What the Cross Proves

The Hope We Can't Afford to Doubt

Life is full of question marks, no doubt. We don't know everything that's coming. We don't even always know everything that's upon us right now. But when there's an expected outcome — when you're hoping for something, really wanting something, but not sure if it's coming — we've all lived with that tension ever since we were children.

Our parents would tell us they were going to take us somewhere next weekend, and we weren't really sure whether they actually would. As adults, we're still hesitant to get our hopes up for something we really want without some proof. You put in a job application, your interview goes well, somebody tells you, "Man, you're the best candidate yet. " That makes you pretty hopeful, but it's not in the bag. Tomorrow they might interview somebody better. You're not sure.

You're waiting for something in the mail. You have the tracking info, you can pull up your phone and see exactly where it is. But it still doesn't guarantee delivery — at the last second, the driver can get the address wrong, or somebody's handwriting made a one look like a seven. You're not sure. You're never sure until it's in your hands.

And that's true with packages and weekend plans and things as important as jobs. But if you're like most Christians, there come times in your life where you wonder whether you're going to make it all the way.

You see friends who were on fire for the Lord — maybe the friend who brought you the gospel no longer follows. You see disappointing things like that. The pastor ousted from his church for some egregious sin. Your favorite Christian music artist who no longer follows, no longer believes. You see in yourself your own missteps, your own bad habits you still haven't kicked. And you wonder if you're going to make it.

There can't be any greater hope in an outcome than making it to what the Bible calls glorification. That's our word for tonight. That's the ultimate outcome you want — to be glorified. There's no greater expectation than that.

What is it? Glorification is not a place, it's an event. It's what happens at the end of the trail of the Christian. It's after this whole process of God saving you, rescuing you, reshaping you, sanctifying you. Glorification is that final stage. It's a time when God will share his glory with his people. You're made whole. There's no more brokenness, no more sin — meaning no more sinning, and no more sinfulness that produces the sinning. And of course all the consequences that come with that: no more asking for forgiveness, no lingering consequences of sin like disease, or aging, or death.

Glorification is not a disembodied experience in heaven — it's not what you experience the moment you die. It's what all Christians experience in the end, when there's the great final judgment and those who are not condemned because they're in Christ receive their new bodies, and are made finally whole, and enjoy a new creation, a new earth, new heavens — with resurrected bodies free from damage and free from the constraints that sin has placed on us now.

That's glorification. It sounds glorious, right? That's why it's called glorification. It's based on God's glory made whole finally in the end.

It's encouraging — that's the buoy of your faith. It's hope-inspiring to read about in scripture. But will we actually get there? That's the question. If glorification is the greatest package you can ever wait on, how do you know it will arrive? If glorification is the greatest promise from our Heavenly Father to his children, how do we know he will do it?

We can say, well, he's God, we're supposed to trust him at his word. If God said it, we're supposed to trust him. And that should be enough. But it's not. It's not enough — and God knew it would not be enough for us to just hear, "I'm God, I'm truthful, I said I will, therefore I will. "

In his wisdom, and in the wisdom of the divine Trinity, it was decided before the foundation of the earth to prove it to you through a physical, in-time, historical action. God knew in his wisdom we needed something to focus on — an anchor, a fixed point — to know glorification is ahead of us. Whatever you're facing, whatever trial, however much your body hurts right now, however much it hurts to suffer from the consequences of your own sin or someone else's sin, we need something true and sure to secure our hope that glorification is coming in the end.

Here's an illustration. Let's say your life depends on a medical procedure — you need a blood transfusion — and a friend tells you, "I'll go with you, I'll do this for you. " Normally you might wonder: is he actually going to show up? What if he gets busy? What if at the last minute he backs out, gets scared? But in this case, none of those thoughts even cross your mind. Why? Not just because he's a good guy who you went to college with and you've been to a lot of ball games together. It's not because you go way back. It's because a couple of years prior, he gave you one of his kidneys. Why wouldn't he do a blood transfusion?

That's an argument from the lesser to the greater. If you know for a fact the lesser thing is true, you know for a fact the greater thing is true. And that's what we're going to look at in one verse tonight, in Romans 8.

One Verse, Four Components

Romans 8, verse 32 — a famous verse in a famous section of Paul's letter to the Romans. I want you to see in this passage how a night like Good Friday, a service like this one where we focus on the cross and on Jesus' sacrifice, is assuring. The cross is the one historical action, the one event, that God has put before you to demonstrate that he will do what he says he will do. It's a logic that Paul uses in this verse: if God did the bigger thing, of course he'll do the smaller thing.

If he didn't spare his own Son for us, how could it possibly be true that he would withhold everything else? That's the point. It's an argument from the greater to the lesser.

If your grandpa pulls you aside and says, "Hey, all my tools, buddy — they're yours. You're going to rebuild cars on your own from now on, and I'm giving you the car lift, the tools, the garage, the property, everything is yours" — you're not sitting there wondering, what about the ratchet set? Does he mean the ratchet set too? Of course. He gave you all of this. Of course he'll give you the smaller thing.

And Paul is saying: that's what you need to understand about the cross. Every time you take communion, every time you think or sing or read about the cross, God is reminding you — if he did that, you can trust him with tomorrow. If he got you into the race, he'll get you across the finish line.

We've all heard those sad stories where some family wins a five-thousand-square-foot home on the slopes of somewhere amazing, and you cry watching them celebrate on TV — and then you read somewhere that they don't live there anymore. They got the house, technically it was theirs, but they couldn't afford the taxes, couldn't afford to live there. Nobody gave them a new job to go with it. Just: here's the house, good luck. A house they couldn't handle, couldn't stay in.

And Paul is saying: God is not like that. If he gives you this, of course he'll give you everything else it takes to remain. Because it's on him, not on us. Are we really in — like, are we genuinely in? Or did we just get started and now it's on us to finish? No, it's on God to finish it. And how do you know he'll finish it? Because he started it at tremendous cost. The costlier thing was to get you in.

Let's look at this verse in four essential components.

First: God gave up his Son rather than sparing him. He could have spared his Son. Not only does God have the right to spare his Son — in one sense he had every reason to. But in the wisdom and love of the Trinity, they conspire together to get us out of our mess. We know what motivated God in not sparing his Son: it was love. John 3: 16, we know those verses. And just in this same chapter, Paul asks rhetorically, "What can separate us from the love of God? " Nothing. And he follows that up with: well, he didn't spare his Son. He proved his love in the greatest way possible, so you don't have to wonder if he loves you enough to get you home.

Second: God gave up his Son for believers. I know I'm stepping into a minefield with this one, but I'll do it quickly and the rest of you can argue about it over dinner. "For us all" in this verse refers to the elect — to those who believe. Why? Because when you read Romans 8, that's what Paul is talking about. Those whom he predestined, he glorifies. And those are the ones he gave his Son up for — the ones who place their trust in Christ. If "all" referred to every person who ever lived, then the rest of the verse would have to apply as well, meaning God gets everybody home. But that's universalism, and that doesn't bear out with scripture.

So when you hear reformed folks — especially those in what some call the "cage stage, " who just discovered Calvin, memorized the TULIP, and are jamming it into every conversation — when you hear excited talk about limited atonement and it hurts your ears because it sounds like "why would God only do it for some? " — this is one of the verses you'll have to wrestle with.

Real quick: atonement is the forgiveness of sins by Jesus bearing the punishment — like we just sang about, like we just heard read from scripture. Jesus bears the punishment so that I can receive forgiveness. And limited atonement doesn't mean some believers get more atonement than others. That's not it. Believers get full atonement; unbelievers get none. It's full or none. Limited doesn't mean a person gets a limited amount of atonement — it means the number of people who benefit from the atonement is limited. But those who benefit from it, benefit fully. Those outside of Christ get none of it; those in Christ get all of it. Not half in, not in for the first leg and then you cover yourself the rest of the way. It's fully given to those who are in Christ. The full thing, applied to the person when that person is hidden in Christ.

Third: this gift is not just an act, it's a person. Paul says God gave us his Son — "how will he not also with him graciously give us all things? " He gave us Jesus. We could just sit with that for a long time. He didn't just give us something Jesus did. He gave us Jesus. "With him" means that God has given us his Son, and together with his Son has given us all things. We stand with Jesus. We live in Jesus through the Spirit of Christ. Jesus intercedes for us every step of the way as we walk in the Spirit. Our entire identity is now in Christ Jesus. God gave us Jesus — not to just get us started, but to take us all the way.

Fourth — and this is the main thing Paul is getting at: if God has given us his Son, could have spared him but didn't, and didn't merely give us something his Son did but gave us his Son himself, then surely he will give us, together with Jesus, all things. And "all things" here means everything we need to reach glorification. Not everything you want, not the pony or the island or whatever you dreamed about as a kid. Paul is talking about glorification. He's talking about how nothing can stand against you. Everything we need to get across the finish line is ours in Christ.

Glorification Is Already Secured — Here's How to Live From That

Now let me set the table a little more. Did you actually turn to Romans 8? If you did, you'll see that Paul has what some have called the golden chain — a sequence of things God has accomplished for the Christian. Verses 29 and 30: those whom God predestines, he calls; those whom he calls, he justifies — makes right, takes off the hook of condemnation; and those whom he justifies, he also glorified. Past tense.

Wait — didn't I say at the beginning that glorification is something we're looking forward to? It is. But I think Paul puts it in the past tense because it's so sure. It's as good as done. We're glorified, though we're looking ahead to glorification. Why? Because it doesn't depend on what I do Wednesday. It depends on what God did in Christ on that Friday, all those years ago.

And a little earlier in verse 18, Paul talks about the fact that whatever you suffer in this life cannot be compared to the future glory that waits for you. He's not putting a precise description on glorification — he's not saying "here's what it'll look like, " "here's your job in the new earth" — he's saying put whatever you're suffering on a scale of one to ten. A one is somebody cutting you off in a lane. You act like you can't get over it, and the kids are wondering if you're actually sanctified — but you do get over it. A ten is a terminal diagnosis or the loss of a loved one. A life-wrecking situation. And maybe you've got two or three tens right now, and a couple of eights, and a handful of fives on top of that, and you're just thinking, what in the world?

Paul's saying: the weight of all of that doesn't even transfer onto the scale of what's coming. The glorification that awaits you is so far beyond anything we can measure right now. What's it like to wake up and your knees don't crack, you don't reach for your glasses, your vision is Legolas vision — you're looking miles away and you can see clearly? We don't really know. Our bodies and minds are so affected by sin and its consequences that we can't even fully imagine it. But Paul is saying: whatever your tens and eights and fives are now, they can't compare to what's ahead.

And it wouldn't be worth it — none of it would be worth it — if glorification were a question mark. But Paul's saying it's worth it. You can bank on glorification. That's what gets you through the suffering. That's his point in verse 18. And the proof is our verse tonight, verse 32. All things we need to get across the finish line are ours in Christ.

Did Jesus make it all the way? Yes — he lived, died, resurrected, ascended, and will return. Paul is saying we are given him, so we also can make it all the way through to his return and our glorification.

Now let me point out one more thing in this verse that I don't want you to miss. Paul says God will not spare condemning his own Son. We could have said, does God spare condemning sinners? Does God not spare condemning sinners? And the answer, if you're in Christ, is yes. You can't be condemned if you're in Christ. But you might ask: did you actually do those things? Yes. So how can you be with God, who's perfectly holy, if you've messed up? Because the consequences of your messing up were put on Christ. That's how. And did Christ shoulder some of it, leaving you to finish the rest? Or did he say from the cross, "It has begun" — you finish it? Or "It is finished"?

It is finished. That is our assurance. Something was finalized and accomplished on the cross, so that when Paul talks about glorification, he can put it in the past tense.

The Table

As we transition to communion, we think about the bread and the cup — symbols of the cross. Jesus' body broken, his blood and life poured out on our behalf. And Paul is saying: when you contemplate the cross, think of a father who is adopting a child and has already paid unimaginable costs to secure that adoption — legal fees, time, sacrifice, rearranging his whole life to bring this child into the family.

If a father did all of that, and you're the adopted child, you wouldn't then worry about whether he'll buy groceries and actually feed you. Of course he will — that's the goal. The adoption wasn't to show off to the neighbors, only for the child to disappear three years later. "What happened to the kid? " "I don't know, I didn't feed him. " What father would do that? And Paul is saying: God the Father wouldn't do that. The purpose of the adoption is to feed you, nourish you, grow you, and make you into the person he wants you to be — conformed to the image of Christ. God does that, and he will do that.

And we're reminded of that when we take the bread. We're reminded of that when we drink the cup. God has secured your future, which is to share in the glory of Christ.