Teaching About the Cross

Bible teachers need to understand that the death of Jesus on the cross and His resurrection are not isolated stories. Nor should they be reserved for the Easter season. The cross is a pivotal point in the redemption message found throughout Scripture.

The Old Testament, pre-cross, points forward to Jesus as the Messiah who would die on the cross for our sin.

1) After the creation and fall of man, God promised this Redeemer who would come and crush the serpent’s head. Satan (the serpent) would only be able to “strike his heel” through His death as Jesus would rise from the dead as Victor over sin, death, and the devil (Gen. 3:15). When Adam and Eve sinned, their nakedness was exposed, and as a foreshadow of what Jesus would eventually come and do, God clothed them by making “garments of skin for Adam and his wife” (Gen. 3:21). Garments of skin would have required the death of an animal. Likewise, “God made him (Jesus) who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21) We must be clothed in Jesus’ righteousness in order to be accepted by God which was made possible by His death.

2) The Law was a tutor to show people their need of a Savior. “… no one will be declared righteous in God’s sight by the works of the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of our sin. … all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” (Rom. 3:19-24) “But when the set time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive adoption to sonship.” (Gal. 4:4-5)

3) The Old Testament Prophets foretold the coming of Jesus who would be “despised and rejected by mankind” and “pierced for our transgressions” for “the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Isa. 53).

The New Testament, post-cross, points back to Jesus and His death on the cross.

4) The Gospels tell about Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Jesus even foretold His own death and resurrection to the disciples (Mk. 10:32-34) and how it was necessary for this to happen to Him as a part of God’s plan of redemption. “… beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures (the Old Testament) concerning himself” (Lk. 24:27). He said, “Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms” (Lk. 24:44).

5) Jesus’ death on the cross was a demonstration of God’s love for people so that “whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (Jn. 3:16-17). As already evidenced from the beginning pages of Scripture to the cross, we cannot save ourselves, no matter how hard we try. “… it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God” (Eph. 2:8-9). Though dead in our sins, we are made alive in Christ because the debt we owed due to our sin was nailed to the cross (Col. 2:13-15).

6) Those who put their trust in Jesus, believing in the all-sufficiency of His work on the cross for their salvation, are placed into the Body of Christ, His Church (1 Cor. 12:13; Eph. 2). We, His Church, are to proclaim His message of redemption as “Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us” to be reconciled to God (2 Cor. 5:17-21).

7) In the book of Revelation and some other passages in the New Testament, we read of God’s plan to not only save us from the penalty of sin, as He now does for those who put their trust in Jesus, but also from the very presence of sin in His eternal new heaven and new earth (1 Pet. 3; Rev. 21) — all because of what He did on the cross. “Worthy is the Lamb, who was slain!” (Rev. 5)

“May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal. 6:14)