If you want to see what judgment looks like, go to the cross. If you want to see what love looks like, go to the cross.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the dual nature of the cross, representing both judgment and profound love.
In this quote, D. A. Carson suggests that the cross serves as a powerful symbol reflecting two contrasting themes: judgment and love. The imagery of the cross evokes the harsh reality of judgment for sin, representing the weight of consequence, while simultaneously illustrating the ultimate expression of love through sacrifice. It invites reflection on the depths of compassion intertwined with the severity of justice, urging us to appreciate both aspects in the context of faith and redemption.
In practice
In a sermon about redemption, this quote could help illustrate the profound meaning of sacrifice.
Both God's love and God's wrath are ratcheted up in the move from the old covenant to the new, from the Old Testament to the New. These themes barrel along through redemptive history, unresolved, until they come to a resounding climax - in the cross.
It is a cheap zeal that reserves its passions to combat only the sins and temptations of others.
Many of us in our praying are like nasty little boys who ring front door bells and run away before anyone answers.
There is a certain kind of maturity that can be attained only through the discipline of suffering.
The kingdom of heaven is worth infinitely more than the cost of discipleship, and those who know where the treasure lies joyfully abandon everything else to secure it.
Failure to believe stems from moral failure to recognize the truth, not from want of evidence, but from willful neglect or distortion of the evidence.
Although I may try to describe Love, When I experience it, I am speechless.
We said good-bye, and Dill went inside the house. He evidently remembered he was engaged to me, for he ran back out and kissed me swiftly in front of Jem. "Yawl write, hear?" he bawled after us.
I'm before him on my knees, and he kisses me He assumes I lose my reason and I do. Men are stupid, men are vain, Love's disgusting, love's insane, A humiliating business-oh how true.
here was a silence between them for a moment, and she wondered if all women, when in love, were torn between two impulses, a longing to throw modesty and reserve to the winds and confess everything, and an equal determination to conceal the love forever, to be cool, aloof, utterly detached, to die rather than admit a thing so personal, so intimate.
Beli at thirteen believed in love like a seventy-year-old widow who's been abandoned by family, husband, children and fortune believes in God.
You believe that a lover will bring you love, but it is your love that will bring you a lover.
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