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Podcast: Have We Domesticated the Cross? (Jeremy Treat)

September 18, 2023 by: Crossway

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.

Don’t Let the Atonement Become Less Than Amazing

In this episode, Jeremy Treat talks about why the doctrine of atonement is so important for all Christians, how it’s often misunderstood by believers and unbelievers alike, and about the impact that it should make on our day to day lives as followers of Christ.

The Atonement

The Atonement

Jeremy Treat

In this addition to the Short Studies in Systematic Theology series, pastor Jeremy Treat gives a foundational understanding of what Scripture teaches and what the church confesses about the doctrine of atonement.

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Topics Addressed in This Interview:

01:10 - A Natural Longing for the Atonement

Matt Tully
Jeremy, thank you so much for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.

Jeremy Treat
So good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Matt Tully
For the Christian, the atonement—the message of what Jesus accomplished on the cross for our salvation—stands at the heart of our faith of what we believe. We’re going to dig into that a little bit today in our conversation—what the atonement is and why it matters for us as Christians—but for many unbelievers, the doctrine of the atonement is probably viewed as bizarre at best, and perhaps even immoral at worst. And yet you argue, in this new book that you’ve written for Crossway, that our secular culture actually evidences a certain longing for atonement in ways that we Christians would find surprising or counterintuitive. So I wonder if you could unpack what you mean by that. What is that longing that you see among non-Christians?

Jeremy Treat
I think everyone acknowledges that something is wrong with the world. Everyone feels guilt for things that they’ve done. People feel shame for things that have been done to them. And then we long to be made pure, to be set free, for things to be put right. And so everyone has this longing, and that longing presses through in different ways. You hear it in headlines where victims seek atonement for wrongdoing. You hear it in conversations of, How can I atone for what I’ve done? We’re longing for this. And so for Christians, the good news is that’s possible through Jesus Christ. Our sins can be atoned for all. All that our sin has made wrong can be set right. We can be forgiven, we can be set free, we can be made new. And that not only applies to us individually, but it can happen at a communal level, even at corporate level, and ultimately at a cosmic level. And so that’s where I think it’s important to give people language for what we’re longing for. And, of course, I think to do that we have to talk about sin. We have to talk about how there is a problem. Sometimes, Christians want to proclaim the good news of what God has done for us in his Son through grace, but we also have to be honest about the condition that we’re in and the condition of our hearts, of our need for grace. I think there’s something there in our culture today where the curtain has been pulled back so much on the injustice in the world and the wickedness and the evil. To be able to acknowledge that for what it is, and then also recognize how it plays out in our own hearts, but then to say, There’s good news! God has done something about this

Matt Tully
You lead a church in Los Angeles, which is not exactly the place that many of us would would think of when it comes to being open and friendly towards orthodox Christianity and a view of the Bible that you would espouse in your church. And as you’ve ministered in that highly secular, highly materialistic context, I think sometimes maybe our assumption from other parts of the country is that there just wouldn’t be a wide acknowledgement of the reality of sin. There wouldn’t necessarily be this sense of guilt or shame that people have for the things in their lives that they’ve done wrong. Is that not what you’ve seen? Is that a caricature of a secular context, like LA, that you think maybe doesn’t represent what the reality is?

Jeremy Treat
I think guilt and shame are universals, and you cannot believe in God and maybe not feel a guilt towards God, like I’m in debt to God or something like that. But the people that I talk to in my city who don’t know Jesus, there’s so much shame. There’s so much guilt. There’s so much regret. There’s so much pain. People in LA wear it on their sleeves more. It’s more open. The brokenness is just right out in front of you. So it certainly gets expressed in different ways. You don’t have Martin Luthers running around Los Angeles saying, How can I be righteous before a holy God? But they’re saying, How can I deal with this pain that I feel and this shame and the weight of the world of all the injustice around me? And so one thing that’s interesting about LA, though, is that when a lot of people think of secularism they think of New York’s and London’s, where you don’t have these overt beliefs in God. But I would say Los Angeles is hyper religious. In a lot of ways, I think it’s more of the future of urbanism because LA is such a global city, and with that comes the religions from all over the world and all these different ethnic groups. And so what’s fascinating for me in Los Angeles is that the idea of believing in somebody who was tortured on a cross and died and that’s our hope, and it seems really weird. He is going to come back on a horse with a sword out—it seems really weird, right? But the spirituality in LA is all over the map. People are doing ayahuascas and praying to the stars and buying crystals. It’s all weird. I think the longing for something transcendent is so strong that it breaks through in different ways. And I feel like in my context I get to see that in really direct ways with all kinds of witchcraft and all these cults. It’s just all over. In that hyper spiritual context, in some ways it’s easier, I think, to talk about the atonement and what God has done for us in Christ, because there is more of an openness to spiritual solutions, so to speak. Whereas in a place like New York or London, somebody might just look down and say, I’m not, I’m not even willing to have that conversation. But here, I do think there’s a more openness and a genuine pluralism of spirituality.

Matt Tully
Beyond just that more open disposition, do you see a direct line between that longing for atonement that we all have and even those hyper spiritual, new age type of spirituality that you see in LA? Is there a direct line between those two where you would say that those kinds of practices and those beliefs are directly evidencing this desire to be made right?

Jeremy Treat
I think atonement is only only a part of it. When I look at the spirituality in LA, I want to think of it through a lens of creation, fall, redemption, new creation. There is a lot of good that I can see in non-Christians in our city, because they’re made in the image of God, and I believe in God’s common grace. The fall affects everyone. But when you get to that remedy, that’s where the doctrine of atonement really comes in. And I think there’s just something beautiful to sacrifice and love being at the heart of that remedy. And what’s so interesting about that is it’s the opposite of the I choose me. I’m going to be true to myself and say no to everything else. It’s literally the opposite of that. It’s that I’m going to sacrifice myself for the good of somebody else. And so it’s Jesus talking about what does it profit man if he gains the world but loses his soul? And people are trying to gain the world, and they’re losing the soul in the process. And Jesus is the one who gave it all so that he might redeem all. And so for us then, faith is recognizing that and trusting in Christ, but it’s what people are longing for, but it comes about through a different means. It’s actually not in prioritizing ourselves and seeking ourselves first and all of that, but laying ourselves down and trusting in Christ.

09:27 - More Than a Decorative Pleasantry

Matt Tully
Let’s go to the other end of the spectrum, maybe the conservative Christian evangelical world where we are very familiar with the cross. You write in your book about the tendency that we have to domesticate the atonement, to make it so familiar and tame. You say, “Whether placed on a calendar in a Christian bookstore, tattooed on an arm, or elevated above a city skyline, we have tamed the cross and turned it into a decorative pleasantry.” How would you say that our familiarity with the cross as Christians and as evangelicals has impacted our understanding of it?

Jeremy Treat
I think it’s massive. When we domesticate the cross and relegate it to this pleasant symbol, we start to miss out on the depth of our sin and on the glory of what Christ has really accomplished. And so I feel like I have to remind people all the time that people in the first century would be disgusted by a symbol of a cross. Crucifixion was invented by the Persians, perfected by the Romans, and it was a form of capital punishment. It was literally invented to slowly torture the person as they died. If they wanted to just kill someone, they could decapitate them, right? They could burn them at the stake. They had forms of killing that would do that. But the cross was meant to physically torture someone. And even more important than that, and what Western people often miss when they read the Gospels, was it was meant to publicly shame them. And so it’s not like Jesus was the only one who was crucified. The Romans crucified tens of thousands of people. They would do it on roadways, and you would have vultures coming in and picking at the bodies. The smell would be horrible. The sight would be horrible. Everything about it was grotesque. And when you understand that, then you start to get this sense of like, Wow. Jesus not only took my place and bore this physical pain—and the Gospels don’t even talk about the physical pain. The emphasis in the Gospels is Jesus bearing our shame and humiliation in our place. So when you start to understand how brutal and ugly crucifixion was, it’s then that you start to recognize how glorious it is that Jesus did that for us.

Matt Tully
In the book you connect the horror of the cross with the glory of the cross. And that’s something I think that sometimes we want to jump right to the glory of the cross. As Christians, we kind of have our theology and we know why it’s so important in the abstract, but maybe we tend to not want to linger on the horror of it.

Jeremy Treat
I think that’s related to sin too. We have to know what crucifixion was about, and then we have to acknowledge our sin. Because if I’m just thinking, Well, people are basically good people, and then Jesus made this nice gesture to them, then it’s like, Okay, cool. I could sing about that for thirty minutes every Sunday, and then live my life in a way that doesn’t really affect it at all. But that’s not what the cross is about. If our sin has separated us from God and literally brought decay into all of the earth, and then the cross is this horrific, brutal experience that Jesus went through, then all of a sudden that changes everything. All of a sudden I’m not just like, Oh, that was nice that Jesus did that for me. It is, He’s changed my life. He went through something unimaginable so that I could be reconciled to God and be a new creation today and be a part of the work that he’s doing. I think when we start to understand the cross in the biblical sense, you can’t yawn over it. It’s not something that’s like, Oh, okay, we know that. No, this is crazy! It’s unthinkable. It’s amazing, and it really does change our lives. It’s changed my life.

13:41 - The Reductive Nature of Theories of the Atonement

Matt Tully
Throughout history, Christians have proposed various theories of the atonement. That’s how these are often described—theories of the atonement, how it works, what’s actually happening when Jesus dies on the cross in our place. And I want to talk about a few of those in a minute, but before we get to that, you actually don’t really like the language of theories when it comes to the atonement. I wonder if you could tell us why that is and what would you say is a better way to talk about the atonement?

Jeremy Treat
The standard way of having atonement conversations is by engaging with theories. And so you have these theories like the penal substitution theory, Christus Victor, and the moral exemplary theory. And the problem is that these are usually presented as mutually exclusive theories, as if Jesus either bore the wrath of God or defeated the devil, or provided an example of love for us. And so the obvious problem with that is you read the Scriptures, and we shouldn’t have to choose between truths. Jesus did all of those things and many more. And so the way that the atonement theology has developed in conversation becomes incredibly reductive, to where you reduce the glory of the cross to one aspect of the cross. And so what I’m trying to do is approach it in a different way, saying we don’t have to approach this by the theories. And honestly, nobody even talked about theories of the atonement until the mid 1800s. That was something that, that came out of an Enlightenment way of thinking in the university system, borrowing from language from other fields and saying, Well, here’s a theory—a mutually exclusive explanation of the cross that explains everything about it through this one dimension. And so I just think that that’s unhelpful. I think contemporary theology went the wrong direction with that. And so what I do in my book is I talk about dimensions of the cross. And we can talk about how Jesus forgave our sins and was victorious over the devil and adopted us into the family of God and bore our shame and set us free from the slavery of sin. I cover twenty dimensions of the atonement in the book, and there’s many more. And so I think it’s a better way of approaching it, saying, Let’s try and understand the fullness of what Christ accomplished on the cross. And yes, it’s the forgiveness of our sins, that’s at the heart of it, but it’s much more than that. And then also understanding how those things relate to one another, so we’re not just kind of picking and choosing. Oh, I like this. I like that. No, here’s a glorious, multi-dimensional accomplishment that we’re going to be rejoicing over for all of eternity.

16:41 - Is There an Over-Emphasis on Penal Substitution?

Matt Tully
In evangelical circles, probably especially among maybe more Reformed types, penal substitution is perhaps the primary lens or dimension through which we tend to view the atonement. And maybe this relates to what you were saying about trying to hold together all of these dimensions. Some Christians would criticize many protestants for what they would call to be an over-emphasis on penal substitution, that sometimes certain conservative Christians are reductive in making that the sum of what God did on the cross. How would you respond to that kind of a critique?

Jeremy Treat
I think it’s often a really fair critique. I do think that a lot of more conservative Christians and Reformed Christians have almost exclusively focused on penal substitution. An example is when Gustaf Aulén came on the scene and wrote Christus Victor, he’s recognizing a gap in a lot of theology. And he was right to do so. I think that he went about it in a lot of wrong ways. That’s another conversation. In our culture, if you have an emphasis on penal substitution, plus we’re living in this Enlightenment world [ that doesn’t really take seriously the spiritual realm—we’re modern people, so we don’t believe in angels and demons anymore and all that kind of stuff—you can look back at that and see a lot of Reformed Christians, and Christians in general, just ignored the victory over the demonic. And that is clearly a key part of what Jesus came to accomplish. He says that in 1 John, that he came to destroy the works of the devil. And you have that clearly in Colossians 2, of what Jesus is accomplishing on the cross. It’s this triumph over the enemy, disarming him, putting him to public shame. So I don’t know if I’d say there’s been an overemphasis, because I don’t know if you can overemphasize something so important of what penal substitution points to, but it’s been to the neglect or the exclusion of a lot of other dimensions that are just beautiful and glorious and that we really need.

Matt Tully
Then on the other side of the spectrum, though, you have others, even some seemingly evangelical Christians, who would accuse those who affirm penal substitution of having a pretty deficient or even immoral view of God. I came across a tweet online from one such person, a pastor in fact, and he writes, “Penal substitutionary atonement—which says God had to kill something, so he chose Jesus not you, but he’s still kinda angry with you for sinning—has pushed more people away from God than any other doctrine. It makes God a petty tyrant, which others then model.” How would you respond to a critique like that against this dimension of the atonement, as you see it?

Jeremy Treat
I think that there are a lot of really unhelpful and unhealthy views of penal substitution out there, and those need to be corrected. Most of the critiques that I hear of penal substitution are critiquing popular versions of it that are really bad. The train conductor illustration is an example of that. I can come back to that in a second, but the critiques that I hear of penal substitution, they’re not valid criticisms of John Stott or J. I. Packer or any of these people who are thinking in deeply Trinitarian ways, non-reductive ways.

Matt Tully
So they’re caricatures. You would say they’re straw men?

Jeremy Treat
Well, I wouldn’t say there’re totally straw men because I think that there is a lot of popular-level preaching that falls into that. It kind of presents God as angry, Jesus is loving, and he’s got to kill him in order for you to go to heaven. I mentioned the train conductor. I remember as a kid hearing this story. There’s the father, he’s a train conductor. He looks down, his kid’s playing on the tracks, but then the train is coming, and so the father has this dilemma of, Do I either sacrifice my son by switching the tracks and saving all the people on the train, or do I let the train go off and I save my son? Of course, what he does is he sacrifices his son to save all the people. That’s used as an illustration for the cross. Now, there’s elements of truth in that. It’s sacrifice. But the problem is the son is just blindsided. He’s not choosing. He’s not offering his life. It’s not father and son working together. The son’s playing, and the next thing you know he’s getting crushed by the tracks. And that’s a horrible illustration for understanding what happens at the cross, because the cross is a Triune work through and through—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit all working together for the purpose of atoning for sins and a renewal of the heavens and the earth. And when you approach it like that, then it doesn’t fall prey to those caricatures of pitting an angry father against a loving son. No, the father’s angry, but the son gets angry too. They’re both united against sin, and they’re both loving as well. So we need a lot more nuance than that. I unpack that in the book. I ask How do we think about the trinity? How does that shape the cross? But most of those critiques really are critiques of caricatures. But then again, I want to follow up and say we need some of those, because unfortunately, I think there are a lot of crude, unbiblical versions of penal substitution out there.

22:40 - Wrath Is Not an Attribute of God

Matt Tully
That’s really helpful. We can’t really talk about the atonement without talking about the wrath of God and especially how that directly connects to penal substitution. But you say something really interesting about the wrath of God in your book. You write, “We must understand that wrath is not an attribute of God. God is love. God is holy. God is just. God is not wrath.” I can just imagine right now that for some listeners, hearing those words may be causing alarm bells to be going off in their minds and they’re thinking, That sounds like something a “progressive Christian” might say, someone who doesn’t really want to believe in the wrath of God. So what are you getting at when you say that wrath is not an attribute of God?

Jeremy Treat
If people read my book, they’ll see very clearly that I believe that the wrath of God is a very real, important biblical theme. And if you lose that, then you lose so much of what God is doing in the cross. So I want to acknowledge that. But saying that wrath is not an attribute of God is really important, because God is holy and God is loving. God is love. God is holy. God is just. But God’s wrath is the rightful expression of his holy love in the face of sin and evil. So when we think about God before the creation of the world, we can say God is love—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in perfect communion with one another. But we wouldn’t say God is wrath. Wrath is God’s holy, loving response to sin. And so that doesn’t diminish the wrath of God. I think it just helps us understand it correctly, in the way that it flows from God’s character as a holy, loving God.

Matt Tully
And that helps to maybe help us color a little bit better, too, and push back against the caricatures of penal substitution, where, fundamentally, it isn’t an expression of anger; it’s an expression of God’s love that, again, it’s coming into contact with the sin of the world.

Jeremy Treat
The problem is that we pit love and anger against each other. We think, Well, if God is loving, then how could he be angry? But look, if you’re a parent, you know that that’s a false dichotomy, because I love my kids, but sometimes the things that they do make me angry because I love them. Now, we need to understand that anger arises because of love. If somebody comes after my children, trying to hurt them, I’m going to get angry because I love them. If I didn’t get angry, you would rightfully question whether I actually love them or not. Now, the hard part about that, even when I start to make a comparison by comparing like God’s anger to our anger, is it’s hard for us to imagine God’s perfect loving wrath, because we’ve never seen someone who’s angry who has a purely righteous anger. Our anger, at some level, taps into selfishness and a lack of self-control and all of those kinds of things. And so it’s hard for us to imagine a perfectly pure, righteous, loving, just anger. But that’s exactly what God has. His anger is never irritability. It’s never an explosion where he can’t contain himself. “The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” So we just need to understand God’s character in the right way as we talk about the cross.

26:17 - Atonement Impacts All of Creation

Matt Tully
When we think and talk about the atonement, we often, as we have in this conversation so far, think primarily in terms of humanity’s broken relationship with God, our own sin problem, and the effect that it has on us. But you want us to, in some ways, broaden our perspective on the atonement, and on the impact of the atonement, to encompass all of creation. I wonder if you could just help us understand what impact we should be seeing there?

Jeremy Treat
I think God reconciling sinners to himself is at the heart of it. And that’s the traditional conversation about the atonement—How does God reconcile sinner to himself? I think that’s correct, but it’s incomplete, because the vision in Scripture is even broader than that. And so when you think about Scripture like Colossians 1, it’s talking about this reconciliation not only of God and sinners, but of heaven and earth. By the blood of the cross, God bringing together heaven and earth. The way I talk about it in the book is that atonement is about the at-one-ment of God and sinners. He’s taking two who are alienated and making them at one. But it’s also about the at-one-ment of heaven and earth. The way that God reconciles us to himself comes within this broader story of God uniting heaven and earth in Christ. And so we need to recognize how Christ’s atoning work comes to us, but it also goes through us, and the vision is for all of creation.

Matt Tully
When you say that, is there a sense in which we should understand Christ’s atoning work—the sacrifice that he paid on our behalf—is that also, in a sense, on behalf of the world? Should we understand that the world itself is in some way culpable and guilty or tarnished, and Christ is having to purchase redemption for the world? Or is the impact on the world just kind of flowing out of our own redemption?

Jeremy Treat
Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s definitely different kinds of categories. I can’t hold the land accountable for sin like God holds me accountable for sin. I think Romans 8 is probably the place to go to think through that question. The creation is in bondage because of the sin of humanity. It was our sin against God. You think of this vertical rebellion against God that led to this horizontal shattering of shalom and goodness of God’s creation. And so just as the created world is in decay because of our sin, the creation longs for our redemption, because it’s in our redemption that the overflow of that is into all of creation. So I think it’s all wrapped up together. But when we talk about sin and moral culpability and whatnot, that’s on humanity.

29:12 - Teaching Our Kids about the Atonement

Matt Tully
Many of the people listening right now are undoubtedly parents—maybe even parents of small children. I was recently reading in the book of Exodus the story of the Passover in Exodus 12, when we have this terrible threat looming over Egypt. God is giving instructions to the Israelites for how to prepare the sacrificial lamb and how to take the blood of the lamb and spread it over their doors. And then there’s this incredible instruction that God gives. He says, “And when your children say to you, ‘What do you mean by this service?’ You shall say, ‘It is the sacrifice of the Lord’s Passover, for he passed over the houses of the people of Israel and Egypt when he struck the Egyptians but spared our houses.’” And it just kind of got me thinking about this idea of atonement and, again, Passover lamb was this early sign of an atonement for the sake of the guilty. How should we as Christians think about teaching our children about this doctrine? I think for some it can probably feel a little bit overwhelming, a little bit intense to try to explain and to go beyond just the kind of “Jesus died for your sins.” All of us as parents know that they start to ask tough questions that maybe we’re pretty quick to want to gloss over. How would you recommend or give advice to Christians who want to help their children understand and appreciate the seriousness of this, but maybe not scare them or give them a bad view of God in all of this?

Jeremy Treat
I think the way you’re talking about it with Exodus is honestly where I would start—teaching them to see the Bible as a grand story that culminates in Christ, and showing how all of that points to him. If I try and sit my eight-year-old down and try to talk systematic theology with her, it’s going to be harder for her to track with me. But if I sit down with her and I say, Hey, let me tell you a story. Let’s talk about God’s people being in slavery, what God did, and that’s pointing forward to us. There’s a kind of slavery that we experience in our lives today. I think it’s important with kids to really have a holistic approach with this. And I like to use more academic categories. I want to give my kids biblical theology, systematic theology, and practical theology. So what I mean by that is, and I even think of this kind of as the kids grow up a little bit, I just want them knowing the story of Scripture. I just want to read The Jesus Storybook Bible to them over and over again, and then move towards Scripture itself. Tthey know the stories, but they know how it fits together as one story culminating in Christ. I think that’s so important. I think a lot of people have the wrong view of the cross because they have a truncated story. All they have is You’re a sinner, and Jesus is a Savior. And if that’s all you’ve got, then why does creation matter? Why does community matter? Why does justice matter? None of that fits. But if you’re going creation, fall, redemption, new creation, then they’re going to have the right framework. So I would start with story. But then I do think, especially in our world today, we need to talk with our kids about particular beliefs. What do we believe about what it means to be human? And that seems like such a vague, generic question. What does it mean to be male and female? What is the purpose of our lives? Do we create our own purpose, or are we created with purpose? And so you get into that and you’re having these more topical conversations with kids. I want my kids to understand sin. For them growing up in the church and we we’re blessed in so many ways in our lives, I don’t want them to have a sense of entitlement. Like we talked about earlier, to appreciate God’s grace you have to be able to recognize your own sin. So I think walking through some key topics like that, but then I also just think practically that I want my kids to be able to experience a community that’s genuinely shaped by the atonement. We’re this cross-shaped community, where there’s a seat at the table for anyone and everyone, and they’re seeing that play out. So when they go back and they read Ephesians 2 someday and it talks about the dividing wall of hostility being broken down through the death of Christ, they could say, Oh yeah, that makes sense, because in our church we have all these people from different ethnicities and yet we’re one in Christ. And I don’t see that in happening in the world. And so that’s because of what Jesus did. So I want to approach the topic with my kids in a really holistic way of helping them understand the story, understand key beliefs of what we have, and then how it really plays out practically in our lives.

34:06 - How to Keep the Doctrine of Atonement from Becoming Stale

Matt Tully
And that’s such great advice for all of us, adults included, going back to what we said earlier about how we can domesticate the cross. We can, in so many ways, narrow it down into this little thing that is an individualized, personalized, small thing that can honestly sometimes be boring for us. It can feel like a stale topic to talk about, especially if we’ve been raised in the church. So I wonder if you could just personally reflect for a minute—How do you, as a pastor and as someone who actually did a PhD studying the atonement, how do you keep this doctrine from becoming stale and cold for your own heart and your own life? Is there practical advice you would offer to listeners who sometimes worry that this just feels like kind of old hat to me?

Jeremy Treat
Yeah, that’s good. I think the first thing that comes to my mind is when you understand the fullness of what Christ accomplished on the cross, then it’s infinitely rich. It’s never-ending resources. What I mean by that is if you only understand the cross, say in terms of justification, which is amazing and glorious, but let’s say that’s the only angle that you take with it, then I could see how maybe over time it feels like, Okay. I kind of know that. But if you move from that and say, Okay, but the cross is also participating in God and a renewal of heaven and earth, and it deals with my shame, and it deals with my spiritual blindness, and it deals with my guilt and all these different aspects of it—then at that point, it comes alive so much more. And so even in the book when I walk through these twenty dimensions, I then talk about how it’s a remedy for every ailment. So if I’m feeling spiritual attack, then it’s not, Well, if I go to the cross, then all I have is that Jesus forgave my sins. Well, yeah, Jesus forgave my sins. That’s great and glorious. But when I’m being attacked by the demonic, I need the truth that Christ conquered them on the cross. I’m only facing a defeated enemy. That’s powerful. When I’m wallowing in shame, I don’t need to be reminded of certain aspects of the cross, but I can be reminded that Jesus bore my shame. That’s beautiful. So that’s why I think the more we understand of the fullness, the more we’re just constantly amazed at what God has done for us. The other thing I would say that’s been really impactful for me just recently in the last few months is 1 Corinthians talks about the cross in a way that subverts worldly wisdom and power. I think especially in Los Angeles, it’s a lot like Corinth. People are so status hungry and want to come across to be impressive. We want to have worldly power, worldly success, and all of that. And Paul says to the church in Corinth, “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it’s the power of God.” And then he calls the church, in 2 Corinthians, to embrace weakness as a way of experiencing God’s strength. And so for me, when I think about how I’m following the crucified and resurrected Christ, I don’t need to try and be impressive by worldly standards. I can acknowledge that that’s the default mode of my flesh, and I can acknowledge that I’ve grown up in a way that my temptation is to avoid weakness and hide weakness and try and pretend like I’m strong all the time. And I think the cross has been an invitation to me, especially recently, to embrace my weakness and to say God’s power is made perfect through weakness. You see that through the cross, and then you see that through a people who are shaped by the cross. And so that’s been something that’s just been really personal for me lately that the Lord’s been doing in my life. And I think without the cross, that doesn’t make sense. Without the cross, what does it mean that power has made perfect in weakness? Or how could I possibly say “When I am weak, then I am strong,” which is what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12. So that’s why the cross is good news. It’s good news for people who are weak. It’s good news for people who are hurting. And ultimately, that’s all of us.

Matt Tully
Amen. That’s so good. Well, Jeremy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today and help all of us—new Christians and old Christians alike—appreciate the cross, the atonement of our Lord and Savior, Jesus, a little bit better.

Jeremy Treat
Thanks, Matt. It’s been a pleasure.

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