Calvary's Fourth Cross

Did you know that there was a fourth cross a Calvary on that so-called Good Friday?

The Gospel writers repeatedly tell us that the Romans crucified Jesus and a pair of criminals at Golgotha.  But according the Paul there was another cross.  There was his cross.  In a very real way, every follower of Christ died at the Place of the Skull that dark day.

"I have been crucified with Christ" (v20).  You may not have seem him at the time, but Paul was there.  He uses the Greek term συσταυροω/sustauro'o.  It's a compound word meaning to crucify (ταυροω-/-tauro'o) with (συσ-/sus-).  A closer look at the root without the prefix describes not only crucifixion but literally to drive down stakes into the ground.  

This probably goes back to the pre-Roman form where the executioners would impale the victim on a large stake.  Historians describe crucifixion as one of the most brutal and cruel forms of execution in recorded history.  

Roman citizens viewed the cross with such shame that it simply wasn't talked about.  It was too vile.  Too mean.  Too nasty.  Too shameful.  Yet Paul embraced the fact that he also died with Christ.  We should hug that bloody Roman cross as the tree of life (Prov 3:18).

A closer look at the Greek grammar is important as well.  The apostle uses the perfect tense of the verb.  In the original language, the perfect tense indicates something that happened in the past that has an ongoing and never ending effect.  

Jesus died once for all people and all of their sin (Rom 6:10; Heb 7:27; 9:12; 10:10; 1Pet 3:18).  It's the same tense Christ uses when He screams, "It is finished!" (Jn 19:30).  It's over.  Done with.  No more.  End of discussion.  

He drove a stake through the heart of sin once and for all on Calvary.  Paul so identifies with Jesus' substitutionary death that he uses that very same perfect tense.

Most of the time the Bible talks of Christ's crucifixion in our place, it looks at it from God's perspective.  That's the view in Isaiah's great passage that paints the portrait of the Suffering Servant (Is 53).  

That's exactly the image Paul gives in his second letter to Corinth.  "For our sake He made Him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God" (2Cor 5:21).  

But here, the apostle looks back at the cross from our perspective.  He was there.  We were there too.  Paul is describing how through Jesus' substitutionary death, we also drove a stake through our own sinful selves.

On second thought, there were only three crosses at Calvary.  That's because Paul died WITH Christ.  That's because we died WITH Christ.  We died on His cross.   

©2012

Jay Jennings