The Gospel Throughout ScriptureSample

They stripped Him and mocked Him and drove iron through the hands that had touched lepers and opened blind eyes, and the sky went dark in the middle of the afternoon, and I need you to understand that the darkness was not symbolic—creation was responding to what was happening to its Creator the only way it knew how. The sun could not watch. The earth shook. We have domesticated this moment with stained glass and hymns sung in comfortable rooms, but there is nothing comfortable about it.

Look at the cross and see what is actually happening: every act of injustice that ever was or will be, every enslaved Hagar, every self-destructing Samson, every fugitive Moses, every David dodging spears while playing worship music—all of the wreckage of the human experiment is being gathered up and nailed to that wood. Isaiah saw it seven hundred years early: “He was pierced for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on Him.” The innocent One absorbed the guilt of every guilty one so that the guilty could be called innocent, and from that cross, with blood in His eyes and breath leaving His body, Jesus said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” and He was not just talking about the Roman soldiers. He was talking about you and me and every person who has ever participated in a broken system and called it normal. The cross is where the gospel stops being an idea and becomes a cost, because salvation was never free—it just was not charged to your account.

Bring it to life: Stream The Passion of the Christ on Wonder Project.