The cross and the option of mediation …

It’s likely you’ve experienced something I have on several occasions.

When signing an agreement of different sorts (terms for employment, use agreements, etc.), you may have stumbled across a clause in the “fine print” where you had an option to give up your right for any potential legal action and, instead, agree to settle any differences through mediation.

Sometimes, mediation is the best possible course for you. Take, for example, the cross.

Without the mediation work of Jesus Christ at the cross, we would only have the option of standing before God as being guilty of sin. The trial would be short:

“For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard,” Romans 3:23, and you and I are a part of that “everyone” and “all.”

From there, it’s directly to the consequences of sin. That’s not an outcome that’s good for any human being.

But God provided a clause in dealing with our sin. We could, instead, accepted Jesus as Mediator between ourselves and God, receiving Jesus’ representation for us. Emil Brunner, writing in “The Mediator,” reminds us that faith in the Mediator is our only hope:

In Christianity faith in the Mediator is not something optional, not something about which, in the last resort, it is possible to hold different opinions, if we are only united on the “main point.” For faith in the Mediator – in the event which took place once for all, a revealed atonement – is the Christian religion itself; it is the “main point’; it is not something alongside of the center; it is the substance and kernel, not the husk.

This is so true that we may even say: in distinction from all other forms of religion, the Christian religion is faith in the one Mediator … And there is no other possibility of being a Christian than through faith in that which took place once for all, revelation and atonement through the Mediator.

It was Jesus Christ at the cross who stood between Earth and heaven and did the great work of mediating on our behalf:

“For there is one God and one Mediator who can reconcile God and humanity — the man Christ Jesus. He gave his life to purchase freedom for everyone. This is the message God gave to the world at just the right time,” 1 Timothy 2:5-6.

“Just think how much more the blood of Christ will purify our consciences from sinful deeds so that we can worship the living God. For by the power of the eternal Spirit, Christ offered himself to God as a perfect sacrifice for our sins. That is why he is the one who mediates a new covenant between God and people, so that all who are called can receive the eternal inheritance God has promised them. For Christ died to set them free from the penalty of the sins they had committed under that first covenant,” Hebrews 9:14-15.

“Jesus told him, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me,'” John 14:6.

On Good Friday, we thank God for a holy, righteous, and compassionate Mediator who offered up Himself to usher in a new covenant between God and humankind.

Scotty