Small Group Discussion Questions for November 13

1. “Crux” or “crucial” come from ‘cross’ in Latin which means the central thing. In what way is the cross the central or most important thing for you?

In the minds of people around the world, the cross symbolizes the Christian faith and universally stands for the central reality of the Christian faith. The words crux or crucial, in fact, come from the word ‘cross’ in Latin and now in English means the central, most important thing.

We are at the end of Jesus’ life today in our series. Today we come to the cross, the cross that stands at the center of all time. All time is before is B.C. – before Christ. All time after the cross is A.D. – in the year of our Lord. The cross divides all of history. It is that which all of the O.T. looked forward to and that we look back to. It is the center. The Apostle Paul says, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified.” He is saying that if he is not making the cross clear then he is wasting his time. We would say, if I as pastor or we as a church do not make clear the cross to each other and to the wider community, then all of our many activities as a church (look at them) are in the end a waste of time.

2. How does the cross bring into question God’s reliability?

First, the cross as a problem. I think one of the main problems people have with the cross is that it brings into question God’s reliability. Why did God let it happen to Jesus? I mean what kind of a God would allow this to happen to his one and only faithful servant on earth? The Romans were cruel. Crucifixion was deliberately designed to maximize physical pain and humiliation. Just hanging up there with flies and birds picking on you for hours and hours and sometimes several days. It was such a ghastly way to die that Cicero had crucifixion banned to all Roman citizens. But the N.T. actually focuses very little on the physical suffering. The greater emphasis by far is on the mental or spiritual suffering that Christ went through on the cross as he cries out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And these words seem to me to be the most troublesome of all. We sometimes speak of a peaceful death and point to a man like Socrates or many of the Christian martyrs or a loved one – he/she had a peaceful death. Or they died with such courage. You can’t say either of these things about Christ because he didn’t. He died in agony crying out “My God, my God….” He seemed to crumble.

Now the problem for us is, if God let this happen to Jesus, what hope do we have that he will stand by us in our hour of need? This is the crunch question. If this happened to Christ and Christ was the one perfect servant God has had on earth, how can we trust God at all when he abandoned Jesus?

3. How does the cross bring into question Jesus’ reliability?

But even more Jesus’ reliability is called into question. Jesus had promised, “Peace I give to you, not as the world gives peace but real peace” On another occasion he said, “Do not be anxious – let not your hearts be troubled.” And now he himself is on the griddle and he seems to give up in despair. What business does Jesus have to promise us so much when for him it didn’t seem to work out? It seems to make the promises he made to us null and void. Onlookers suggested – if he can’t save himself, how can he save us?

Doesn’t this discredit the cross entirely? All these promises in the O.T. about how God will not forsake his people – especially in their hour of need. Then he seems to forsake Jesus, the only perfect servant he ever had. The cross itself is a problem.

4. What is the problem behind the cross?

But secondly, there is the problem behind the cross. There certainly is a problem with the cross itself, but the bible teaches us that it is not in Jesus and it is not in God the Father. The problem behind the cross is us. You ask “Pastor Dave, what do you mean?” Here is what I mean. The real outrage is human sin that caused the cross to be necessary.

5. Discuss the difference in meaning of the two Greek words for sin – “harmartia” and “anomia”.

It’s a very old-fashioned word, sin is – somewhat unpopular today. It is translated out of several Greek words. The most common Greek word is harmartia = a falling short of a goal or a target. If you are shooting a bow and arrow at a target and the arrow falls short of the target the word you’d use is harmartia. We as human beings fall short of God’s righteousness. Even when we are at our best, even when our intentions are the most unspotted, even when we are doing our best in putting our intentions into practice, we fall short. Do you see what the word harmartia is saying? Even when we are on the top of our game, we still are falling short.

Another Greek word that looks at another side of sin is sin is anomia = mean lawlessness or rebellion. Sin isn’t just a well meaning attempt to get somewhere and falling short, it is also stubbornness, pride, rebellion, lawlessness – which wants to have no one over me, no boss – I want to paddle my own canoe, I don’t need any advice, I don’t need anyone telling me what is right. Sin as rebellion.

6. Is there enough evidence to solidly hold to a doctrine of sin today?

But isn’t this a gloomy picture of the world? You will hear people look at Christianity today and say how gloomy. There is so much good going on in the world, how can you possibly believe in this awful doctrine of sin? My answer would be – there is an awful lot of evidence for it. Listen. Put two two year olds down here in front of me and give them one toy and I’ll tell you how WWIII is going to start! Does anyone give evidence to sin more than a self-centered child? Have you ever tried to obey the Golden Rule? Here is your assignment for this coming week. Try your hardest this week to treat others as you would want them to treat you. Just try it tenaciously for a week. Here is my prediction: you will learn something important about yourself; you will end the week with a very different idea of what sin is all about.

Look at the evidences for sin in every day life. Verbal commitments are never enough, we need legal contracts don’t we? Think of all you have to go through to buy a house – contracts, deeds sorted out and cleared. Doors are not enough, we need locks. Paying fares is not enough, we need tickets to show that we’ve paid. Laws are not enough, we need police and penal systems to enforce them and electric chairs in prisons. Why? Simply because we cannot to be trusted. It doesn’t make sense to trust other people because people aren’t trustworthy. We need to protect ourselves. And that’s just within society – not to mention the whole problem of national defense against outside attack.

7. Give examples of how people deal with sin.

So what is the modern way to deal with sin? There are two main ways: 1) we justify it.

Listen to excerpts from a letter of Sigmund Freud where he speaks of where he thinks he is morally.

“I will add that I have no dread at all of the Almighty. If we ever were to meet, I should have more reproaches to make of him than He could to me. I should ask Him why He did not give me better intellectual equipment and He could not complain that I have not made the best use of my supposed freedom. [He goes on and says] I believe that in a sense of justice and consideration for others and disliking making others suffer or taking advantage of them, I can measure myself with the best people I’ve known. I’ve never done anything mean or malicious.”

I read this because I think many, many people today would have exactly the same verdict about themselves. Basically, God is going to have more to answer to me than I will to Him. I’ve done as well as can be expected with what He has given me and I am better than most people. So today we try to justify ourselves.

The other way we deal with sin today is 2) ignore it. Here the soldiers crucifying Jesus surely are the best examples. It’s all in a day’s work. They are just doing their job. And what are they doing when this incredible moment in the history of the world is happening? They have a little crap game going for themselves. They are rolling dice for Jesus’ clothes – stealing and making off with it. At the most important moment of all history, there they are right underneath the cross rolling dice – ignoring everything.

8. How does it strike you that more than anyone else, Jesus teaches us about hell?

So when it comes to sin, we in our generation justify ourselves or ignore our sin. But do we understand something? When it comes right down to it, what we think of our sin is relatively irrelevant. It is unimportant by comparison to what God thinks about our sin. Sin is against God. God says, “All have sinned and have fallen short of the glory of God” and we are accountable and answerable to Him for this sin. This violates His nature and “the wages of sin is death.” Jesus spoke not only of the Good News of the Gospel but unmistakable warnings of judgment and hell and eternal separation from God in outer darkness. Almost all of the biblical teaching on hell comes from Jesus himself. This is something that people don’t realize I think when they talk about the God of the O.T. being a God of wrath and Jesus and the N.T. being a God of love – a religion of love. In fact, almost all the teaching on hell comes from Christ himself. Perhaps it is because we wouldn’t be able to take it from anyone else like Paul or Peter or someone like this.

9. In what way is the cross the solution to the problem of sin?

The cross itself is a problem – it is an indictment of God. But there is a deeper problem behind the cross – human sin. But in bringing the two together we find that the cross is the solution to the problem of sin. I think we really have to get a grip on the fact that the death of Christ was no normal death. It’s not just that Jesus had a particularly low pain threshold and cried out as he was dying. That’s not it at all. Jesus as he was dying was experiencing the full judgment of God – rejection by God – condemnation of God. He was experiencing as much as anyone can hell – total abandonment by God. He was experiencing the outer darkness – punishment of sin and separation from God. He who was without sin, became sin for us and as such was abandoned by God. Since God cannot tolerate sin in his presence, God turned his back on Jesus who himself was God and left him alone and condemned.

10. What happened on the cross when sin was brought into the Trinity itself?

What is going on here? I think when you really look closely at what is going on here on the cross, you see a division within the Trinity itself. Wherein from all eternity, from before the world was created, the Father – Son – Holy Spirit had existed in complete harmony, and communication and love, on the cross you see anger and wrath visited on one member of the Trinity by another. You see abandonment and punishment. Something comes into the Trinity itself – sin.

So in this poem that I read, “It’s God they ought to crucify instead of you and me, I said to the carpenter hanging on the tree.” It was God who was being crucified. That’s just the point. It was God the Son. God wasn’t just up in heaven. It was God the Son who actually died a death for us. Here is what it means. Your sin and mine is part of what Jesus was suffering for. This is a mystery beyond anything we can get a hold on – of how a sin that you and I commit in 2005 A.D. can somehow have been paid for back then. It is something we can’t grasp because God transcends time. But he died not for his own sin because he was perfect. But like Gal. 3:13 says, Jesus became a curse for us, punished for us in our place. Or as Hebrews says, he tasted death for everyone.

So when Jesus was on the cross, God condemned him – not just as a sinner but as the most evil man that ever lived. Because he condemned him for the sins of millions and millions of people. Jesus catches on his back the landslide of punishment for all the murder, lying, cheating, raping, lying, gossiping, cruelty – all the things that separate us from God.

Finally, as he died, Jesus said, “It is finished”. He bowed his head and gave up his spirit. He didn’t say, “I am finished”. He was far from finished. He said “It is finished”. That is, his work is finished, his work of redemption is accomplished. We think of Hebrews 9 & 10 which contrasts the priests who had to offer sacrifices continually and Christ who died once and for all to bring the forgiveness of sin. His death once and for all was sufficient to forgive any and all the sins of men.

I trust that we see into the depth of something here. If you are a Christian, you worship a God that might have pardoned Adolf Hitler at the end of his life. Not because he wasn’t guilty – because he wasn’t so bad, but because the death of God’s Son was a sufficient sacrifice to cover and to pay for Hitler’s sins along side yours. And let me just say this. If you don’t believe that, then you haven’t understood what the death of Christ means. You’ll think the cross will just forgive someone up to a point and beyond that point people like Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot have gone a bit too far. But what the Scriptures teach about the death of Christ is that its once and for all and it covers even something like this.

I raised the question at the beginning: “How can we trust God if he abandoned Jesus?” But do you see, we can trust God precisely because He abandoned Jesus. The best reason we have for trusting God is because he abandoned Jesus for us. God turned his back on Jesus precisely to turn his faced toward us. Jesus loved us that much that he was willing to take the rap for our sin. That’s what the cross means for the world. That’s what the cross means for you and me.

Salvation is at a tremendous price to Christ. That’s what the cross is all about. But salvation is free to us. And the challenge to us is this: how shall we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? God having done this much to redeem us, how shall we escape if we neglect it? The answer is a sobering one: we will not escape what Jesus experienced on the cross – the full judgment of God, rejection by God, condemnation by God, total abandonment by God, the outer darkness, punishment of sin and eternal separation from God in hell – we will not escape these things if we neglect so great a salvation. Jesus experienced all these things FOR US so that we do not have to experience them! How great is this salvation! I plead with you, do not neglect it! Turn to Christ, ask him to forgive you of your sins, trust Him that what he did on the cross was for you.