You and I have a problem: evil.
Man, I hate that. But it’s real. We’re not good men who mess up now and then. We are bad men who prove it every day. What’s more, this grim assessment is equally true of everyone: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). We’re all like Jason Bourne. We’re trying to figure out who we are. But the more we discover, the less we like what we find.
But still, God’s whole heart is for us.
He specializes in turning hopeless cases into stunning successes. But not through any religious do-better-try-harder. God does it through Jesus, who now comes into the picture, center-stage.
When everything was on the line for us, with our dignity hopelessly damaged by our recklessness, God simply changed the subject. He changed it from us and our shame to Jesus and his grace. Not Jesus as an inspiring example we should imitate but Jesus as the better self we’ve never been. Our King lived for us the royal life we should have lived and died for us the shameful death we should have died.
This magnificent man—“the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), the “exact imprint” of God’s nature (Heb. 1:3)—we didn’t welcome him into our world on a red carpet. We blamed him for our misery and humiliated him at the cross.
The whole point of crucifixion was not just to kill a man but to demean him while killing him. Never more than in Jesus’s death. The nakedness, the mocking, the spitting, with the crown of thorns and the purple robe—it was the humiliating “inversion of his kingship.” The cross was like a lynching in the Old South—white rage vented on a scapegoat. Jesus understands shame.
But the cross was more. Amazingly, the cross was where God started bending our evil around to restore us. We thought we were getting rid of Jesus, but God made sure we’d get ourselves back. At the cross, we proved how bad we are to God, but God proved how good he is to us. In C. S. Lewis’s story The Magician’s Nephew, Aslan the lion—the Christ figure—makes this promise about our evil: “I will see to it that the worst falls upon myself.”
At the cross, God didn’t sweep our evil under the rug but exposed it and paid for it. The love of God is not a cheap compromise. His forgiveness is noble forgiveness. That’s why when God washes you clean of all your sins in the blood of Christ, you can allow yourself to feel forgiven. Feeling new is the right response to the cross. Freedom is what God wants for you. The cross was the price he was willing to pay. You can accept his grace with a clear conscience.
Maybe you look at your mess and think: If God has any self-respect at all, he must despise me. He’d be wrong not to despise me. But that despairing thought keeps you hanging back from God. Self-punishment doesn’t make you more forgivable. It blocks your way to forgiveness. He is inviting you to come out of hiding and stand tall again. He’s not at war with you. Why? Because you aren’t really all that bad? No. Because in one blinding moment of painful atonement on the cross, the dark energy of your evil forever lost its bid for supremacy.
Do you really think, after the cross, your shame drives God away? Nope. Your shame is precisely where he can re-create you the most gloriously. You think you’re disgusting to him? Wrong again. The worst things about you are where he loves you the most tenderly. God welcomes high-maintenance men who keep coming back to him for more mercy and more mercy and more mercy, multiple times every day. He isn’t tired, and he isn’t tired of you.
He proved his commitment long ago. At the cross.
When you come to Jesus for the forgiveness you don’t deserve and the re-creation you can’t cause, how does he respond? He is downright happy to give you his royal best. Don’t worry that he might change his mind later if you screw up again—and then again. The actual Jesus you’re dealing with knows only one way to love—his way. Which means not just grace but “grace upon grace” (John 1:16)—endless grace. It is his exuberant love for you, not your feeble love for him, that will lift you all the way to your eternal crown (1 Cor. 15:49).