The Illusion of the "Come Up"
We all love a good success story. We love the part of faith where the blessings are accruing, the miracles are multiplying, and the seas are parting. We love the Jesus who multiplies the fish and the loaves. We love the Jesus who heals the sick and raises the dead. But what happens when the Jesus we follow turns His face toward Golgotha? What happens when He asks us to follow Him into the dark?
It is easy to be a "come up" Christian. It is easy to worship when everything in your life is trending upward and the benefits of faith are obvious to everyone around you. But true transformation does not happen in the comfort of our preferences. It happens at the cross. We have sanitized the cross today. We wear it around our necks, we stamp it on our Bibles, and we paint it on our church walls. But in the first century, the cross was not a symbol of religious affiliation; it was an instrument of execution. It was the place where your plans died.
When Jesus encountered the rich young ruler, He didn't offer him a prosperity plan. He offered him an invitation to surrender. He looked at a man who had everything the world says you need to be happy, and He told him that he was still missing the one thing that actually mattered. The invitation wasn't just to believe; it was to bleed. It was to let go of the safety nets and step into the radical unknown of cross-bearing faith. When Jesus explained how hard it is for those who trust in their own resources to enter the kingdom, His disciples were astonished. But Jesus reminded them that with God, all things are possible. The cross is the ultimate impossible moment made possible by God. It interrupts our "come up" to give us something eternal.
Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me.— Mark 10:21, KJV
The Mockery of the Crowd
The cross interrupts our obsession with self-preservation. When Jesus hung between heaven and earth, the crowds that had once clamored for His healing touch now stood at the foot of the cross and hurled insults. They wagged their heads. They mocked His power. They fundamentally misunderstood the nature of His mission. They thought His inability to save Himself was a sign of weakness, completely missing that His refusal to save Himself was the ultimate display of His strength.
Think about the profound irony of that insult. The religious elite thought they were delivering the final blow to a failed revolutionary. They thought they were exposing a fraud. But in their mockery, they were actually preaching the gospel. He saved others; himself he cannot save. If He had saved Himself, He could not have saved us. His restraint in that moment is staggering. He had legions of angels at His disposal. He could have come down from the cross in a blaze of undeniable glory and forced every knee to bow right then and there. But He wasn't after forced submission; He was after our redemption.
Have you ever been in a place where people looked at your life and mocked your faith? Have you ever trusted God, only to find yourself hanging on by a thread, while the world whispers, "If God is so good, why are you suffering?" This is the agony of the cross. They wanted a savior who operated on their schedule, a king who proved his royalty by avoiding pain rather than absorbing it. But Jesus chose the nails. He chose the splinters. He chose the suffocation. When people ask why Jesus died, we have to look past the political theater of Pilate. He died to take the full weight of our fractured, rebellious, exhausted human condition upon His own shoulders.
Likewise also the chief priests mocking said among themselves with the scribes, He saved others; himself he cannot save. Let Christ the King of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe. And they that were crucified with him reviled him.— Mark 15:31-32, KJV
The Sound of Forsakenness
There is a darkness that goes deeper than the absence of sunlight. From the sixth hour to the ninth hour, a heavy, suffocating darkness covered the entire land. This wasn't just a meteorological anomaly; it was a cosmic mourning. Creation itself could not bear to watch the Creator be murdered by His own creation. The sun refused to shine. And in that pitch-black afternoon, the greatest transaction in the history of the universe took place. The Son of God was experiencing the crushing weight of separation from the Father.
I mean, what really happened beyond the crown of thorns that marked His brow? Beyond the sign that Pilate put above Him in three different languages? What happened down in my soul when my shackles fell off, when my shame was nailed to those beams, when the chastisement that brought my peace was upon Him? On the cross, that's where my sin is. On the cross, that's where my mistakes are. On the cross, that's where all of my second-guessings and my deepest regrets are redeemed. Jesus didn't just die a physical death; He absorbed the wrath of a holy God against sin.
If you are sitting in the dark right now, wondering if God has abandoned you, you need to hear the cry of Jesus. When He cried out in agony, it wasn't the pain of the nails tearing His flesh that broke Him. It was the agonizing silence of heaven. He entered into the ultimate abandonment so that your story would never end in isolation. He was forsaken so that you could be forgiven. He was cast out so that you could be brought in. The darkness of the cross is the absolute guarantee that God will never leave you in the dark.
And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?— Mark 15:34, KJV
The Veil Torn Wide Open
We spend so much of our lives trying to prove we are worthy of love. We try to clean up our act, fix our mistakes, and present a polished version of ourselves to God. But the cross shatters the illusion of our own righteousness. The beauty of the gospel, perfectly captured in the truth of Romans 5:8, is that God didn't wait for us to get our act together. He moved toward us in the middle of our mess. While we were still actively rebelling, while we were still failing, Christ laid down His life.
The moment Jesus yielded up His spirit, something earth-shattering happened in the temple. The thick, heavy veil that separated the Holy of Holies from the rest of the world—the barrier that said "keep out, you are not clean enough"—was violently torn in two. And it wasn't torn from the bottom up, as if a man had done it. It was torn from the top to the bottom. God Himself reached down and ripped the barrier away. What happened on the cross was the release of the absolute freedom God wants to produce in your life.
Even the hardened Roman executioner, a man who had seen countless criminals die, was completely undone by the way Jesus surrendered His life. He saw the majesty of Christ's suffering and recognized the divine. The debt is paid. The ledger is cleared. The access to the Father is fully, completely, and eternally open. You do not have to earn your way into His presence. You just have to stand in the finished work of Jesus. The cross changes everything because it means your worst day is not your last day, and your deepest sin is no match for His deepest grace.
And Jesus cried with a loud voice, and gave up the ghost. And the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom. And when the centurion, which stood over against him, saw that he so cried out, and gave up the ghost, he said, Truly this man was the Son of God.— Mark 15:37-39, KJV
Do not look at the cross and only see a tragedy. Look at the empty, blood-stained wood and see your absolute liberation. The King of Glory descended into the very depths of human despair so that you would never have to face the grave alone. Your shame is gone, your future is secure, and the veil is permanently torn. Walk boldly into the grace that was bought for you in the dark, and let the finished work of Christ be the anchor for your soul today.