We're 21st-century centric. America-centric. It's human nature, I suppose. History begins with us. We may read about it, but we don't experience it. And we forget it.
What was the world like before the Cross? We read about it all through the Old Testament – what God asks of His people and what He actually gets from them. He asks for their devotion and gets apostasy. Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28 say that God’s people are blessed for obedience and cursed for disobedience. “’You shall not make idols for yourselves or erect an image or pillar, and you shall not set up a figured stone in your land to bow down to it, for I am the Lord your God,’” says Leviticus. “The Lord will establish you as a people holy to himself, as he has sworn to you, if you keep the commandments of the Lord your God and walk in his ways,” says Deuteronomy. “And all the peoples of the earth shall see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they shall be afraid of you.”
God wants worship. He wants fellowship with His creation. That is why He created. And He wants a mighty people who can deliver that kind of relationship. Idolaters shall not access the tree of life.
His creation begins to worship graven images, the idols of others, and gives Him anything but devotion. They acquire a knowledge of good and evil; that is, of everything (merism is a literary device not unknown to Hebrew writers), even things apart from God, and they insist on gravitating toward those things, toward idolatry and an existence of exile, oppression, and enslavement. Long ago, their forbears had tasted the fruit of that sin that would banish them from God’s fellowship, and over time, they, willingly or not, have virtually made it an art form. And so they live as a conquered minority, almost always in exile, always enslaved and oppressed, assimilating to foreign cultures and answering to their pagan overlords, worshiping birds and reptiles, golden calves and the gods of their oppressors’ making. The Israelites in Shittim bowed down to Baal of Peor, for example, many of them willingly, as Numbers implies in chapter 25. They mingled with the Midianites and yoked themselves to that man-made god.
The Babylonian subjugation of the Kingdom of Israel and then of the Kingdom of Judah in the 500s BC and the long train of abuses after that from the Medo-Persian Empire, the Greeks, and the Romans is common knowledge. But even long before that, such as with the Egyptians and Assyrians, the people of God were exiles. They abandoned God, their tree of life.
They knew the living God, but seldom made Him their priority in worship. As Paul says to the Roman Christians, “For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man and birds and animals and creeping things” (1:23).
That was the ancient world, the pagan world, the world before Christ. Even among God’s faithful, idol worship was more the rule than the exception. They revered not the Creator but the creature. Images of kings and animals lived rent-free in their heads. The creature had power over them. And conspicuously absent from their sphere of worship was the cross. Crucifixion had a long history among the ancients, though by the end of the last century BC, it was a rather young tradition in the Roman world. It was a form of execution reserved for slaves and rebels, a slow, painful, ghastly way to die, and a thorough whipping or thrashing beforehand to discourage resistance or flight only worsened the condition of the accused. Seneca describes crucifixion as a long, drawn-out affair in which the victim would be “wasting away in pain, dying limb by limb, letting out his life drop by drop . . . fastened to the accursed tree, long sickly, already deformed, swelling with ugly tumors on chest and shoulders, and drawing the breath of life amid long-drawn-out agony.”
Imagine the Appian Way in Europe, a stretch of road spanning 132 miles, from Rome to Capua, lined with some 6,000 crosses, to each one nailed one of Spartacus’ men, a slave who rebelled against Rome. 6,000 bodies – skeletons – in that nebulous region between living and dying, writhing in pain, struggling to breathe, pecked at by birds, crawling with bugs, with seldom a loved one to attempt to rescue them while citizens walked by and tried not to look at them for the awful sight that it was. And days later, when finally dead, many would continue to hang and rot, removed and tossed to the ground only when their executioners needed a cross on which to nail another rebel.
Crucifixion was a public spectacle that made a statement: “Rome is in charge.” But it was a public spectacle seldom spoken of in polite society, it was so horrifying to witness, let alone to recall. When the Romans introduced crucifixion to Jerusalem, it was so shameful a practice that they planted their crosses outside the city walls on a hill they called Golgotha, “The Place of the Skull.” And on that hill, Jesus, as the Apostle Paul describes, was obedient to death, “even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8).
The pagan world – a world in which totem poles were the norm and crucifixion was not discussed. It must have been for many – especially slaves and rebels – a world of dreadful paranoia and fear. Even governors and statesmen who could not promptly deliver on a king’s orders could find themselves in the direst of predicaments. It was a brutal, barbaric, dog-eat-dog world in which militant nations ripped open pregnant women in the lands they invaded to prevent child birth (see Hosea 13:16 and Amos 1:13) and leaders of states peopled by a multitude of ethnicities demonstrated their authority and entertained themselves by throwing prisoners in arenas to be torn apart by wild animals. It was a world of pantheons and superstition, and, for all intents and purposes, without a living God.
But look around now. All over the world. Every hemisphere. Every continent. And note the number of totem poles on display. And compare that to the frequency with which images of the Cross appear. On church steeples, in cemeteries, embroidered in our clothing and dangling from our ears in our jewelry, tattooed on our skin, engraved on Bible covers and on stonework and metalwork, displayed prominently as art. In popular culture, images of the Cross appear in music videos and movies. Even among unbelievers, it can inspire some measure of awe; it’s a little bit mysterious and intimidating, maybe even, to the most apprehensive, a little bit dangerous. It inspires even them. The Cross surrounds us. It is embedded in Western culture and indeed in cultures all around the world. What McDonalds wouldn’t give for its Golden Arches to be so universally recognized.
In the world, carved images of lizards and raptors have given way to images of the Cross, and along with that change of scenery, the world was transformed. Through the Cross, believers are once again worshipping the Creator God. Not when they pray five times a day facing a particular city, or after they've made pilgrimages to a temple or tabernacle, but always. And through the Cross, they are also transforming civilization.
More than any other faith, more than any government or corporation, more than any other organization at all, Christianity has improved the standard of living and quality of life for untold regions and cultures.
In its humanitarian output – schools, hospitals, shelters, soup kitchens – the church within which Jesus Christ is the cornerstone put into practical terms the manifestations of love and compassion that have been unmatched by any other organization or institution before or since. Christians turn out for famine and disaster relief. They counsel addicts and unwed pregnant women, and they aid and comfort the sick, powerless, jobless, and exploited. In every city and in virtually every small town and hamlet in the world (or certainly in the West), a Christian church or organization has hosted an outreach ministry of some kind.
Christianity enkindles the dispirited heart and animates the pedestrian imagination. It has inspired the proliferation of art, literature, music, and architecture as well as a culture of privilege, prosperity, free enterprise, and a work ethic that has built in the West civilizations of unprecedented welfare, equality, and family cohesion. Christianity has been a catalyst for tremendous progress that has improved the quality of life around the world.
Indeed, Christianity and Western culture are so intertwined that they cannot be separated. Elsewhere in the world, it is also very much ingrained. Why has the church made such an impact in the world, one might ask. Because it has more resources? More will? A longer history? Does simply having more of something enable its transformational powers? Or, in addition to its numbers, does it also have some thing that is different?
When Jesus was crucified, a revolution began. At first, no one knew what to make of the crucifixion. What they expected from it lay in a sort of limbo, especially in the first three days, before his resurrection. And even after the resurrection, they tried to make sense of the implications as they quibbled with one another, prayed for direction, and organized ragtag congregations largely on what they had heard, for the New testament was not yet canonized, and indeed for most of the first century was still in production. But they had the Holy Spirit, the power of forgiveness, the power of transformation.
