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“Thanks
be to God for his indescribable gift” —1 Corinthians 9:15
Charles
Spurgeon, that great preacher of a past century, is quoted as saying: “While others are congratulating themselves,
I have to lie humbly at the foot of Christ’s cross and marvel that I am saved
at all.”
It
is one of those unexplainable marvels in life that God would sacrifice Himself
for me—or for any of us.
The
humility displayed in Spurgeon’s comment is rare today. And perhaps that is why
it is so easy for us to skip over the cross and hurry past its humiliation in
our scramble to get to a happier event. It’s hard enough for us to consider how
little we deserve any mercy from God, but to admit that we don’t deserve any
mercy at all is especially difficult. There has to be something redeemable
about us, doesn’t there?
In
recent years the trend has been away from “worm” theology—the idea that we are
nothing. When Isaac Watts (1674-1748) first wrote the classic hymn At The Cross, the first stanza went like
this:
Alas, and did my Savior bleed?
And did my Sovereign die?
Would He devote that sacred head
For such a worm as I?
By
the time we get to 1993, that last line had become For sinners such as I? That was fine—we are sinners. But in
editions of some hymnbooks back as far as 1976, the words for the last line had
been changed to For someone such as I?
We seem to have gotten better over time.
In
recent years the focus, both in secular society and in religious society, has
been to build self-esteem—something “worm” theology doesn’t do too well. In an
effort to soften the impact of the last line of the poem on our delicate
psyches, someone has taken the opportunity to change the words of the old hymn.
Perhaps
that is one reason, however minor, that has helped to dull our senses to the
huge impact that the cross has on our lives: past, present and future. When we
forget what we are we also run the risk of forgetting just how incredible a
gift was given to us that day at Calvary.
Remember
the drawing of the little boy and the caption underneath his picture that said:
“I know I’m somebody ‘cause God don’t make no junk!!!!” that became a catch
phrase some decades ago? Essentially that saying is true—God doesn’t make junk.
What the phrase fails to recognize is that though God doesn’t make junk, we
have “junked” ourselves because of our sin, the sin that separates us from the
God who created us and who loves us beyond our capacity to understand.
Perhaps
we are not quite worms (that might be to insult the hapless, innocent worm),
but we are certainly hopeless, helpless sinners.
When
we recognize just how far we have fallen from the “good” that God declared His creation to be in Genesis, and just how
trashed our lives have become, then we can, like Spurgeon, kneel in awe at the
foot of the cross and declare that the gift of God in His Son crucified on a
cross to restore us to “good,” is
indescribable.
Until
we develop a “holy horror” toward just how bad we are, we will find it
difficult, if not impossible, to appreciate the cross and our desperate need
for the Saviour Who hung there in our place of judgment.
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