But God forbid that I should glory,
save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. Galatians 6:14
The
preaching of the cross of Christ was the very center and heart of the message
of the apostles, and there is nothing I know of that is more important than
that every one of us should realize that this is still the heart and the center
of the Christian message. In order to emphasize that, let me put it negatively
first. What is the message of the Christian Gospel and of the Christian church?
Now at the risk of being misunderstood I will put it like this: It is not
primarily the teaching of our Lord. I say that, of course, because there are so
many today who think that this is Christianity. They say, “What we need is
Jesus’ teaching. He is the greatest religious genius of all times. He is above
all philosophers. Let us have a look at His teaching, at the Sermon on the
Mount and so on. That is what we want. What the world needs today,” they say,
“is a dose of the Sermon on the Mount—a dose of His ethical teaching. We must
preach this to people and teach them how to live.”
But
according to the apostle Paul, this is not their first need. And I will go
further. If you only preach the teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ, not only do
you not solve the problem of mankind, but in a sense you aggravate it. You are
preaching nothing but utter condemnation, because nobody can ever carry it out.
So they did not preach His teaching. Paul does not say, “God forbid that I
should glory, save in the Sermon on the Mount” or “God forbid that I should
glory save in the ethical teaching of Jesus.” He does not say that. It was not
the teaching of Christ, nor the example of Christ either. What they preached
was His death on the cross and the meaning of that event.
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