THE PREACHER'S THEME
made precisely that the vehicle for the supreme revelation of Himself—here surely is a marvel that beggars description: here is the ultimate hope of our sin-tormented world. You do not preach the Cross aright until you make men hear, on the lips of the Crucified, such words as Joseph spoke to his betrayers: "So now it was not you who sent me hither, but God." Call the Cross the nefarious deed of Annas, Caiaphas and Pilate, call it the supreme revelation of the inmost essence of sin, call it the act of our own contemporary society or (in Pauline phrase) of "the potentates of the dark present, the spirit-forces of evil"—and you will tell the truth, but not the whole truth, not the final and decisive truth. Call it the act of God, call it the mightiest of all His mighty acts, call it the point in history where love divine was supremely master of the situation—and the deeper truth will begin to emerge. You will be helping men to realize that the most desperate chaos sin can perpetrate to-day is not too grim for this amazing love to handle and transform. And through your preaching—please God—they will understand in a new and living way the magnificent outburst of the apostle: "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?"
This leads me to the second note in your preaching of the Cross. Preach it as Victory. If you speak of Calvary only in terms of revelation, you may be gaining the approval of the opponents of a "transactional theology," but you are certainly diluting disastrously
83
