The Cross The Way Of The Lamb

The Cross is the way of the Lamb, and the Cross, or the Lamb, links the eternities. 

One arm, so to speak, of that Cross reaches right back over all the ages and beyond the garden into the eternal counsels, and there takes up all the immensity of those counsels of God, the eternal purpose.

The other arm of the Cross touches the ages to come; and by way of that Cross, that from the beginning, which has in the meantime been challenged and upset, is realized: so that the way of the Lamb is the way of the realization of the eternal purpose of God, and nothing less than that. 

That is why I have taken pains to stress the immensity of that purpose.

Our conception of the Cross is so small. 

Our hymns about the Cross have such a limited view of that Cross. 

Oh, yes, “the burden of my heart rolled away” at the Cross...  quite true and good, blessed; but the Cross is infinitely, transcendently more than our conversion. 

The Cross has come in not just to get people saved from their sin and secured unto heaven and have the blessings of forgiveness and access to God.

No, the Cross has come in to lay right hold of that vast scheme of the divine intention and purpose and to realize it, and nothing less than it. 

We ought to see that the Cross is a very much bigger thing than we have ever imagined.

When the Lord begins to work subjectively by His Cross in a life, He does a very utter thing beyond conversion. 

In many lives it often comes to this: that a fuller apprehension of the meaning of identification with Christ in death and burial and resurrection is a far bigger thing than conversion, and that is significant. 

You cannot make too much of the Cross, for this very reason... that there is nothing greater and vaster than God’s eternal purpose in the creation of this universe, and the Cross has to do with every bit of it, touches it at every point.

The things in the heavens are purged by the Blood of that Cross (Heb. 9:23).

The Cross is an immense thing because of the immensity of that with which it has to do. 

So the Cross is retrospective-but not merely to the fall, not merely to the entrance of sin. 

The Cross is retrospective to before the world was, from the laying down of the foundation.

It is retrospective to the very purpose of God in having a world at all. 

If you can understand and grasp why God created this universe, what His thoughts were, what His intentions;

If you can really comprehend all the immensity of His purpose in making this a heritage for Himself, worthy of Himself and satisfying to Him, then, and only then, will you be able to see the greatness of the Cross, the magnitude of the Cross.

Yes, the Cross reaches right back to that.

~T. Austin Sparks~