Craig T. Owens

This is a weekly series with things I’m reading and pondering from Oswald Chambers. You can read the original seed thought here, or type “Thursdays With Oswald” in the search box to read more entries.

A New Perspective Of Calvary

     If Jesus Christ were only a martyr, His Cross would be of no significance; but if the Cross of Jesus Christ is the expression of the secret heart of God, the lever by which God lifts back the human race to what it was designed to be, then there is a new attitude to things. … 

     There are any number of amateur skeptics, and the men who are seeing the difference between “believing their beliefs,” and “believing God,” men, who, through the turmoil and the stress, are seeing that rationalism is not the basis of thing. According to the Bible, the basis of things is tragedy, and the way out is the way made by God in Redemption. The New Testament does not say that the human race is evolving, but that the human race is a magnificent ruin of what it was designed to be. …

     Paul says the fundamental revelation of the New Testament is that God redeemed the whole human race when they were spitting in His face, as it were. … 

     The majority of people who have never been touched by affliction see Jesus Christ’s death as a thing beside the mark. When a man gets to his wits’ end and things go hard with him, his thick hide is pierced and he is stabbed wide awake, then for the first time he begins to see something else—“At last I see; I thought that He was stricken, smitten of God and afflicted; but now I see He was wounded for my transgressions.” … 

     Jesus Christ did not come to give us pretty ideas of God, or sympathy with ourselves; He came from a holy God to enable men, by the sheer power of His Redemption, to become holy.

From The Shadow Of An Agony

Oswald Chambers wrote these words in the midst of The Great War (what we now refer to as World War I), when everyone’s belief in rationalism was shaken to the core. Tragedy has a tendency to do that to us.

Chambers says that trouble in this world should point us to the unshakable, inescapable truth that this world is “a magnificent ruin of what it was designed to be,” and the only security and hope we have is a new life with God though the Redemption Jesus paid for at Calvary.

May any pain, suffering, or confusion you feel in this world help you see the Cross of Christ in a whole new light.