Jay Strother 

What is love?  A group of professional counselors posed the question to a group of 4–8-year-olds, “What does love mean?”  The answers they received were broader and deeper than anyone would have imagined:

• “Love is when a girl puts on perfume and a boy puts on shaving cream and they go out and smell each other.” – Karl, age 5
• “Love is when you go out to eat and give somebody most of your french fries without making them give you any of theirs.” – Chrissy, age 6
• “Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and talk more. My mommy and daddy are like that. It’s gross.” – Emily, age 8
• “When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.” – Karen, age 7
• “When my grandmother got arthritis, she couldn’t bend over and paint her toenails anymore. So my grandfather does it for her all the time, even when his hands got arthritis, too. That’s love.” – Rebecca, age 8
• “God could have said magic words to make the nails fall off the cross, but He didn’t. That’s love.” – Max, age 5

Max got it right. Pastor/theologian John Stott put it this way: “Only one act of pure love, unsullied by any taint of ulterior motive, has ever been performed in the history of the world, namely, the self-giving of God in Christ on the cross for undeserving sinners.”  The cross was ultimately an act of sacrificial love, but how does this act of love actually save us?  Paul tells us in Romans 3:21-26.

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I pastor in the Nashville metro area, which is supposedly the heart of Bible belt. However, the most frequent comment we get from guests across our nine campuses is this: Thanks for opening up and preaching from the Bible.You would think that in Nashville, of all places, this would be the norm, but sadly it’s not. 

You could say the same about preaching on the cross. The cross is present in our churches as a symbol, and it’s referenced in our songs and liturgies but pay attention and you’ll hear little actual preaching on the cross. Fifteen years ago, I helped start our first campus and as we engaged a new community with the timeless gospel, I could sum up what I learned with one short phrase: Don’t assume!  We need to never assume that people know how the cross of Jesus Christ saves!

The cross has been at the heart of the Christian faith and preaching from the beginning, but it is now under attack by those who consider it “cosmic child abuse.”From the early second century, Christians chose not the dove, the victory palm, or the ichthys to be the defining symbol of our faith but the cross. It would have been an unpopular choice, as the cross was a symbol of being cursed by God to the Jews, it was undignified to the dignified Greeks, it was a horror to the Gentiles, and it was so disgraceful it wasn’t even to be spoken of among the Roman upper class. It was unpopular then and its unpopular now, the historic doctrine of the cross considered “cosmic child abuse” by so-called progressive pastors and theologians.  

Alisa Childers is a musician, an apologist, and a best-selling author who wrote about her experience in finding herself in a Nashville church in which the pastor began to deconstruct his faith and led his church down the dangerous path of progressive Christianity. She writes in her book, Another Gospel, that “despite the abundance of biblical testimony, the one thing virtually all progressive Christian thought leaders agree on is that Jesus didn’t die to pay the penalty for our sin.  He was crucified by an angry mob for speaking truth to power, and his love and forgiveness towards those who killed him is a simply nothing more than an example we all should follow.” After not just one but two disillusioning church experiences, Alisa and her husband eventually found refuge at one of our campuses because in her words, “we just needed to hear the gospel preached again.”

Let us never forsake the cross in our preaching. May we never “assume” that while our congregations may easily recognize the symbol of the cross that they may have never been taught the depth of its meaning. While we may be tempted to preach with “brilliance of speech” or “[human] wisdom,” may we resolve like Paul to “know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified” (1 Cor. 2:1-2)!

Many are familiar with what happened to Jesus of Nazareth: He was betrayed, handed over to Jewish and then Roman authorities, subjected to a sham trial, sentenced to death, beaten brutally and executed horrifically. But far fewer grasp what was accomplished.  

John Stott in his classic work, The Cross of Christ, states that the New Testament gives three main answers:

1. SALVATION – God has rescued us.
2. REVELATION – God has disclosed himself to us.
3. CONQUEST – God in Christ has overcome evil.

The blessings of “such a great salvation” (Heb. 2:3) are so richly diverse that no one image or word picture can capture them completely. So just as the church is presented in a number of ways (Christ’s bride and his body, the sheep of God’s flock, the branches of His vine, his new humanity, his household, his family, the temple of the Holy Spirit, etc.) so there are varied and richly textured images in the Scripture that illustrate the saving power of the cross. But perhaps the greatest concentration of these is found in Romans 3. 

In the book of Romans, Paul writes to address the “big story” of the gospel to the multi-cultural church at Rome. Douglas Moo helps us to understand why Romans is considered Paul’s theological magnum opus. “What is most significant for our understanding of Romans is the sense that Paul gives us of having reached an important transition point in his missionary career. He has been preaching the gospel for almost 25 years; he has planted thriving churches over much of the northeastern Mediterranean part of the Roman Empire; he has hammered out his theology on the anvil of pastoral problems and debates with opposing factions. He thus writes Romans during a lull in his ministry, at a time when he can reflect on what he has come to believe and what it may mean for the church.”  

After his introduction, Paul announces that the gospel is good news: “I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’ (1:16-17).”  

It’s this statement that has changed lives and changed history, as this verse brought the great Reformer Martin Luther to faith in Christ: “I have felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.”  

But why do we need to be saved in the first place? Paul doesn’t mess around or waste time in Romans. Right after declaring the good news, he gives us the bad news. We are both ungodly and unrighteous. We’ve rebelled against God, and we’ve turned on each other (Rom. 1:18-3:20).  

The “Big Story” of Scripture hinges on this point: the bad news is that our situation is worse and more desperate than we realize. But the good news is that the gospel is even more glorious than we can ever imagine. In Romans chapter three, Paul unveils the three movements that illuminate the saving power of the cross.

The first movement is our REBELLION (Romans 3:9-20). 

When we examine our sin, our hypocrisy and the inability of our heart to do what we know to be right; God’s righteousness reveals our greatest problem – we are all guilty before God. (3:9-20). Paul, in closing his argument much like a lawyer, wraps up his case with three witnesses: the “charges” that he had just brought against both Jews and Gentiles, the Old Testament, and the Law itself. In verses 10-18 Paul quotes a variety of phrases from Psalms, Isaiah, Ecclesiastes and Proverbs. The texts which God committed to them for the purpose of being a light to the Gentiles have now been turned upon them. 

Paul employs the Old Testament rabbinical practice of charaz which means “stringing pearls” – Paul substantiates his charges by stringing together a series of Old Testament texts. He quotes six Old Testament sources in 14 sweeping statements with devastating artistry. We first see the character of our depravity. “NONE is righteous, no, not one.” We want to judge ourselves using relative terms but the standard here is the righteousness of God. 

Next we see the conduct of our depravity. We use our lips to curse. We use our feet to shed blood. Will Durant wrote in The Lessons from History: “In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no major war.”  We love our violence, which is the natural outworking of our fall. 

Finally, we see the cause of our depravity. “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”  Instead, everyone does what is right in his or her own eyes. In view of all this, there could be no conclusion other than that the entire human race suffers from a radical inner corruption. For any honest soul today, the quote attributed to Russian author Ivan Turgenev says it all: “I do not know what the heart of a bad man is like; but I do know what the heart of a good man is like, and it is terrible.”

I like to think of this as “Paul sings the (depravity) blues.” Paul is “riffing” from his vast knowledge of Scripture about the depths of our condition. Blues is famous for being a style of music that is honest about the mess of our lives. It’s a musical form that rehearses our miserable condition and holds out hope for something better. 

Paul closes with verse 20: The law has served its purpose; it condemns us, but it cannot save us. Imagine the emotion at this moment if Romans were a play or a movie: we’ve seen the brokenness, we’ve dealt with the mess, and we’ve tried to win the battle against evil on our own. But we have failed. We simply cannot overcome, and we stand convicted, unrighteous and totally cut off from any hope.

The second movement is REDEMPTION (Romans 3:21-26). 

This section of Scripture has been called “the center and heart of the message of Romans” (Cranfield, Barnhouse).  “The most theologically important segment in the entire New Testament” (Mounce).  Even “possibly the single most important paragraph ever written” (Morris).  

Paul begins with “But now,” one of Paul’s favorite literary devices – he uses it 16 times! Martyn Lloyd-Jones, the great British preacher and expositor of Romans, once said that “there are not more wonderful words in the whole of Scripture than just these two words, ‘But now.’”  How could he make such an extravagant claim?  He was thinking of the many occasions when the NT writers use these two words to contrast the state of people outside of Christ, with the situation in Christ.  

When Paul states “God’s righteousness has been revealed…” he uses the perfect tense – action in the past with results continuing into the present.  If we ask, “How is it revealed, Paul?”  He boldly answers, “Through faith in Jesus Christ, to all who believe, with no distinction.” (3:22). Paul says this is “Attested by the Law and the Prophets” which is important. “The Law and the Prophets” is the Jewish way of saying the entire Old Testament – “The Law” being the Torah and “The Prophets” being the rest of the books with the exception of the “Writings” which were Psalms and the wisdom books. 

The point Paul is making is that this plan of salvation is in complete continuity with and fulfillment of his covenanted promises to Israel!  It shows that Christ saving us was the plan from the beginning. It shows that God has been orchestrating reality to bring us to this point of salvation. “The gospel is no afterthought.  The cross was not plan B but always plan A.”

Now we arrive at a verse familiar to anyone who was taught to memorize the “Romans Road.”  Romans 3:23 states that: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  “For all have sinned” is in the aorist tense, which in the Greek language can capture a snapshot in time. In other words, everyone’s cumulative past is summed up by this phrase. “Fall short” is in the present tense, meaning we are continually falling short of God’s righteous standard, and we are “always falling behind” the glory of God. 

This “levels the playing field of the gospel – we are all sinners. We are all in need. We cannot save ourselves. Bishop Handley Moule said, “The harlot, the liar, the murderer, are short of it [sc. God’s glory]; but so are you. Perhaps they stand at the bottom of a mine, and you on the crest of an Alp; but you are as little able to touch the stars as they.”  

As he elaborates on how Jesus saves, Paul now gives us three of the most important theological terms in the New Testament that are drawn from three different spheres of influence: (1) Justification from the law court; (2) Redemption from the marketplace; and (3) Propitiation from the altar.  

First, JUSTIFICATION [The Court Room]: We are “Justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” When God justifies a guilty sinner, two things happen: Negatively, the sinner is declared no longer guilty of sin. Positively, the sinner is declared righteous.  Not made righteous but declared righteous. A helpful illustration here is that of a dirty person taking a hot shower – not “It’s as if I’ve never been dirty” but “I was filthy and now I’m clean.”  

Paul uses this term more than 20 times in Romans and Galatians and it is key to his theology.  “Justification expresses the judicial action of God apart from human merit according to which the guilty are pardoned, acquitted and then reinstated as God’s children and as fellow heirs with Jesus Christ.”  Justification defined: “Justification is an instantaneous legal act of God in which he (1) thinks of our sins as forgiven and Christ’s righteousness as belonging to us, and (2) declares us to be righteous in his sight.”  

Second, REDEMPTION [The Marketplace]. Remember that the population of Rome was probably half slaves or former slaves, so the power of this term would not be lost on the audience.  Redemption is the process by which a slave’s freedom is purchased for a price. In the Old Testament it was used of slaves, who were purchased in order to be set free; they were said to be ‘redeemed’. It was also used metaphorically of the people of Israel who were ‘redeemed’ from captivity first in Egypt, then in Babylon, and restored to their own land. 

Just so, we were slaves or captives, in bondage to our sin and guilt, and utterly unable to liberate ourselves. But Jesus Christ ‘redeemed’ us, bought us out of captivity, shedding his blood as the ransom price. He himself had spoken of his coming ‘to give his life as a ransom for many’. In consequence of this purchase or ‘ransom-rescue’, we now belong to him.”

Third, PROPITIATION [The Altar]: “God presented Him as a propitiation through faith in His blood to demonstrate His righteousness…”  “To propitiate” means to “turn away” – so how did God turn away His wrath against sinners? Many Christian people are embarrassed and even shocked by this word, however, because to ‘propitiate’ somebody means to placate his or her anger, and it seems to them an unworthy concept of God to suppose that he gets angry and needs to be appeased. However, God’s wrath is not like ours – it is his holy hatred of sin and evil. Wrath demonstrates God’s holiness: it is precisely why we can trust Him since we know He will be faithful to His word. Wrath shows that God will not suffer injustice forever. 

Of course, it would be evil for any of us to sacrifice our child. But we are not life-givers, whereas God is the author of life itself. The cross is where God’s love and justice meet and where He provided the perfect sacrifice that His righteous wrath demanded. In other words, God himself gave himself to save us from himself!

Thus, the cross is the demonstration of how love and justice meet.  If we summarize 3:21-25, the standard of righteousness has never been anything less than moral perfection, which no mere mortal can ever achieve. Therefore, our only hope is to be declared righteous by the gracious gift of God. We receive this gift through faith in Jesus Christ, who took our punishment on our behalf, thus satisfying the heavenly court’s requirement that justice be served.

This leads to the third movement which is that this gospel calls for a RESPONSE (Romans 10:9-14). 

In the gospel storyline, the story is “passive” up to this point. God created. Mankind fell, so we are born into sin. But now the story pivots. Confronted with the atoning sacrifice of Christ, you must make your choice. Romans 10:9-10 tells us how: Confess with your mouth Jesus is Lord! Believe in your heart God raised Him from the dead! Call on the same of the Lord and be saved! Then make those feet beautiful and go preach this good news.  

We receive this gift by faith, and we are declared righteous! Do not take this for granted. Do not assume people understand this. As a 7-year-old I knew I was a sinner and I needed a Savior, but all the while God had done all this for me and more! I received an eternal gift, and I’ve spent the rest of my life seeking to understand the depths of that gift and I still can’t possibly grasp it all! We’ll spend all eternity understanding and celebrating in fresh and deeper ways all Christ has done.  

The expression of joy in the saving power of what Christ has done for us came alive to me on a mission journey to east Africa. I spent several days leading a Bible conference for pastors who had little prior access to theological training. After days of teaching, on the last day of the Bible conference I wanted to model how to do expository preaching, so I preached through the book of Ephesians. Our African brothers are very demonstrative, and they would express with shouts, claps, gestures and groans the emotional impact on them of each line of the text.

When I reached the opening of chapter two, where Paul describes that we are dead in sins and trespasses and under the wrath of God, you could feel the weight of those words. There were tears in the room as I carefully outlined the depths of our depravity. Then at last I reached verse four: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive in Christ even though we were dead in trespasses.  You are saved by grace!” 

From the back row of the room came the most blood curdling and ear-splitting cry I had ever heard. I froze in stunned surprise. I had never in my life heard a cry as piercing and memorable as that one!  After a moment, the rest of the room joined in a chorus of “amens,” clapping, high-fiving, and joyous laughing. 

Not long after I finished that section of the text, we had a break and the pastor responsible for the shout came up to me to explain. As it turns out, he is a warrior in his indigenous tribe as well as a pastor. He said the cry he had made was the traditional victory shout of his people when the enemy had been defeated! Now every time I reflect on passages like Ephesians 2 and Romans 3, I hear this victory cry in my heart – this is how we all should feel about the saving power of the gospel!

The saving power of the cross shows how unholy people can be reconciled to a holy God. This redemptive work of God through his Son Jesus Christ is the most amazing event in the history of universe. Never would such a plan have arisen in the human mind. God brings a just sentence of death upon all, for all have sinned. 

He then provides a sinless sacrifice, his only Son. From God’s standpoint forgiveness is freely offered. All that remains is for people to accept that forgiveness. The obligation is to believe, to trust in the redemptive work of Christ. The good news is good only to those who receive it. Will you receive the gift of the saving power of Christ today?

If we come back after looking at Romans 3:21-26 and ask again, “What is love?” perhaps we would agree that the “father of English hymnody,” Isaac Watts, said it best: 

When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of Glory died
My richest gain I count but loss
And pour contempt on all my pride
See from His head His hands His feet
Sorrow and love flow mingled down
Did e’re such love and sorrow meet
Or thorns compose so rich a crown
Were the whole realm of nature mine
That were a tribute far too small
Love so amazing so divine
Demands my soul my life my all.