Living under the Shadow of the Cross

The whole of Jesus’ life was lived under the shadow of the cross. As Christ faithfully served His Father each day, the agony of Calvary loomed ever nearer. Today, Sinclair Ferguson begins to reflect on the life of our Lord.

I wonder what the big moments in your life have been. I think most of us have them, and the Lord Jesus was no exception. And so this week on Things Unseen, I want to think about a few of those moments in Jesus’ life. During the year, we’ve actually touched on one or two of them already, and we’ll no doubt do that again. But this week we’re going to think together about a few of them.

If you’re anything like me, the older you get, the more it strikes you that there are some moments and events in your life that seem to loom especially large. Some of them are crisis points, or turning points, or moments of special accomplishment maybe, or sometimes moments of loss and pain. And you can remember some of the details of those moments years later, even when earlier on in the day, you couldn’t remember where you’d put your car keys.

There’s just something about particular events that make them major chapter headings in the story of our lives. And all this is simply part of what it means to be human, and I mention it to remind us that our Lord Jesus must have had similar memories too. Certainly, He had big moments in His life, moments that the preacher, G. Campbell Morgan, described in a book entitled The Crises of the Christ. And in a way, as I say, that’s obvious. But in our lives, it underlines that God has a unique plan and purpose for us. And the same was true, of course, of our Lord Jesus, and He experienced the whole of it in our human nature.

The Logos, the Word of God, became flesh and dwelt among us, says John, and that’s magnificent theology. The one divine person of the Logos was with God and was God, but He also became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:1, 14). And not all moments in His life were the same any more than they are in our lives.

I think I’ve referred before on Things Unseen to what’s called the Chalcedonian Definition of 451 AD. Those fifth-century theologians who wrote the definition said that the Son of God is “acknowledged in two natures unconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the difference of the natures being in no way removed because of the union, but rather the properties of each nature being preserved.”

That means that Jesus had a human mind and a human will, a human memory, human sensations. He felt as we do. He remembered in ways that are similar to the way we remember. But He did all this sinlessly, of course. And it’s clear there were some events in His life that He realized were big moments for Him, crucial events.

Of course, one of them was very literally crucial—the crux, the cross. And it loomed so large in His thinking that He spoke about it regularly before He experienced it fully. Indeed, He said once that He felt His whole life was hemmed in until His crucifixion actually took place.

You perhaps know the painting by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter, Holman Hunt. It’s called Jesus, the Light of the World. It portrays Christ holding a lantern and standing at the door of a house. It’s somewhat beloved of Arminians, who like to point out that there is no handle on the outside. And when I was a teenager, numbers of my friends kept a postcard-sized version of it in their Bibles.

But Holman Hunt did another painting of Jesus entitled The Shadow of Death. And here, he represents Jesus as a young man stretching at the end of the day in the family carpenter shop, and the light falling on Him casts on the wall the silhouette of a man stretched out as though hanging on a cross. Speaking personally, I don’t really much care for the art, but the message is certainly suggestive, isn’t it? Yes, there were big moments in our Lord’s life, but His whole life was lived in the shadow of the cross. It wasn’t only at the end of His life, but throughout it that He was taking up the cross for us. Yes, there were what Campbell Morgan called “moments of crisis,” but there was never a moment when He was relieved of being our burden bearer and Savior.

We cannot begin to fathom what it must’ve been like for the Lord Jesus as a young man on the hills of Galilee to meditate on the 22nd psalm or on the Servant Songs of Isaiah, thinking to Himself: “These passages are speaking about Me. The crisis moments are coming.” But you know, for all eternity, we’ll admire Him for enduring all of those moments, and for all eternity, we’ll praise Him for what John Calvin well described as “the whole course of His obedience.”

So, His whole life was a big moment. But in the rest of the week on Things Unseen, I want to focus with you on some of those big moments. So, I hope you’ll join me tomorrow.