Knowing God Through the Cross

The only way to know God is through Christ crucified. Every other understanding we may form concerning God, whether according to his power, by his glory, on the basis of sovereignty, our conjecture about his divine knowledge, as Creator, or anything else, will be an inaccurate if not subsumed under the message of the cross. The crucified Jesus reveals who God is in ways no speculation about divine powers, attributes, essences, or anything else can.

Unfortunately, our tendencies are to imagine deity in ways that seem exalted to us, in terms that we would think are appropriate to the divine reality. Though some of those may actually be true about God, the cross puts all these in a perspective and context of self-sacrificing love, humility, and identification with us.

The cross presents God to us in ways we would never think are appropriate: weak, vulnerable, humble, and certainly not triumphant. Without the cross as the overarching understanding, we will elevate mere aspects of God and miss the whole.

In other words, God is powerful and sovereign, but what that means is only properly perceived through the cross of Christ. The power of God is the capacity to love all, even enemies, without self-regard. The sovereignty of God is not demonstrated by a supposed divine rule from on high as God determines everything, but God is sovereign by dying for the restoration of creation. He is over all by loving all into existence and into newness. That is the exercise of his sovereignty. Sovereignty in any other register is a mistaken idea of who God is.

If God can only be known through the cross, did anyone before Christ, then, truly know God?

My answer would be “yes” in as much as the cross was revealed to them, not through the historical event, but as they glimpsed in the character of God what would be demonstrated by the cross. Israel’s prophets spoke about Christ and his cross, not simply in some predictive way of a future event, but because the selflessness of God’s generous love had become apparent to them.

God revealed himself to them as a God who suffers, who comes to us, and whose love endures forever and whose mercies never come to an end. No historical event had yet embodied fully what they saw and knew, but it would be manifest in the cross of Jesus.

To know God through the cross of Christ is not solely referring to the crucifixion so long ago, but the meaning of the cross as symbol of God as love. Those who knew God as infinite, mysterious, and unquenchable love, before Jesus was born of Mary, knew God through the same truth which would be symbolized in his cross.

We have to take seriously Jesus’ statement that he came to show us the Father (Matthew 11:27). There was indeed something to show us beyond what was generally known up to that point.

God, who is called the Almighty in the Hebrew Scriptures, must now be seen as Almighty as interpreted through the cross. Almighty, which in previous times might have been taken as God can do whatever God wants, in other words, limitless capability, is now given context by the cross. Almighty describes the nature of the love who is God. The love of God is how he is the Almighty.