men by the very fact that they were immortal.

They had absolutely nothing in common with the cross as a sign of shame, in other words.

And thus of the one who, listen to what he says, was bound in the most evil,

ignominious fashion, and executed in a shameful way.

Are y'all starting to get a picture of this culture? No wonder,

y'all, the Gentiles and the Jews alike hated Paul's message.

It was a message that truly was beyond human belief.

In other words, no seeker-friendly message, right?

It was either an absurdity or an obscenity, not seeker-friendly at all.

But I want to talk with a few minutes about wisdom made foolish.

If it wasn't enough that crucifixion bore such a shameful stigma in this culture,

there was also the shameful simplicity of the cross,

a repudiation of worldly wisdom, in other words.

It went against the grain. 1 Corinthians 1, 19-21. Somebody read that for me.

1 Corinthians 1, 19 through 21, if you can look it up.

I'll get some of y'all participating a little bit. For it is written,

I will destroy the wisdom of the wise and will bring to nothing the understanding of the proof.

Where is the wise? Where is the stride? Where is the disputer of this world?

Has not God made foolish the wisdom of this world? For after that It is the

wisdom of God, a world by wisdom knew not God, that pleased God by the foolishness

of preaching to save them that believe.

Thank you, Brother Thomas. Yes, both Jew and Gentile enjoyed complexities,

especially the Greeks, again, with their philosophical systems they had.

But they loved mental gymnastics, in other words, and intellectual,

what do you call them, labyrinths.

They believed the truth was knowable, but only to those with elevated minds.

And yes, you're thinking, right, this is where Gnosticism comes from, right?

This system later became known as that, Gnosticism, a belief that certain people,

by virtue of their enhanced reasoning powers, in other words,

could move beyond the hoi polloi,

the common people, in other words, and ascend to the level of enlightenment. it.

And at the time of Paul, we can trace at least 50 different philosophies that

were actually rattling around in the mind, you know, in the Roman and Greek

world, right? In the minds of the Roman and Greek world.

And the gospel came along and said something important.

And according to what Thomas read, you know what it said? None of it matters.

We'll destroy it all. Take all the wisdom of the wise, get the best,

get the elite, the most educated person, the most capable, the smartest,

the most clever, the best at rhetoric, oratory, logic.

Get all the wise, all the scribes, the legal experts, the great debaters of

the age, and they're all going to be designated fools.

The gospel says they're all foolish. Paul's quotation of Isaiah 29,

14 in verse 19, listen to what he says, I will destroy the wisdom of the wise.

Had to be an offensive statement to his audience, did it not?

He was basically saying this, church, I'll trash all you philosophers and all your philosophy.

Nothing was subtle about Paul, right?

Nothing was vague or ambiguous about him. But the message wasn't Paul's, was it, Brother Ronnie?

As he reminded us when he affirmed this, he said, it is written.

Literally, it stands written.

It stands as divinely revealed truth that the gospel of the cross makes no concession to human wisdom.

Paul was just God's mouthpiece.

And I just have to say it tonight. Human intellect plays no role in redemption.

None. And in verse 20, it's as if Paul was saying, what do you think you have

to offer? Where is the scribe?

What contribution does the legal expert make?

Where is the debater?

What does he have to offer? They're all fools.

1 Corinthians 2.14 says, but the natural man, don't miss this,

you know this verse, the natural man does not receive the things of the Spirit of God. Why?

For they are foolishness to him, nor can he know them because they are spiritually discerned.

That's the problem. This is the problem. An unconverted person may have great

reasoning power, church, and intellect, but when it comes to spiritual reality

and the life of God in eternity,

he makes no contribution. She makes no contribution.

Whether it's Athens or Rome, think about it, whether it's Cambridge,

Oxford, Harvard, Samford, Yale, Princeton, wherever else,

all the collected wisdom that

is outside Scripture adds up to nothing but foolishness. God is the truth.

Wisely established that no one could ever come to know him by human wisdom.

The only way anyone will come to know God is by divine revelation and through the Holy Spirit.

The final word on human wisdom is that it's all nonsense.

Man, by wisdom, cannot know God.

So, yes, it's a scandalous message, is it not?

It's a scandalous message. So next week, we're going to pick up with the scandalous

message, talk more about that.

In fact, we're even going to talk about the doctrine that probably is most hated,

okay, when we get to that.

But we're going to continue on this journey about what the cross means,

what really happened at the cross, and salvation, you know, the salvation message that's presented.

And even today in our world, the rejection that we will face,

because Well, still, still people on their own foolishness is foolishness.

The only way it makes sense is when the Holy Spirit, when God Almighty reaches

down and touches a person and opens their eyes.

That's it, man. There's no one who understands. Scripture says there's no one

who seeks as their guide.

There's no one who does good, not even one.