Many people over the centuries, and even indeed recently, have denied some part of what happened at the crucifixion. Some people have said God didn't know it was going to happen. Some people have said it's an accident, and others have said it's some form of divine cosmic child abuse.

There are many people who have said this, like Brian McLaren and others, names that don't mean very much to us most likely. One more notable person though would be Rob Bell, who basically wrote a whole book that tried to make the point that the traditional Christian view was that Jesus saves us from God, and how could that possibly be good news? How it could it possibly loving that Jesus had to save us from God by himself, an innocent person, being punished for something he never did? He makes the point that that couldn't be loving. He makes many other points too, or at least asks very many rhetorical questions.

The point I want to make today is that the crucifixion wasn't cosmic child abuse. In fact, people who say this make at least two major mistakes. The first is that they have a low view of scripture, and the second is that they deny the efficacy, the effect, of what Jesus actually did at the cross. They actually gut the center of the Gospel.

Now, what do I mean when I say they have a low view of scripture? Well, from scripture they read, and it seems come to believe, that Jesus was innocent, and that the Father sent this innocent man to supposedly die for other people's crimes.

That's what they're enraged about. That's what they reject. They believe that from scripture, or at least they say they do, but you know what's interesting is they reject the other parts of scripture that show that Jesus was also fully God, that he was fully willing to die, that it was his plan also from before the foundation of the world. They take the half of scripture they seem to like, or at least reject fully, and they don't look at the other parts, which contradict or at least give the fuller picture to the first part, that the Father sent Jesus to die on the cross, which is true. They have a low view of scripture. They're not taking all of it equally seriously.

We're going to look at many passages, and this is part of what I mentioned earlier in the year, that as Christians we need to be prepared to demonstrate more than the fact that intelligent design is true - there's a God out there that created everything. We need to be prepared to demonstrate the truthfulness of the Gospel, of the redemption that Christ secured on the cross, of the substitutionary nature of what he accomplished, which we'll talk about in a minute. Those are really important things.

Sometimes it's really easy to see the division between Atheism and Christianity, but many times it's more difficult to see the divisions between Jehovah's Witnesses and Christians, or Roman Catholicism and Christianity, or Mormons and Christians, because many of these issues, in addition to talking about the nature of God and some other things, center on what actually happens at salvation, what's necessary for salvation, and what did Jesus do at the cross. So, we have to care about those things too. We can't just care about the age of the Earth, and evolution, and the nature of truth, although all of those are important.

When we come to scripture and we want to see what's the full picture, let's not just pick and choose to create a problem, but what does all of scripture say? Well, does it say it was cosmic child abuse? Well, no. In John 10:18, Jesus says, "No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord, and I have the authority to lay it down, and the authority to take it up again. This is the charge I received from my Father." Someone's going to…