Only The Crucified God Can Save

It is only the Crucified God who can save us. Every other divinity is just a projection of our own insecurity.

We have often got our understanding of God wrong. All too often, we begin with an idea of who or what God is. God is all powerful, God is all knowing, God can do anything, God is spirit, God is just. We have these ideas about God, or these attributes that we think God possesses, and we say “yes, this is what God is.” But the problem is, these are only our ideas about God, they are not who God is. We cannot work our way up the tree of reason to discover who God is by our own merit or clever thought. We can only know God because God has chosen to reveal God’s self to us.

Only the Crucified God Reveals Who God Is

Scripture tells us that that no one has seen the Father except for the Son (John 1:18, John 6:46) and that Jesus is the image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:16). No one has ever seen God except for the Son. Only Jesus has seen God the Father. No one else ever has. Every direct human interaction with God has been with the Holy Spirit or with the Son. But the son makes known to us who the Father is (John 1:18) and does so by being the very image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15).

This means, if we want to know who God is, we need to start with Jesus. We are used to starting with ideas of God, and then applying those ideas to Jesus. But that is not what the Bible teaches us. We need to start with the person of Jesus, and then work from there to come to understand who God is. God is like Jesus. This is the most important part of all Christian theology and teaching. Jesus is the self-revelation of God. It is Jesus who teaches us who God is and shows in himself what it means to be God. We cannot know God except in the way that Jesus has revealed to us and the Bible has explained to us.

This means that we must know God as the crucified God.

We Know God as the Crucified Messiah

Jesus enacted salvation for the world by his life, death, and resurrection. Jesus is the crucified messiah, and so God is the crucified God.

We must never make the mistake of confusing our ideas of God for who God is. We like the idea of a powerful God, a warrior God, a God who takes every part of ourselves and makes them perfect, makes them bigger than we could ever know them. We like it when God looks like us. But God looks like a victim.

God looks like someone getting lynched. Someone being abused. Someone being detained and tortured and imprisoned. God looks like someone being executed, someone starving and homeless and loveless. God always looks like the crucified Messiah. God accepts weakness in order that weakness can become strength through grace.

The things that this world thinks are strong and powerful and important are revealed as little more than excrement and waste. Less than nothing. But those things thought of as weak, as fragile, as broken, as powerless, are the things which God has used to gain victory over sin and death.

The Victory of the Crucified God

The victory of the cross is a victory of weakness over strength, of powerlessness over the powerful, of grace over vengeance. The crucified God does not bend to our desires and does not cooperate with our schemes.

The crucified God is never on the side of Empires. No one can pledge alleigience to a flag and to the crucified God at the same time because the crucified God will always be on the side of the people being persecuted by that nation, by that empire.

The crucified God cannot be claimed by the rich and the powerful. The crucified God is always on the side of the poor, of the hungry, of the weak and the victim and the broken and the lost. Not for nothing did Mary sing that her son would lay low the mighty and bring down the proud whole raising up the hungry and the lowly.

The Crucifixion is Both Judgement and Love

The crucified God hangs in judgement over us. The crucified God shows us the cost of love, the cost which every disciple is called to carry. We cannot have an easy theology of glory while we follow the crucified God. We can only have a costly discipleship, not a cheap one. The crucified God calls us to take up our own crosses and follow where Christ has led us.

Our starting place for all Christian thinking, preaching, teaching, and theology, must always and only be the crucified Christ. May we never lose sight of the cross or try to make God into anything other than the crucified God.

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