K-495 the Crucifixion of God (2 of 2) — Art Katz

The Cross as the Center of Christian Faith

If the enemy can succeed in moving the church away from the cross, and I think he's been largely successful in modern times, or even allow a kind of an acknowledgment of the cross that is not the cross, but some plastic simile of the cross, he will have succeeded.

I remember I came to a ministry that celebrates the cross, and in fact the Lord gave me that image in the talk that night about a plastic beam. He said, your cross is not the cross, the splintery blood splattered one, but a plastic simile.

You can knock it and it's hollow, and I've never been invited back, but it was an illumination for me that this requires the deepest apprehension, and those who have had that kind of insight usually have to express it in the suffering of their own life.

I think of Watchman Nee, whose statement on Romans 6, in the normal Christian life is perhaps one of the most brilliant, setting forth of the place of the cross and the crucified life of the believer, and was later called upon to demonstrate that in almost a quarter of a century of internment in a communist prison camp in China.

So this is a sacred, holy, needs to be restored, and I think that the book that I have before me is one of the finest statements that has come to my attention. It's also an opportunity for us to hear how theologians think, and to understand what theology is, any ology, biology, whatever other ologies, sociology, the study of society, the study of biology, theology, the study of God.

So in Germany, because they did not have separate seminaries, and that the subject of theology was included in the universities, it was called the queen of the sciences, it was looked upon as the pinnacle, the ultimate endeavor of intellect, and soul, and spirit, in inquiry of all the kinds of things that come before men to examine.

Theology was considered the pinnacle, the queen, and that every other discipline, like philosophy or science, was a contributing factor in order to apprehend and to probe the rich things of God. So let's pray, and without the Spirit of God to illumine the cross of God, we'll have haywood and stubble.

The Cross as God's Central Revelation

We need a very real cross, and I think it's on this issue that the last great struggle of the church is going to take place, if not already. So we need to understand and identify and firmly have hold on this so central aspect of the faith, because as we were saying last time, this is where God is most acutely revealed.

This is where it has pleased him to reveal himself as God, and to miss that revelation is to condemn yourself to a distortion of God, though you may call him Jesus, or whatever label you please to call it.

You can call it Judaism, you can call it Christianity. It is not God, but some facsimile, some approximation that must suffer distortion, and that distortion and warp will be felt in every aspect of the life.

That's why if this is not in its proper place, if this has not come into its pivot with a thump into the hole, dug for it, and become the center, everything is going to be askew. And that's usually the condition of most Christian lives, for the want of this centrality.

So little wonder that T. Austin Spock's book is called, The Centrality and the Universality of the Cross. So let's just join our hearts and ask the Lord for illumination, the privilege, and the consequence of understanding.

So Lord, we bless you. We ask the breath of God to be upon us, Lord. Breathe upon us, my God. Lord, your spirit, that eternal spirit, my God, that glorifies Christ and makes known the things pertaining to him as he makes known the things pertaining to the Father, and that all three, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, reveal God as you deserve and desire to be understood.

Lord, I think that we can say in our prayer that every warp in present mankind, every human suffering, every distortion, every violence and mayhem and murder and every ugly and terrible thing that is going on in the earth is in proportion to the ignorance of the knowledge of God.

Mankind is paying a price for that ignorance, my God, more than it can ever conceive, and that the knowledge of God is sanity, righteousness, right living, and Lord, we want to know. We want to understand that we might set you forth and make you known and exhibit and demonstrate the realities, my God, that are in you and that are revealed at the Cross.

So bless us together, Lord, and open the riches of things by your spirit that men cannot probe and understand unaided. We thank you for this privilege. We look to you, my God, that you're the only one having suffered this who can make this known.

We bless you for our privilege to seek you in this, look to you, in Jesus' holy name. Amen. So if we can get through a central chapter of this book on the crucified God, we will be doing really good, and have a little glimpse of how theologians probe, ask questions, and seek to understand.

So just consider that of all of the things that God could have done to affect his salvation, why did he choose to do it in this way, the cross of Christ Jesus? Because everything about it is abhorrent and calculated to offend human sensibility and particularly religious sensibility.

It's as if God went out of his way, knowing man and his disposition, to set forth something calculated to offend his every category, and to say, if you reject this, you reject any knowledge of me. And as I've tried to suggest, what the Jewish people have paid for this rejection is beyond any ability to comprehend what this state.

It has left us with such a distortion and such an absence, not only of the knowledge of God, but the presence of God, that we have been an open victim of all of the consequences set in motion by the rejection of this profound thing.

If this came at the cost of God himself being crucified, how must he regard that rejection? And if judgment is not just some arbitrary thing that God slaps on man, but is the outworking of man's own sin, that the judgments are proportionate to our own transgressions, what would be the consequence of this rejection, of this sinful rejection?

History has demonstrated, and will yet demonstrate, how great that consequence is. So Moltmann says that the death of Jesus is a statement about God himself. Not only a statement, but the statement, and an ultimate statement, I would say.

Who is this God that reveals what he is in himself through the cross? He quotes my favorite theologian, Karl Barth, who says that to crucify Jesus is the image of the invisible God, and that man's thought about a lofty God and being noble and distant is completely shattered by what is demonstrated in Jesus at the cross.

The Humility of God in the Crucified Christ

I just need to be reminded myself that Jesus himself is God, and God made flesh, taking upon himself the form of man and revealing in his suffering humanity not only what true man is, but what true God is, because this man suffers in his humiliation, his own experience of rejection, the unbelievable, excruciating physical thing, the torment, the bearing of sin, the turning of the father from him, is a totality of things that we have not even a word to sum up.

It is the humiliation of Jesus, and that's why it's followed by his exaltation, because he lay aside his deity, because he did not, how does it say in Philippians, strive for you to be equal with God.

Say that again? He did not consider it robbery to be equal with God.

And allowed himself to take upon himself the form of a man and of a servant, and to suffer in that form, the death and the death upon the cross, the most excruciating and dishonoring. Therefore God hath highly exalted him and given him a name above every name both in heaven and in earth.

So you have both the enormous humiliation and the enormous exaltation, and that's a principle for us. It's God setting forth, not in a revelation of himself, but his way. So the exaltation, honor, anointing, use, service, glory, the things that pertain to God are related to humiliation and going down.

The two things are set by God in what was revealed through Jesus at the cross. So he calls this the center of all Christian theology. Theology, not only its theme, but in effect the entry to problems and answers on earth.

I don't know if we can see that, and I don't know that I can find any way to say that. I always often say that if you scratch something deeply enough in the last analysis, the issue is always the issue of the cross.

Whatever it is, whether it's in marriage, whether it's in ministry, in relationship, in community, if you scratch deeply enough, the issue invariably and always is the issue of the cross. It's central to everything.

I hope later we'll get to see the issue of the church and unity and being the one new man that God is after is also the issue of the cross. So what kind of man is this that suffers this humiliation and this death?

You know that etchi homo, that Latin phrase, behold the man. Man as God would have us to understand what God celebrates as man is not our notion. It's not the macho man. It's the man in weakness. It's the man who gives himself over to this as true man.

It's God's humanity, he says. In the dehumanized Christ, remember the pictures that we saw in that classic painting, you wonder whether you're looking at a man or an animal, so gnarled, so grotesque in his suffering that he's marred more than any man.

So this is charged with irony and contradiction. He's so despoiled as man, so dehumanized, but in that suffering he exhibits God's definition of what true man is. True man is not some macho guy who flexes his biceps, but the true man is the one who allows himself to become dehumanized, to suffer humiliation in obedience to the Father at the cross.

That's man. Behold that man. So this utter humiliation to the point of death on the cross is the statement not only about man, but about God. Did I ever tell you that, and you may have heard this, when I picked up an article one time and the title was The Humility of God, and just the title alone made me freak out.

I just collapsed. I sagged and I went down. The humility of God. I never thought in those terms. I thought of God as noble, superior, great, powerful, all of the grand adjectives that are true of God, but I never thought of the humility of God.

And the humility of God is not just an aspect of his being, it is God. This is what God is, and this is why the Jewish community cannot consider that the Jesus on the cross is their God, because it contradicts their every definition and category of what they would suppose God to be.

But God is not wanting men to live on what man supposes God to be, but what he in fact is as he demonstrates what he is. And that's why the cross is the central demonstration. It is the demonstration of the humility of God, a God who will suffer this for man, the jeering, the taunts, the becoming sin, the physical excruciation of the nakedly in the dung keep outside of the city is a statement of what God is in a way that we could never have conceived him if we broke our brains all our life long.

We could never have thought that this is what God is. God, saints, is humble. That's his nature. As powerful and as glorious as he is, when he says that he stands at the door of our heart and knocks, and if any man hears my voice and will open to me, and I will come in and suffer for him with me, is a beautiful picture of that humility.

We just need to have that sink into our spirits, because the church that does not reflect God in his humility is not the church. We have to say that there's been a false representation of God, most ironically by that agency intended for his revelation, the church, because it has not acted and lived in the central disposition of God himself, which is his humility.

God is humble, and the once and for all demonstration that he gave is his coming down from earth, from heaven. No man can ascend who has not first descended, and I think that there's even a scriptural basis to say not only descended onto the earth, but into the earth and below the earth and spoke to the prisoners, and I don't know all that that means.

In fact, I hardly know anything of what that means, but some go so far as to say he descended even into hell. He descended into the place where men are in captivity. Some say it's that generation that was judged by the flood, and there he presented himself.

I don't know. I don't want to even speculate about that, but only to say that when God goes down, he goes down. And it's not some momentary act. It's not some aberration. It's not the impulse of the moment.

It's an act in keeping with what he is in himself. This is his true self, and it was revealed once and for all in one historic moment in time in Jerusalem at the cross, and that's why it's so central to any understanding of God.

The distortion of that, the failure to comprehend that, or the indifference to that has got to be charged, I've said it so many times now, with remarkable consequence. So it's a revelation of a God who takes upon himself the form of a man and exhibits this humility and that humanity.

This is God, and God is like this. He's not greater than he is in this humiliation. He's not more glorious than he is in this self-surrender. He's not more powerful than he is in this helplessness. He's not more divine than he is in this humanity.

Those are not my words. This is the statement of Moltmann. This, by the way, is theological thinking and writing, probing. What does it mean? Examining and trying to apprehend the depths of things that men would do well to devote themselves.

Everything that Christian theology says about God is to be found in this Christ event. This Christ event on the cross is a God event. The event, I'm saying. Here God has not just acted externally in his unattainable glory and eternity.

Here he has acted in himself and has gone on to suffer in himself. Here he himself is love with all his being. So for all of the talk of what love is, which is subject to sentimentalizing and different renderings, if we see this as the epitome of the act of love, this self-emptying and giving oneself over in behalf of others, in such humiliation and to death, we will have the closest approximation of what love is.

How much have we suffered for the distortion of the meaning of that word? So everything comes back to the cross. Here's the revelation of the God who is love in the supreme act of love. So if you want to know what it is, examine it here.

The Cross Reenacted in the Church

And wherever that is reenacted or reiterated in the life of the church or an individual saint, that is the love of God going forth. Wherever that kind of self-sacrifice is exhibited, there is God. And that's the exhibition of God that the powers of darkness dread.

They would very much prefer a church that is macho, a church that is doing heroic things and carrying on great events and conferences and things like that. The powers of darkness love that. But to see God's own humiliation, to see reenacted again the very thing that was exhibited at the cross terrifies the powers of darkness.

That is another reenactment of God. That is setting forth God as God, and that is devastating to the powers of darkness. And that's how the age ends. When the church as the body of Christ suffers in itself, the final convulsions of what Jesus suffered at the inception of the church is again the experience of the church at the end by the same powers of darkness.

When the church, so to speak, is crucified, when God allows in Revelation 13 the beast to defeat the church, and the church bears it with the same humility and uncomplaining self-surrender as being its call and the privilege to reenact the glory of what was first consummated at the cross, the age ends.

The powers that have been defeated or disarmed are brought to their final and utter end by that once and for all final reenactment. That's the whole majesty and the glory of what we are about. And that's why in all that God is dealing with us day after day is to bring us to that place.

Every time we stub our toe or have a difference of opinion or some episode arises in tension, it's all some minuscule issue of the cross and our willingness to bear with Christ's humility that that thing that's put before us, another reenactment, and our failure to do it shows that we've not yet come to that place.

And so I need to say also that we must understand that the resurrection is inextricably bound up with the crucifixion. These are not separate categories. The one is integral to the other, and it's by the power of the life revealed and obtained that raised Jesus from this death of humiliation.

That exaltation is our power to reenact his humility. And taking the cup and the bread, how does it say it, that his death might be remembered? Somebody help me with that. That we would show forth his death somehow in the drinking of this cup.

That somehow in that sacrament of the life that is to be found in the bread and in the cup is a power to show forth that death. Because humility is not something we can put on. You can't be the first one in your neighborhood to have it.

It's a contradiction in terms. Humility is God. It's not some self-effacing meekness where you're so reticent. Oh, do you mean me? Oh, really, I'm not a public speaker. No, please, no, don't call. That's not humility.

That is vanity and egotism of the most secretive. God calls you to do something and say something for his name. You can count on the enablement and grace will give you to perform it. To defer from that obedience because who am I that is a terrible disrespect to God and an unwillingness to believe for the grace to perform the things to which we're called.

So like love is distorted, humility is distorted. We give human definitions to those things which are okay for salesmen but are terribly inappropriate to the people of the kingdom. We need a humility that's humility and a love which is love which is to say what God himself is as it was most acutely revealed in his uttermost suffering unto death.

And that willingness to bear that is the reenactment. And God is in that. And the God that is in that terrifies the powers of darkness and that brings as much result and proportion as what was wrought on the cross.

And that's why Paul says if the rulers of this darkness knew, they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. As they ventilated their wisdom in destroying, they did not know what they were releasing for they would not have done it.

So if we want to know what apostolic preaching is, if you want to know what real intercession is of the kind that affects an answer from heaven that shakes powers of darkness that brings answer, it's the reenactment of the cross.

It's a prayer or a witness or a sharing or a preaching that is the tasting again of death, of humiliation. It's the feeling of terrible weakness that is not an accident but a necessary condition for the releasing of his life, which you don't have to bear.

It's voluntary as it was with Jesus. Now every variation and deviation is a movement away from this cross and the real issue for which the church is called. So for those who have no stomach for this, the experience of this humiliation, which is a suffering, they would look for some other forms of Christian expression.

The Cross, Reformation, and Knowledge of God

Here he's saying that this was for Luther the issue of the true or the false church and was the principal factor in setting in motion the Reformation because the Catholicism of Luther's day was a works-oriented religious kind of thing that men would perform in order to obtain the favor of God.

Really what it was is either a distortion or the exclusion of the cross and that Luther's Reformation brought the church back again to the thing that is central and that in fact he says it's the issue of reality itself.

We'll come to understand that because there's a form of the knowledge of God that does not require the cross. I think that that's the form that Judaism has obtained and even that which is called Christian.

There's a great emphasis in the 19th century on things that are natural and nature and finding God in nature, natural religion it's called, which was a movement away from the and can bring a knowledge of God by your own deduction from nature.

And some of the leaders of the Jewish community like the Mendelssohn family who moved into this exciting enlightenment renaissance view of nature and natural religion and were somewhat embarrassed by the reference to the scriptures and the supernatural God of the scriptures were a great factor in influencing the German theology that finally was established by the 19th and early 20th century.

There was a movement away from biblical faith and that there's a way in which God can to some extent be known in nature because he's revealed in his own handiwork. But that does not reveal God in a way that God would have himself to be known.

I want to get at that if I can. I think that the wrong forms of the knowledge of God will result in a religion of that kind because the power is the resurrection side of the cross. So he writes here, it's not enough for anyone to know God in his glory and his majesty but at the same time he does not know him in the lowliness and shame of the cross.

Thus true theology and true knowledge of God lies in Christ the crucified one. Natural knowledge of God is potentially open to men but in fact they misuse it in the interest of their self-exaltation and their self-divinization.

I understand this so well but I don't know if I can communicate it. There's a way in which you can come to a sense of God from nature that shuns the revelation of the cross, that has some valid things to say about God but the effect of it is to exalt the man who has that knowledge.

Do you understand that? The kind of knowledge that's derived from a study of nature, God in nature, however true it may be, has this effect upon that one, it exalts the man. But the knowledge of God that comes from the revelation given at the cross humbles man and humiliates him and brings him to the place of the truth about himself and about truth itself and about reality itself.

That's why the cross is so central. You can almost say that the real conflict right to the end of the age is between Judaism and Christianity or anything that resembles a faith that purports to be a knowledge of God that does not derive its understanding from Christ crucified and resurrected.

This is the real antagonism, whatever names they're called, and when I say Judaism I'm including even Christian denominations, that though they may give some verbal acknowledgement of the cross or of resurrection, their real view is a view of God not taken from that but from a general sense of knowledge that leaves man in an exalted condition.

In fact, there's an antagonism between those who prefer a view of God predicated on that because it's a nice God and it's a loving God in a certain way and an honorable God and a God who would not ask you to do this and to do that and a God who would not call you to shame and that kind of thing.

And the people who subscribe to that will invariably be opposed to those who insist upon Christ and him crucified and the life that derives from that in resurrection. We need to understand that this basic conflict because we're going to be at the heart of it.

So that's a remarkable statement of the dangers of knowing God from nature and even celebrating the created thing above the creator himself and why God in his mercy in a point of time gave a revelation of himself to save us from that kind of distortion that more acutely reveals himself at the cross.

So to quote again, to know God in the cross of Christ is a crucifying form of knowledge because it shatters everything to which a man can hold on and which he can build both his works and his knowledge and precisely in so doing sets him free.

This knowledge of God revealed at the cross saves man from the kind of exaltation that Romans 1 describes where he would celebrate nature for its own sake or his works as somehow satisfying God because something is revealed about the suffering of God that reveals God at his heart.

I think we said it last time, suffering reveals. There's something about suffering that reveals and that's why the Roman centurion at the cross was compelled to cry out, this, truly this is the sin of God.

Something was revealed in the depth of that suffering and the magnitude or the grace with which the suffering was born. The patience and the acceptance, the surrender to it, not the chomping at the bit or fighting against it or the cursing under one's breath, but the resignation reveals the character of God as God in fact is.

It's not a suffering that's masochistic, it's suffering as God bears it that shows what God's heart is and why necessarily that revelation can only come through the suffering of the church and that that suffering is inevitable in the obedience of the church, both in the things of the daily and the things that will conclude the age.

Stephen's Martyrdom and the Offense of the Cross

I think about what it is that made the hearers of Stephen gnash upon him with their teeth. The one statement that brought them to a boil was, I see the heavens opened and Jesus at the right hand of the power or authority or the throne.

And when they heard that, they put their fingers in their ears and rushed upon him with their teeth because in that one statement was such a calculated attack, a devastating blow at what men celebrated as God, as distant, lofty, removed from the sufferings of man, but that a man crucified with the wounds could be at the eternal presence of God at the very throne was so categorically opposed to everything that they understood to be God that they couldn't bear to hear it.

These were the priests. These were the men whose whole religious system was predicated on their view of God. But when Stephen made that one statement, heaven opened to him that he could see the heart of the mystery.

You saw the antagonism that came upon him unto death. And that's a capsule thing of why it is that the true church is going to suffer in the last days at the hands of that same kind and class of men and for the same reason.

Not that we will say, I see the heaven opened, but something about our deportment, the way we carry and conduct ourselves will exhibit the kind of thing that devastates their view of religion and of God and their place in such a system that they cannot bear to hear or to consider.

And the only answer is to murder and to remove through violence that one who makes this kind of view of God known. If you can understand what I'm saying right now, you'll understand every historic persecution of the church by the religious party since time immemorial.

It's not the world, it's religion that says that they will kill us and claim they are doing God a service. But what God are they doing a service to? It's the God of their own imagining, around whom and through whom a whole system, not only of religion, but of society, of value, of the whole thing that constitutes for men reality is, to say it's challenged is not to say it enough, is absolutely overturned.

It's threatened, its whole foundation is revealed as false to which men have given themselves when the truth of God is revealed by those who see the heaven opened and that the crucified suffering son of God is at the right hand of power.

Not because the father is condescending to take such a loathsome thing to himself, but because what the son is in his suffering and in his wounds is God, as God truly is. Can you understand that? This is God and men cannot bear to consider that.

And there are things in my spirit that have come from 31 years of walking and to whatever degree my own obediences have brought me into a measure of understanding of the reality of this, now to find expression.

Isn't that interesting because that's a suffering form of teaching. Do you know what I mean? There's another form of teaching where it could be lined out in principles that would be interesting and edifying, but this form of teaching has the potential for becoming event, but that is in the moment that the life of God will take hold of something as is perhaps doing right now as we gasp and splutter our way through.

It's a painful thing. See what I mean? It's a reenactment of the cross and that's what made apostolic preaching so powerful and merely to subscribe to the cross as somehow yes being true, but not understanding the principle, the life thing that is in it that God set forth in himself as a model and an example for every successive generation that a church should be predicated on that foundation and have its life out of that power, then we don't understand what it is to which we are called.

And when some of us have to taste death or taste humiliation, taste the kinds of things that pertain to us, we think of a strange thing. Going back to what was the cause of Stephen's death, because the first of anything is often the paradigm or the pattern.

The first martyrdom contains timeless, profound elements that will be enacted in every true martyrdom until the end. And so what is it that we could understand with Stephen's death? First of all, his statement was not something calculated to please men or to pacify them.

He was brought to a place where men were already opposed to him and calling him a blasphemer, so he knew he was already in a place of danger. Instead of speaking soothing things or carefully spoken things that would ease their displeasure, he seems to have rubbed them the wrong way.

He goes through a whole history of Israel and shows the characteristic apostasy of the Jewish people, their failure with Moses, right on down. And then he ends, as your fathers did, so do you also. You do always grieve the Holy Spirit of God.

He shows an unbroken continuum and they are with their fathers. And in fact, they are soon going to prove it by what they do to him. But when he came to that one statement, when he saw the heavens opened by the Holy Spirit, Jesus at the right hand of the Father, who is the crucified Christ, battered, wounded, carrying those wounds and the statement of his suffering right to the throne of God, that men somehow think ought to be sublime and religiously exalted and different and other than, that was the nub of offense that they could not bear to consider and had to extinguish the life of the man who saw that and depicted it in his own suffering.

Can you get that? That's why the Church prefers God's man of faith and power. That's why they love personalities that seem to have it all together, who come out from the wings and are resplendent in their authority.

And you look at them wide-eyed. You're some suffering saint and you're knocked from pillar to post and you can't get it together. And you're marriage and you're children and you're this and you're that.

But there he is, some resplendent thing other than yourself. And of course, you're not expected to aspire to be that. Can you understand that there's a way in which the Church would like that? Because it does not make a requirement of them.

They like to have someone who's exalted. And in another place, the mysterious man of faith and power. It absolves them. They're not expected to. That's why their passivity in the pew and just singing the hymns on the dollar collection plate.

And that's a projection of the view of God, who's exalted, noble, holy, different, and other than men. But the God who is a sufferer, like men, and in his humanity, shatters that whole phony, baloney, religious enterprise.

And not only shows us what God in fact is, but what he's calling us to be. By the same grace by which he was it through the eternal spirit. Can you understand that? The world hates the cross. And especially the religious world.

And where the cross is in any way resonant in a believer, there's something in the religious world that arches its back. I've gone up in elevators, in Hilton hotels, at international and regional full gospel conferences with some of the most celebrated, charismatic figures of our generation, and I've never met them.

And not a word was exchanged. But the moment that the elevator door closed and we ascended up, I could just sense the back arching. There's an intuition, a sense that what is represented here is antithetical, is opposite and contrary to everything upon which my religious success has been predicated.

And indeed, as that conference is unfolded, it becomes clear. God has me wearing a cardigan, black sweater, and a white shirt without a tie, and gray trousers in contrast to these guys who are splendiferously dressed, and my word comes out like a monotone.

I went, what's, Lord, what is this? I'm, by contrast, such a bleak nothing that these men even get up and leave the platform with contempt and disgust. And when you come the next day to have a cup of coffee, there they are clustered together.

They're in. They are the in crowd. These are the guys who are with it, and God is with them. And look, and you come in, and they give you that kind of a look, and there's no inviting you to their table.

You're just a loathsome thing, and you go sit in the corner with your cup totally out of it. But something happens in the course of those days with your plain and un, what's the word, conspicuous presentation where people come down before God flat in such a transaction, in such a life-changing thing.

But unfortunately, those who derided you were not there to see it. They've already gone on. How shall I? I'm saying those things just to show you. Classic archetypal oppositions, but the end will reveal them yet more acutely.

And we are the people called to the end. And we need to know why it is that we're going to be opposed, and not to blanch or balk at that, but to be steadfast in cleaving to the cross of Christ Jesus. Because only it has the power to set men free.

And the Jewish people need to be set free from their delusions. A phony church needs to be set free from its deceptions. And the only thing that has the power is the reality of God, which corresponds to the truth of God, set forth in the suffering of God at the cross of God.

The Cross Against Religious and Political Systems

It's a mode of living and being, and not just a subscription to the truth of it in your mind. He quotes another writer who says that the natural man is incurably religious and hates the cross and suffering.

He seeks works and success and therefore regards the knowledge of an almighty God who is always at work as being glorious and, quote, uplifting. I've had it out with some rabbis. They don't like the idea of a Lord who is in the earth or present, let alone a Lord who is in you.