Christian Living

The Cross, Part 3—How Effective Is It For You Right Now?

by J.W. Phillips
03/11/25
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The Cross, Part 3—How Effective Is It For You Right Now?

The three biggest obstacles to a successful pursuit of God are sin, self, and Satan—sin, because it constructs an environment inhospitable to God; self, because it seeks a place of rule that only belongs to God; and Satan, because he releases forces entirely hostile to God. All three of these obstacles are best observed, and best overcome, at the cross.

The way the cross does this is by providing a high-powered microscope that brings into stunning focus the very forces at work that day at Calvary, forces that are also at work in our lives today. Once we see what the cross reveals, and keep our focus precisely there, dramatic changes will occur.

In the previous posts, we saw how the cross exposed our old self, the nature we were born with. In this post we shall see how the cross shines its light on sin and Satan.

Sin

Clearly magnified by the cross is the seriousness of sin. J.I. Packer’s observation that “all sin has the nature of suicidal, self-impoverishing madness”¹ has been repeatedly confirmed in the biography of every man. The damage sin has caused can hardly be overstated! And therefore Heaven’s response to sin was hardly an overreaction!

John Owen’s analysis of this response, offered so eloquently in his seventeenth-century book, Communion with God, bears repeating.

"To see Christ, the wisdom and power of God, always beloved of the Father, fear and tremble, bow and sweat, pray and die; to see him lifted up on the cross, the earth trembling beneath him as if unable to bear his weight, to see the heavens darkened over him as if shut against his cry, and himself hanging between both as if refused by each; and to see that all this is because of our sins is to see clearly the holy justice and wrath of God against sin."²

Once one does see this, sin can no longer be viewed in a casual way, something to be considered and negotiated on a case-by-case basis each day. To be careless toward him who showed so much care for us is simply unthinkable. The offense of sin, exposed by the cross, demands all negotiations cease and that only diligence, watchfulness, and on-guard alertness find station in our souls. 

F.B. Meyer said it well, “The pious contemplation of his death will most powerfully kill the love of sin in the soul, and kindle an ardent hatred toward it.” It is by meditating on the cross that we find ourselves aroused to a resistance against sin more militant in its resolve than what we ever experienced before.

In his book, Trial by Fire, F.B. Meyer captured the spirit of this resistance well when he wrote:

"Shall I be a friend to that which was his deadly enemy? Shall sin be sweet to me which was so bitter to him; and that for my sake? Shall I ever lend it a good look or entertain a favorable thought of that which shed my Lord’s blood? Shall I live in that for which he died, and died to kill in me? Oh, let it not be!"³

The minimizing, dismissive attitude that society expresses toward sin can only be attributed to its total blindness to righteousness. By contrast, God’s nuclear reaction to sin, his awesome and terrible vengeance visited upon it, appears altogether unnecessary to fallen man.

Despite this obvious obtuseness in the human race, God’s wrath toward sin exploded at the cross. The earth quaked. The rocks split. The skies turned black. The penalty for sin that day was nothing less than the total torment of hell. Indeed, sin brought down the full fury of God in a way that would shatter all sensibilities, if somehow its measure could be understood.

God absolutely hates sin! He refuses to tolerate it, make excuses for it, overlook its motive, or make light of its intent. The God who is too holy to look upon evil despises sin utterly, and is committed to obliterate it entirely.

Let’s face it: What intrigues men, does not intrigue God! And what men find useful, God finds reprehensible. For God, there can be no compromise, no alliance with evil. His eyes are ever emblazoned with a ruthless resolve to rid every vestige of evil.

It is at the cross of Jesus we begin to realize the enormity of sin when we see, to our astonishment, that the price exacted was none other than the death of God’s own Son. I tell you, no one can fathom the infinite, Almighty God dying! And no one can fathom the alternative, either, of every person who ever lived spending an endless eternity in hell!

What is finally made clear to us, as Calvary shines its light, is that sin is so serious it should be permanently repugnant to us.

Oswald Chambers declared, “The worst state a person could ever be in is never to have had a twinge of conviction of sin ….”⁴

A similar sentiment is found in F.B. Meyer’s biography of Joshua, where it is said:

"We dread the consequence of sin more than the sin itself; discovery more than misdoing; what others may say or do more than the look of pain and sorrow on the face that looks out on us from the encircling throng of glorified spirits."⁵

Once the blinders do come off, though, and sin is seen for what it really is, the conviction that results, like tsunami-like tremors, will engulf the guilty, melting the stony heart in the heat of heaven’s passion. But why is this taking so long?

Thomas Watson asked, “Can we look upon a suffering Savior with dry eyes? Shall we not be sorry for those sins which made Christ a man of sorrow? Shall not our enormities, which drew blood from Christ, draw tears from us?”⁶ And not the tears of shallow sentiment, but tears that find their origin from the bottom of our hearts.

From the cross also is a glaring light that exposes that one within whom sin originated.

Satan

The cross reveals, as nothing else does, the maliciousness of Satan. Describing what occurred, E.M. Bounds wrote: “Angels retired, heaven hushed all its music, and all was draped in silence. All creation trembled in awe while Satan’s dread power was allowed to expend its dark forces on heaven’s Anointed One.”⁷

Yet, having done this, Huegel says, the irony is that it was at the cross of Jesus where Satan himself “was stripped of every artifice, every false light, every alluring deception and made to stand out before men in his true light, which gleams with the fires of hell.”⁸ How insane and repulsive is this archenemy of God!

Herbert Lockyer said of Satan, “He it was who created sorrow among the angels, who was responsible for the entrance of sin, the murder of Abel, the desolation of the Flood, and for the tears, graves, sins, sobs, and miseries of mankind all through the ages.”⁹

But it is at the cross where his lies are impeached, his ambitions are discredited, and his attacks on the Holy One become, most convincingly, an outrageous scandal. All that Satan was capable of is fully in view at the cross—the sinister serpent, the false prince, the Diablo of destruction, the Beelzebub of bluster and blunder.

Behind all the railing and reviling that set its hatred loose at the cross was a spirit far more coarse than the voices that uttered them. That spirit, thrown out of Heaven once and to be cast into fiery torment one day, is as hideous and repulsive as any spirit can be.

See the dear Son of God under attack by that one who once worshiped him and knows, even while he does this, how deserving of worship Jesus is. Yes, see that! Keep looking at that! And you won’t ever want to do business with Satan again! You will hate him and all that he stands for!

Not for one more moment will you contemplate any thought he inspires. Instead, viewing him as an enemy to be despised, you will set yourself against him so resolutely you will study his ways, know his wiles, and recognize all his chameleon-like attempts to appear reasonable. And because this seducer of souls has now been revealed to you so clearly at the cross, you will recoil, instinctively and increasingly, at every approach he makes, and withstand him in the full might of God’s power.

In these ways, you will notice that the cross helps you to make decisions you wouldn’t have otherwise made. So instead of being an antecedent to Christian maturity, the cross is as an enabler of this maturity by getting you to shun self and Satan with vehement resolve.

To every self-life appeal, there will be a ready answer: the refusal to listen! To every whisper from Satan, there will be an authoritative command: vacate the premises! These two conspirators of ruin won’t be permitted to participate in your life in any way!

Therefore, because the pleas of self-life will go unheeded and the counsel of Satan will go unconsidered, the voice of God can now be heard without competing claims infecting the environment with their clamor.

The effectiveness of the cross! Have you found it so in your life? Has your stand against sin and Satan been this resolute?

Notes:

1. J.I. Packer, Rediscovering Holiness, (Ventura, California, Regal, 2009), p.81.

2. John Owen, Communion with God, (Edinburg, UK., The Banner of Truth Trust, 1991), pp.82, 83.

3. F.B. Meyer, Trial by Fire, (Fort Washington, PA., CLC Publications, 2001), p.140.44

4. Oswald Chambers, Bringing Sons unto Glory, (Grand Rapids, Discovery House Publishers, 1990), p.55

5. F.B. Meyer, Joshua, (Fort Washington, PA., Christian Literature Crusade, 1977), p.96.

6. Thomas Watson, The Doctrine of Repentance, Kindle Edition, 2010; Kindle locations: 839-840.

7. E.M. Bounds, Winning the Invisible War, (Springdale: Whitaker, 1984), p.79.

8. F.J. Huegel, The Cross of Christ, The Throne of God, p.84.

9. Herbert Lockyer, All God’s Comfort, (Peabody, Massachusetts, Hendrickson Publishers, 2004), p.57.