So the Judaizers did not understand the necessity and importance of the cross and the blood of Christ. Having the Jewish sacrament of the passover seder and the ceremonial blood sacrifices, they should have known that “without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Leviticus 17:11, as emphasized in Hebrews 9:22).

While Paul encouraged the Ephesians by reminding them that “in Him we have redemption though His blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace” (Eph 1:7), he provided rebuke to the Galatians (5: 7-11): “You were running a good race. Who cut in on you to keep you from obeying the truth? That kind of persuasion does not come from the One who calls you. ‘A little yeast works through the whole batch of dough.’ The one who is throwing you into confusion, whoever that may be, will have to pay the penalty. Brothers and sisters, if I am still preaching circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case the offense of the cross has been abolished.”

Mike Ratliff has commented: “In Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians he delivers a scathing indictment against all who teach works salvation or any version of the Gospel that has been edited from the original. Paul writes that these false gospels seek to remove the ‘offense of the cross’ – which then would also remove its power. The Apostle declares that the offense of the cross never has ceased and never can cease. Any attempt to soften the ‘offense’ is folly. While genuine Christianity is peaceful, mild, and benevolent, history shows us that it has been attacked with the bitterest hate from the beginning. Why? It is clearly offensive to the unregenerate mind.” However, when the cross becomes grace and mercy to a person, then we know that the Holy Spirit has broken through. When it comes to faith in Jesus Christ, it must be all or nothing.

The meaning of the cross can only be appreciated by those who have trusted in Christ and have thereby received the capacity to understand spiritual things from the Holy Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 2 below). To the unregenerate mind, the cross symbolizes ‘a religion of death,’ where God likes to torture and kill those who do good. Regarding God’s sending His Son to redeem us, one radical liberal went so far as to publicly call it child abuse. For such people it symbolizes pagan blood sacrifices — like sacrificing virgins to the gods to get a good crop of grain. To them, the offence is compounded in the Eucharist when Christians mimic cannibalism, eating His body, drinking His blood.

But the twin offenses of the cross and the blood of Christ must remain the centerpiece of our Anglican worship — celebrated in the Eucharist. Besides their essential place in the gospel message, these “offenses” also have a secondary purpose of separating the sheep from the goats: Satan’s goats cannot understand and are offended; God’s sheep understand and are appreciative. The goats don’t really want to understand, for that would mean admitting their sinfulness and submitting themselves to the sovereignty of God.

From 'The Offense of the Cross' by C.H. Spurgeon, 1856: “It is only when we begin to say, ‘I’m a poor sinner, and only Jesus Christ is everything to me,’ that we are saved. But as long as we are content with ourselves in our natural sinful condition, there is not the slightest hope for us. So, you see, this is the offense of the cross, that Christianity does not let men trust in their own self-worth.” In order to be saved, human beings can only get there by trusting God through the sacrifice of His Son on the cross. It is all about Jesus Christ and not about oneself.

“There is something in the cross of Christ which hurts men’s pride: it is opposed to all our ideas of self-earned worth and the self-deification that the ego craves. The cross says that Satan and all evil have been (and ultimately will be) conquered through the love and the painful sacrifice of God, not through God’s overpowering material strength.

The cross says that human weakness and martyrdom are things held in the highest esteem by God, while human power in the world is held in contempt. God has chosen to turn the power, prestige, and money values of the world upside down. ‘God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble’ (Proverbs 3:34, 1 Peter 5:5).”

One of the best explanations of the offense of the cross that I have found was written by the great theologian John R.W. Stott: “What is there about the cross of Christ which angers the world and stirs them up to persecute those who preach it? Just this: Christ died on the cross for us sinners, becoming a curse for us (Gal. 3:13). So the cross tells us some very unpalatable truths about ourselves, namely that we are sinners under the righteous curse of God's law and we cannot save ourselves.

Christ bore our sin and curse precisely because we could gain release from them in no other way. If we could have been forgiven by our own good works, by being circumcised and keeping the law, we may be quite sure that there would have been no cross. Every time we look at the cross Christ seems to say to us, 'I am here because of you. It is your sin I am bearing, your curse I am suffering, your debt I am paying, your death I am dying.'

Nothing in history or in the universe cuts us down to size like the cross. All of us have inflated views of ourselves, especially in self-righteousness, until we have visited a place called Calvary. It is there, at the foot of the cross that we shrink to our true size. And of course men do not like it. They resent the humiliation of seeing themselves as God sees them and as they really are. They prefer their comfortable [egotistical] illusions. So they steer clear of the cross. They construct a Christianity without the cross, which relies for salvation on their works and not on Jesus Christ's. They do not object to Christianity so long as it is not the faith of Christ crucified. But Christ crucified they detest. And if preachers preach Christ crucified, they are opposed, ridiculed, persecuted. Why? Because of the wounds which they inflict on men's pride.”

To complete this Lenten offering, this “renewing of the mind” (Rom 12:1-2) in more pristine depth, I cannot improve upon Paul’s actual words in 1st Corinthians, chapter 2: “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power.

We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, which are coming to nothing. No, we speak of God’s secret wisdom, a wisdom that has been hidden and that God destined for our glory before time began. None of the rulers of this age understood it, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. However, as it is written: ‘No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love Him’ but God has revealed it to us by his Spirit.

The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who among men knows the thoughts of a man except the man’s spirit within him? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. We have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, that we may understand what God has freely given us. This is what we speak, not in words taught us by human wisdom but in words taught by the Spirit, expressing spiritual truths in spiritual words. The man without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual man makes judgments about all things, but he himself is not subject to any man’s judgment: ‘For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”

Because true believers have the Word and Spirit continually available, we have been enabled to understand and appreciate a mystery which so many others regard as an offence. And it is no exaggeration to say that we are immensely and eternally grateful!

Dr. Atkinson is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary with a doctorate in clinical psychology and an M.A. in theology. He is a licensed psychologist in clinical practice in Atlanta and also works as a clinical supervisor training Christian counselors for Richmont Graduate University. He is a founding member of Trinity Anglican Church (ACNA) in Douglasville, Georgia