The Fuller Meaning of the Cross

In "A Statement from the Editor" in the March 1956 issue of A Witness and a Testimony T. Austin-Sparks shows how the cross has a significant place in the life of the Christian as a starting-point in his/ her new life. It has achieved a manifold deliverance of many sorts in an objective way, but the cross also has a life-long function subjectively. Sparks describes what the cross has done for us and is doing in us as seen in the history of the Israelites:

"It was after years of Bible teaching, evangelical ministry, missionary enterprise, and varied Christian activities that the Lord brought us, in His own effective way, to see, as we had not seen before, the fuller meaning of the Cross.

"This was the first stage in an altogether new life under an open Heaven. As we came to see subsequently, the Cross (or its type--the Altar) was ever God’s new starting-point in the realization of His full thought. Starting-point, we say; for Calvary is not an end in itself, but the beginning of everything. As to the objective meaning of the Cross, there was no need for any adjustment.

"The great values of the Lamb slain, as related to the first stage or phase of Christian experience, were there, thank God. Deliverance from the judgment resting upon the world; deliverance from condemnation and death; deliverance from the tyranny or the bondage of an evil conscience--all in virtue of the righteousness which is by faith in that Righteous One who offered Himself without spot to God for us: this was where we stood, by His grace. What Christ by His Cross was and is for us was our anchor-ground. The apprehension and appreciation of all that has never ceased to grow, and is deeper, fuller, stronger today than ever . . . .

"Who is of any use to God or men, in eternal values, who is not settled as to his or her acceptance in the Beloved? Who can count in any realm spiritually who has not a settled assurance that in Christ Jesus they are accounted righteous, whatever they may be in themselves? Every fiery dart of the evil one will get home if the breastplate of righteousness and the shield of this faith is not firmly apprehended and appropriated . . . .

"But, when we have taken account of this and have it well settled, it may only relate to deliverance from 'Egypt.' . . . It was a mighty thing that happened in Egypt, in virtue of the slain Lamb and shed and sprinkled blood, and it had abiding elements and values.

"But there was much more needed. While an outward bondage was destroyed, . . . there still remained an inward bondage. Israel in the wilderness represents the dominion of the natural life, the self-life, the 'flesh.' God’s people, yes! Redeemed, yes! In the Kingdom, yes! Heirs of promise, yes! But not getting very far; ineffective, unfruitful, up-and-down and round-about; and always at the mercy of the life of sense . . . This wilderness life represented much expenditure of energy, much laborious effort, much longing and aspiration, much service and much religious devotion and activity, but it never got through, and it was one big circle, coming back, in effect, to where they were before.

"Well, it was at some such point that the fuller meaning of the Cross was made to break upon our greater need. It is a part of the nature of things that we never learn in a vital way by information. We really only come into the good of things by being 'pressed out of measure.' So the Lord has to take much time to make spiritual history . . . Thus it was that we were turned in that dark hour to Romans, chapter six, and, almost as though He spoke in audible language, the Lord said: 'When I died, you died. When I went to the Cross I not only took your sins, but I took you. When I took you, I not only took you as the sinner that you might regard your self to be, but I took you as being all that you are by nature; your good as your bad; your abilities as well as your disabilities; yes, every resource of yours. I took you as a "worker," a "preacher," an organizer! My Cross means that not even for Me can you be or do anything out from yourself, but if there is to be anything at all it must be out from Me, and that means a life of absolute dependence and faith.'

"At this point, therefore, we awoke to the fundamental principle of our Lord’s own life while here, and it became the law of everything for us from that time. That principle was: 'nothing of (out from) himself,' but 'all things of (out from) God.'

The Son can do nothing of (out from) himself, but what he seeth the Father doing: for what things soever he doeth, these the Son also doeth in like manner. John 5:19.

I can of myself do nothing: as I hear I judge. John 5:30.

My teaching is not mine, but his that sent me. John 7:16.

"We saw that this explains so many strange and--naturally--perplexing things in His behaviour: acting and refusing to act; going and refusing to go; speaking and refusing to speak. Later, we came to see that this is the whole meaning of life in the Spirit, and that it is an altogether different life from the natural ways of men, even of Christian men . . . .

"While an end is written large in the Cross, and while that end is to be accepted as our end indeed, so that there can be no more of anything so far as we are concerned, Jesus lives, and that means boundless possibilities!

"Thus we came to see that the Red Sea and the Jordan are but two sides to the one Cross. Both symbolize the spiritual death and resurrection of the believer, but the latter carries it into another realm. Jordan sees the deliverance from judgment, death, and doom, carried on to deliverance from self: it is the practical disconnection of what is dead from what is. In the first it is my sins; in the second it is my self. At the crossing of the Jordan a monument of twelve stones, a type of the Israelites themselves, was left buried in the bed of the river, as if to signify that the self-life of the wilderness was to be henceforth reckoned as judged and ended as absolutely as was the bondage to Pharaoh. And then another memorial of twelve stones was taken from the bed of the river and placed on the Canaan shore, as a type of themselves, as risen not only to newness of life, but also to a perpetual and practical separation from their dead and buried selves. All this is by union with Christ crucified and risen: for the priests stood in mid-stream with the Ark and its blood-stained Mercy-seat on their shoulders, a type of Christ as in death, yet triumphing over death in virtue of His Blood: for the first set of stones were laid in the exact spot where the priests’ feet had stood.

"Israel after the flesh in the wilderness, and Israel after the Spirit in Canaan, while both having known the blessing of salvation from judgment, are like two different peoples. So it was with us. The difference is unspeakably great . . . .

"How the life of nature blocks the way to the life of the Spirit! How doing, or attempting to do, work for God in our own natural energy closes the way to the energies of the Spirit! How our mental strivings and intellectual labours to apprehend spiritual truth lock the door to illumination by the Spirit! Yes, we know something of this, but, blessed be God, we know something of having that 'natural man' put away, and Christ in greater risen and ascended fulness taking his place . . . .

"There is the tragedy that this meaning or application of the Cross is positively refused and rejected by so many of the Lord’s people. There is a very large body of Christians who just will not have the Cross on its subjective or experimental side. This amazes us, but it explains very much. If the 'natural'” man (not the unregenerate man, necessarily) still exerts an influence in the realm of Divine things, there is bound to ensue a static system of teaching, a fixed horizon of vision, a legal bondage to tradition, a fear of man, a deadening domination of the 'letter' as separated from the 'spirit,' and many other unhappy situations of spiritual death, endless divisions, and spiritual pride. Paul’s remedy for traditionalism and legalism in relation to Christians, was Christ Crucified, as see 'Romans' and 'Galatians' . . . .

"But 'Jordan' is a big crisis, with an abiding application and progressive outworking.

"The crisis is like the touch upon the sinew of Jacob’s thigh. The strength of nature is definitely and permanently crippled, so that 'Jacob' will carry that veto to his last day, when he will still be 'leaning upon the top of his staff.' The progressive outworking will be in the discovery of how much there is that we cannot do--are not allowed to do--of ourselves, because of that basic forbidding of the Cross. This may take us as far as it took Paul, who in one unparalleled experience said:

"'We are weighed down exceedingly, beyond our power, insomuch that we despaired even of life' ('despaired' here means 'there seemed no way out for life'): 'yea, we . . . had the sentence of death within ourselves, that we should not trust in ourselves, but in (upon) God which raiseth the dead' (II Cor. 1:8-9).

"The working of the Cross here is a subjective-objective matter, and has nothing to do with our standing or acceptance, but rather with the fulness of Christ. Because the importance of this crisis and process has to be emphasized to Christians, many have allowed it to enter into the wrong realm and almost carry them back into 'Egyptian' bondage. If the Lord brings us to the despair of Kadesh-Barnea and then shows us Romans 6 or Galatians 2:20, we must capitulate to our death position with Christ as to ourselves, just as we did as to our sins; and we must have a faith understanding with the Lord, firstly that the thing is so, whether we immediately realize it or not; and then that He is going to take us by the way that will reveal what the new position is and implies. We shall undoubtedly discover that there was far more included in the 'death' than we had any idea of; but the new position will mean enablement to acquiesce."