The Grand Paradox

The Grand Paradox

It pleased the LORD to bruise Him; He has put Him to grief. –Isaiah 53:10 (NKJV)

It is hard to imagine how a parent could be pleased when his child suffers. So we can’t help but be baffled when we read that God was pleased to see his Son’s bruised and broken body on the cross. On the surface, something seems terribly wrong here. Or perhaps there is something we can’t see. When we do get it all in proper perspective, maybe everything that has confused us will make some sense.

A paradox is a statement that is inherently self-contradictory but is true nevertheless. A self-contradictory statement can only be true if the basis of the statement is solid. The foundation of every Kingdom paradox is the Cross of Christ, the most solid and true reality in the universe. The profound truth of the Cross makes the seemingly self-contradictory statements in the gospel profoundly true and helps us accept what we find difficult to understand. What more amazing yet perplexing paradox is there than Christ, the perfect Savior of the world, on the cross dying in my place? An innocent man laden with my guilt and shame, bound so I can be free, dying so I can live? Somehow it seems appropriately paradoxical that this dark day would be called “Good Friday.”

The Cross is the grand paradox that provides the foundation for the unsettling paradoxes of the gospel—Jesus’ teachings that we must be poor if we want to be rich, mourn if we want to be happy, give everything away if we want to be rich, die so we can live. Only in the shadow of the Cross do these paradoxes begin to make sense to us. We rest in knowing that one day the Cross, which the world views as foolish, will be lifted high as the soul of common sense rather than the absence of it. Finally, the truth that has been rejected will be irrefutable. Can you see that when your life doesn’t seem to make sense, it’s the Cross that gives it meaning and clarity? In your confusion, will you look at the Cross and see a love for sinners so big that God would be pleased to sacrifice even his own Son so that we, who deserve to die, might live? A love so big that we, who have earned no place in his presence, might boldly enter and make ourselves at home? Sinners purified, dead people made alive is the paradoxical beauty of the Cross—our only hope for healing in this hurting, confusing world.

Beautiful Savior, only your Cross and the coming victory of your Cross could make living in a world gone crazy bearable and even beautiful. You told us that when you were lifted up you would draw all people to yourself. You have drawn me to your Cross, and there I find perspective for living in this world.

DIGGING DEEPER