The event in history in the life of Christ is set forth in the word of God as the only possible means by which a man can meet with God. Now it is customary today for men and women to run away with the idea that there are any number of ways in which they may meet with God, any number of routes they may take in seeking and finding God. But the word of God contradicts that notion completely. It tells us there is only one place where a man can meet with God, and that is at the cross of Calvary.
You may think that it's perfectly reasonable that you should be able to find God on your terms, and you may say to yourself, ‘This idea that we can only find God at Calvary is very restrictive. Surely I'm entitled to approach God in the way that seems best to me.’ Such is the pride of every one of us, that we immediately think that we are entitled to approach God in our own way. But with anything of significance, even in secular life, you can't approach it on your terms. You can't have exactly the job you want. You can't practice medicine, unless you've been trained in medicine. You can't decide that you're going to enter Parliament and just do it tomorrow. You can't decide you're going to enter a profession without having been put through some process of education and examination. So why is it that we think that when we are going to seek Almighty God, the truth about life, when we are going to seek a relationship with him, we think we can do it exactly on our terms, and it doesn't seem to matter what Almighty God thinks. We have overlooked some great and fundamental things. You cannot just blunder into the presence of God, and for reasons much more significant than those which stop you practicing medicine.
To start with, you are dealing with a God who is so holy that you and I, with all our sin and uncleanness and treachery and deceitfulness of heart, would just be burned up as soon as we tried to approach him. This idea fails to take account of the nature of God, the character of God, the obstructions which are in the way, the great ravines and mountains that have to be crossed, the tremendous gulf between us and God. You want to find God on your own terms, but you never will. There is only one way in which you can seek and find God, and that is his way.
Some go further and say, ‘I don't accept that. I am in a position where with my intelligence and acumen I can search for God. You are suggesting to me that I cannot understand the things of God, I cannot take account of the character of God. Of course I can. I have enough mental acumen, I have powers of intellect, I can search for God, I can read the books, I can conduct a religious search if I wish to.’ No, you can't; it's absolutely impossible. If you're going to conduct a search for God and the truth and spiritual meaning, what book are you going to turn to? Do you know of an author who has been to heaven and back? Do you know of an author who can clearly testify that he has seen God and spoken to God face to face? Of course not. There is only one source in the world which is from God, and that is this book, the Bible. That is the only communication in which God has spoken to man. Every word printed there has been spoken by some prophet of God, or some apostle of God, or the Lord Jesus Christ himself, those who stood head and shoulders in holiness and spirituality above all those round about them, and whose words were vindicated and authenticated proved to be true by God. You can't think these things through without the word of God.
Though we are entirely different from the animals, being created, the Bible tells us, in the image of God, yet in some respects we are not a lot better than them. Man has fallen and lost fellowship with God and his mind has become darkened by sin. We too are confined within flesh and time, and we have no sense of the spiritual realm in the state in which we are born. We can only see and touch; we can only investigate within this box of flesh and material things. How can our limited minds embrace what is outside that box? Our limited finite minds, which only know the physical realm, cannot explore and evaluate God who is pure spirit, above and beyond and outside all the dimensions that we know. How can imagine that our opinions count for anything in religious matters? There is only one religion in the world that even credibly claims to be a religion of revelation, and that is the Christian religion. This word of God is God coming down into this box of ours and through the mouths of his prophets and his own Son. Therefore, you cannot find out anything true about God or eternity unless you read it in the Bible.
There are people who agree that the only thing we know about God is in the Bible, but they believe that you can earn God's love and God's favour. They therefore try to live a good upright life, or they say, ‘I'm not doing so at the moment, but I'm going to one day, before it's too late.’ But again, the only way in which you can find God and receive his favour, is in Christ. You have got to meet him at Calvary. The only way in which God deals with somebody is by a personal relationship to Christ, a personal meeting with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Have you ever thought about the prophecies which spoke of the life of Christ and of his death on Calvary? In book after book there is some allusion or reference to the Lord Jesus Christ. He is not named as such, but his death is referred to. If you were to put together the many hundreds of references to Christ in the Old Testament – not accidental references but carefully described prophecies about the one who would come – you would find that every single one of them is perfectly fulfilled in the life of Christ. Sometimes you hear people say, ‘The Gospel writers made it up.’ Apart from being a pretty absurd thing to say historically, there is a challenge for you. This is a challenge which was first put out many hundreds of years ago by Christian people, and nobody has ever met it. Try and write a novel about some event or some person or some enactment that could perfectly honour or fulfil all the Old Testament prophecies. Try and write about a man who would be from God, who would have great power, who would die a death for sinners, who would come at a certain time, at a certain place. Try and take all the fabric of these prophecies and concoct for yourself a possible fulfilment of them. One person historically who tried this was a count who was a great friend of Dostoevsky, and he had a shot at it. After tearing his hair out for about a year, he gave up completely and he began to seek the Lord, because he realised that the Gospel chroniclers could never have made this up. No fiction could honour all of them, because the Old Testament prophecies nail everything down: the time, almost, the place, the events, the historic events round about. You can't bend them, you can't twist them, you can't concoct some fiction which would honour them. You discover that they are not random prophecies, but prophecies all pointing meticulously, many, many of them, to only one feasible event in history.
How did the sufferings of the Lord Jesus Christ start? In a sense the Lord Jesus was probably suffering all the time he was on earth. How could he not have been? That the holy Son of God should have seen and walked among human foulness and taken the insults. But yet we know that his suffering started particularly in a garden, a place called Gethsemane. That's where we read in the Bible that suddenly this great heaviness, this great sorrow, this weight of spirit suddenly took hold of him in the garden of Gethsemane. The Bible teaches that the Lord Jesus Christ suffered and died on a cross, and it was on that cross that he chiefly took the punishment of man's sin. And yet some of his suffering was even before then. The Apostle Peter tells us that in himself he ‘bare our sins in his own body on the tree’. But then he also tells us, ‘by whose stripes ye were healed’. It was his stripes; it was the beatings to which he was subjected as well as the cross. The Lord Jesus Christ came down to earth. He was born as a babe. He grew up. He began to teach and to train his disciples, those whom he would leave behind him to preach his gospel. But all the time he was heading to a day he knew just when it would be. He knew the exact day of the month, day of the week, that he would one day be taken and be slain. Even while he was training his disciples and even while he was preaching to the people and working his miracles and healing men and women, he knew that he was here just for a limited time and that date would come. It was no accident. It was no accident as a blasphemous musical in London has claimed, portraying him as a man who didn't know his own powers, who didn't know where it was all leading. But consider Gethsemane, where he is sweating, as it were, great drops of blood. He is in agony. There has come down upon him a great cloud and a great heaviness, and he cries out to his God. He says, ‘O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt’ (Matthew 26:39). It is a question that is asked for our benefit so that we should understand that it was not possible that the Lord Jesus Christ should not go to Calvary. If Christ is going to save us from our sins and find a way for us to seek God and go to heaven, he was going to have to go through with this because there was no other way. If you are going to seek God, you must seek him at Calvary is because there is no other possible way to get forgiveness, to get life from God.