God alone has a right to act as He pleases. He had an only Son, of whom He could say, " He is all my delight;" and if He would make that Son the One on whom all His wrath should fall, who could dare to say to God, " What doest Thou?" He is God, and He alone had a right to do what He liked and do it how He liked. If He had a plan in connection with that Son, He must have the co-operation of that Son to carry out His plan, and He had it. Christ came to the cross to die there.
Satan has the power of death-God put it into his hand-but God used His Son to nullify it entirely. Satan might let his scythe come in, and one is not to be surprised if the whole world is mowed down. But how was God to stop the executioner, to whom He had Himself given the power, so that he should be unable to cut us down with any taste of death? "Absent from the body, and present with the Lord," being all the believer knows death to be. Satan does the work of destroying the body; but Satan could not accomplish it in connection with Christ. He was the Prince of Life. He gave up His own life, Satan could not take it. He had power to give it up and power to take it again. If He had not died, the power of death would not have been taken from Satan. The marvelous wisdom of God was shown out there, and I can turn to the enemy and say, " Ah! Satan, there you are conquered. You have found more than a match in Him who died there."
I see in the cross the power which meets everything in me. If I turn to the cross, saying, " How horridly unlike I am to that Christ who died there!" the answer is, it is because you are so that He died there. Was not the death of Christ the perfect expression of God's holiness? All the perfect attributes of God shine out through the cross of Christ. If Satan had got man into a position in which it was impossible for God to bless him, and all was broken up in connection with the first Adam, it was only that it might all drop into the hands of the last Adam. All was accomplished at the cross.
Ah! that cross is a low place, a thing that stains all the pride of man. Have you ever known what it is to be brought down to death's door from conflict? I have known what it is—passing week after week and never closing the eyes, simply because I wanted to do something, and Christ had done it all. Peace came to me in that cross, God saying, " My Son bore all your sin in His own body on that tree." What a thought! that the anointed Savior, eighteen hundred years ago, suffered everything for me, and that it was only my own horrid self- will, wanting to do something, which kept me from getting peace in Him. It was not the suffering earth gave Him, not the nails, the spear-but something deeper far; the wrath of God was borne by Him, nailed to that cross, when He cried out, " My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?" You cannot find the cross itself on earth now, but the record of it is in heaven. God is constantly reminded of it, by the presence of the Lamb that was slain, at His right hand.
We shall go into heaven with faces radiant with glory, able to look right up, because of the cross. God forbid we should ever find anything in this world worth thinking of and glorying in, any standard on which our souls can rest, save that cross!
The most awful point of view in which the world's religion is seen, is, as connecting itself with the cross. Could you take ecclesiastical systems, and plant the cross there; and say that all the lust of the eye and of the flesh and of the world which is in them, harmonizes with the cross? The real character of the cross becomes especially manifest in connection with what is ecclesiastical. In regard to Nonconformists, it is only a degree of difference; they are equally under the sanction of the world for their existence. Equally so in regard to government; I cannot separate between it and the beast (that is part of the statue in Daniel); the cross cannot be connected with it, cannot sanction that which all governments form a part of. That which marks off the people of God is the cross, and it behooves them to keep themselves apart from all civil governments.
That cross has separated me from the world that crucified my Lord, just as much as if His body were now on the cross, marred and wounded by the world.
It can never be true that we are crucified to the world unless the heart is in constant communion with the cross of Christ, with Christ crucified. The cross comes in, in everything, as a matter of daily experience. How is one to pass into the old age of a Christian? How find one's self laid aside, no longer with any energy? Surely only by the cross. How can one meet difficulties with a word, and be kept in perfect quietness? Only by the cross. How can we keep under such flesh as ours? Does the "old man" ever get to be better? Not a bit! but you must learn to be able to carry the cross, saying of everything that is evil, " I can have nothing to do with that, because my Lord was crucified, on account of it."