The cross is the universal sign of Christianity. It is central to the gospel and the pivotal point of the Christian’s experience of salvation. Through the death of Jesus we find assurance and peace with God, and with joy we celebrate this in church. But things were different when Christ was being crucified. The scene of the cross was filled with conflict and turmoil, and huge issues were called into question, not just for the hostile Jews but also for the disciples of Jesus. What is it like on the ground today? Not all is quiet. The world is becoming increasingly hostile to the ideas associated with the sacrificial death of Christ, and the Christian consensus around the cross is breaking down. What Evangelical Christians have believed and assumed about the cross is increasingly contested and opposed, even within the Evangelical camp. This is to a large extent due to the shift in people’s thinking as our culture has become postmodern and post Christian. The cross once again brings out the conflict between the spirit of the age and the gospel, and Christians stand in the middle of the clash. Again the cross is at the heart of the spiritual war of the time; and like the men of Issachar, we need to understand the times and know what to do about it.
The cross is a huge and many-sided subject in scripture, but we will approach it through one theme, that of atonement. This theme takes us directly to the critical issues involved in understanding the death of Jesus. When Christians discuss the atonement, they are talking about what exactly the sacrificial death of Jesus does for us and how it achieves this.
While Christians have grasped the function of the cross by faith, in their thinking they have often reduced the death of Jesus to a single issue, and this has left them with a limited, deficient and even dysfunctional view of the crucial event of their salvation. As we go over the subject of atonement, we will look at the cross for all that it does in our life. We need to get a full view of our salvation through Christ’s death.
— George Tabert