14 May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.
There is one way and one way only for the chains that bind us to death to be broken and that one way is the cross. When the scandal of Abu Ghraib Iraq made headlines it demonstrated two very interesting unwritten laws that seem to govern human behavior. The first is that human beings have the capacity to become very base in their behavior when a higher moral code is not internalized and enforced. Some of those involved used their positions of power to dehumanize, or should I say, to attempt to erase the image of God from their captives. They treated them like animals. They reflected their own view of themselves in how they treated their prisoners. They had a low view of who they were and out of that low view they felt compelled to lower their captives in order to raise themselves. The second unwritten law is that we want to place blame on someone so that we don’t have to face the reality of our own propensity to do evil. If we can point outward to someone else, we are able to hide behind the thin veneer of “at least I am not that bad.” Just as the prison guards lifted themselves up in their own eyes by debasing their prisoners, when we place blame on someone else we are debasing them and exalting ourselves. The harsh reality is that we all have the capacity to do what the guards did at Abu Ghraib. We all have the capacity to be a murderer, a rapist, a child molester, a thief, an embezzler, a liar, a two-faced…. We are all just a choice away from sin, and one sin is as good as any other when it comes to making us guilty. And the penalty for sin is death, a broken relationship that results in separation from God forever. That is why boasting in the cross is such a double-sided, double-edged boast. When we boast in the cross we are simultaneously acknowledging our sin with its consequence of death and the only solution to our sin, Jesus death and resurrection. For the Jesus-follower the cross must always be central in our lives. The cross forces us to keep a proper understanding of ourselves; we are hopeless bound to sin apart for Jesus’ death and resurrection. The cross also liberates us from the binding force of sin; we are freed in Jesus to live a life of obedience since the death-nail has been removed from our lives. As a Jesus-follower the safest place for us to live is right at the intersection of Broken Lane and Grace Street. This keeps us humble and thankful, a perfect combination before God.
The Arnold Journey 