Reconciliation By The Cross

For God in all his fullness was pleased to live in Christ, and through him God reconciled everything to himself. He made peace with everything in heaven and on earth by means of Christ’s blood on the cross. [Colossians 1.19-20]

I just had a thought as I read this today...

God living in Jesus is how He reconciled everything unto Himself. Specifically, that reconciliation was accomplished by means of Jesus' death on the Cross. 

Jesus could not avoid His Cross.

Let's consider (evaluate) this in light of some other scriptures:

So we have stopped evaluating others from a human point of view. At one time we thought of Christ merely from a human point of view. How differently we know him now! This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a new life has begun! And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ. [ 2 Corinthians 5.16-21]

We are given the task of reconciling people unto God. Remember, Jesus did His work of reconciliation on the Cross. With this in mind, there is undeniable continuity then in something Jesus said before Paul ever even knew Him:

Jesus warned his disciples not to tell anyone who he was. “The Son of Man must suffer many terrible things,” he said. “He will be rejected by the elders, the leading priests, and the teachers of religious law. He will be killed, but on the third day he will be raised from the dead.” Then he said to the crowd, “If any of you wants to be my follower, you must give up your own way, take up your cross daily, and follow me. If you try to hang on to your life, you will lose it. But if you give up your life for my sake, you will save it. And what do you benefit if you gain the whole world but are yourself lost or destroyed? If anyone is ashamed of me and my message, the Son of Man will be ashamed of that person when he returns in his glory and in the glory of the Father and the holy angels. [Luke 9.21-26]

Jesus put a significant "if-then" caveat out there. "If" you want to be my follower (as a reconciler of men unto God), "then" you must take up your own cross to do so (to also reconcile men unto God). There is simply no reconciliation of people unto God without the "reconciler" visiting his or her cross. 

We cannot avoid our cross.

To be sure, in order to accomplish this, we must consider our "old life" to be "gone," as Paul said in 2 Corinthians above, which is precisely what Jesus did:

You must have the same attitude that Christ Jesus had. Though he was God, he did not think of equality with God as something to cling to. Instead, he gave up his divine privileges; he took the humble position of a slave and was born as a human being. When he appeared in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross. [Philippians 2.5-8]

We are not asked to leave the glory of heaven to go to our cross and reconcile people unto God, but we are tasked to abandon our pathetic sin-riddled, self-centered life on earth (wonderfully glorious as it may seem) to go to our cross and reconcile people unto God. 

Does this make sense?

The message of the cross is foolish to those who are headed for destruction! But we who are being saved know it is the very power of God. [1 Corinthians 1.18]

The powerful reconciliation of men unto God was set in motion by Jesus Christ on the Cross. The powerful reconciliation of men unto God then only continues through us (as ambassadors of Christ) when we go to our cross. We must do this daily. The cross is not an option for anyone who would follow Christ. 

Anyone who does not follow Christ is not His.

Father, the cross is serious business - not only for Jesus, but for us. Help us to seek out our own cross every day so that we might reconcile people unto You - which is our Great Commission. So be it.