I just returned from an Easter service, one of four morning services at the large suburban church I attend. I arrived late to a packed house and had to find a seat on an amplifier case at the very back of the sanctuary, right behind the sound booth.
The joyful aspect of Easter was well represented. The music was festive: a brass quintet accompanied the organ on hymns of triumph and hope. The sermon addressed the healing of the nations through Christ's resurrection. All of this was good. However, the underlying reason for Christ's death and resurrection was not forcefully expounded. To complete the Easter story, I went back home and read a sermon that the London preacher Martyn Lloyd-Jones gave back in 1948, as compiled in the book The Heart of the Gospel (p.28-29):
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According to the New Testament, the cross, the death of Christ, is not only vital, it is absolutely central. You will find this in the teaching of our Lord himself. Then look at the preaching of the Apostles as it is recorded in the Book of Acts and you will find that all along they went around and preached about his death -- how the Christ must suffer -- and about the meaning of that death upon the cross. Peter's first sermon on the day of Pentecost was really nothing but an exposition of that. Paul, too, gives us a very graphic picture in writing to the Galatians, saying that he placarded the death on the cross. He is like a man holding up a placard and on it is the cross. 'I determined,' he said to the Corinthians, 'not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and Him crucified'(1 Cor 2:2). Or again: 'For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid, which is Jesus Christ'(1 Cor 3:11). It is always this message of the cross.
And what did they say about it? This is still the heart of the matter. They did not merely announce the fact that he had been crucified on a cross, that he had died and was buried and rose again. No, they expounded what that meant; they unfolded the doctrine concerning it and their teaching is made abundantly plain and clear in the New Testament itself. What they said was this. They said that He had come deliberately into this world in order to die upon that cross. They taught that what was happening there was that God, in the language of the Prophet Isaiah, 'laid upon Him the iniquity of us all'(Is 53:6). They said that God was there dealing with the sins of men and women in the person and in the body of the Lord Jesus Christ. Again let me us the language of the Apostle Paul: 'For he hath made Him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him'(2 Cor 5:21).
That is their doctrine, which they preached and proclaimed everywhere. And the deduction they drew was that this is the only way whereby we can be forgiven, and that was why they put it in the central position. Their preaching was to this effect, that it was specifically the death of Christ that suffices us; that it was not His teaching, or His example. They said, 'If He has not died for us, we remain in our sins, we are unforgiven.' Their contention everywhere is that the death on the cross is God's way of forgiving man and making a way of salvation. We are shut up with that cross and with what it means, so that without believing that He died there for our sins and bore our punishment Himself, there is no forgiveness for us and we are not reconciled to God.
That is the message. And that is the message at which so many have stumbled throughout the ages and at which so many still stumble today.
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