By Sarah Wootten
Usually when I write my series of articles, I have each week’s topic outlined before I begin the first article. It helps me to think through the passage and make sure I hit all the highlights in the amount of weeks I have been allotted to write. So as I opened up my computer today, you can imagine my chuckle when I saw the topic of this week’s article – God’s power in the gospel. Why would this make me laugh? Because as I write this, it is the day after the election.
This election season has been like a raging storm, and I do not intend to add to the drama. But elections remind me of how we wrongfully perceive man to be powerful. As people went to the polls to cast their vote, no one picked the candidates who they thought were the weakest. That would be silly. Instead, everyone voted for whoever they thought the best leader would be to accomplish a set of goals.
And yet, it’s during the election season that we often forget that man really isn’t powerful. Despite our advances in medicine, any of the leaders that were voted into office yesterday could die within the month of an unknown illness. The most we can do with our modern healthcare is prolong an inevitable death. Man’s power has proved to be temporary and weak, even for those people we consider the most powerful.
As the psalmist writes “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation. When his breath departs, he returns to the earth…” (Psalm 146:3-4, ESV). All of man’s efforts to save have proved to be unsuccessful; we all end up in the grave. Who is powerful enough to save? Only God possesses this type of power, and He displays this power through the work of His Son on the cross.
If Jesus was physically walking among us today, we would not consider Him to be someone of power. Sure He had a lot of followers, but they usually weren’t people of influence. He was poor according to our monetary standards, and He came from a city of complete insignificance (John 1:46). He died a humiliating death while some of His closest friends denied knowing Him (Luke 22:54-62). This was not a man of power according to the world.
But through what the world calls weakness, God’s saving power is on display. Paul tells us that the weakness of God is stronger than anything that man has to offer (1 Corinthians 1:25). So when Jesus came, He didn’t come with power in His fist ready to crush the evil people that surrounded Him. No, He came in obscurity and humility, quietly obeying the will of the Father. He displayed His power through miracles, certainly, but when the appropriate time came, He became weak in the flesh and died on a cross (2 Corinthians 13:4). And it’s through that act of humility and weakness on the cross that we see God’s power.
Everyone is dead in their trespasses and sins apart from Christ (Ephesians 2:1-3). It’s like each of us is a pile of old bones; how are we supposed to bring life to ourselves? Eternal death is what we deserve because of our sin. But Jesus’ death on the cross was not a result of His own sin because He had no sin (2 Corinthians 5:21). Rather, He willingly took the punishment that we all owe and bore it on the cross, taking our punishment away from us. Therefore, Jesus’ death isn’t a display of weakness, but of God’s power to defeat sin and death. “For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God,” (1 Corinthians 1:18, ESV).
We marvel at God’s power displayed throughout Scripture. From the moment He spoke the world into being, we can see His power through what He has done in the world. But it’s at the cross where we see His power in the fullest measure of what has been revealed to us. Death was defeated. Sin was paid for. Sinners were forgiven. Life was secured. Resurrection became assured. It’s a power like no other.
This article originally appeared in The Clarion Newspaper.
Corinth Baptist Church 