For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise;
the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate."

Where is the wise man?
Where is the scholar?
Where is the philosopher of this age?
Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?

For since in the wisdom of God the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe.
Jews demand miraculous signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those whom God has called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.

For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength.

P. T. Forsythe lived for one thing as a theologian in England at the turn of the 20th Century. His "main thing" was keeping the atoning work of the cross the "main thing." It was like the preverbal placing the finger in the dike, as the thinking of the day was to strip Golgotha of its ability to be a stumbling block. "Not so fast," said Forsythe, again and again.

In THE WORK OF CHRIST, he states that the "old orthodoxies....had a true eye for what truly mattered in Christianity, and especially how they grappled with the final facts of human nature, and its darling sefl-will. They closed with ultimates. They did not heal lightly the wound of the people.

It is the grace of Israel we need; for the grace of Greece fails heart, and flesh and moral will. It is subjective sand when we want objective rock. It does not enable us to keep our feet.

We need a hand to lift us by the hair, if need be, and hurt us much in the doing of it, if only it sets un on the Rock of Ages. And the old Puritans (now sixpence a volume octave) at least do that. And they do because...they stood at a center of things with their religion of the moral Atonement, of a free but most costly Gospel.

They grasped what makes God the Christian God - not only a free grace but a costly one. It is not only the freedom of His grace, but its infinite price to Him that makes God God."

"By terrible things in righteousness dost Thou answer us, O God of our salvation.
DARBY TRANSLATION
Psalm 65:5

Rock of Ages, cleft for me,
Let me hide myself in thee;
Let the water and the blood,
from thy wounded side which flowed,
Be of sin the double cure;
Save from wrath and make me pure.

Not the labors of my hands
Can fulfill thy law's commands;
Could my zeal no respite know,
Could my tears forever flow,
All for sin could not atone;
Thou must save, and thou alone.

ROCK OF AGES
A. Toplady

He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all....Romans 8:32

What God gave us was neither His portrait nor His principle; He gave us Himself - His presence, His life, His action. He did more than show us Himself, more than teach us about Himself - He gave us Himself, He sacrificed Himself.

It is ourselves He seeks, therefore it was Himself He gave, life for life and soul for soul. He asks us for life-committal, because it was His life He committed to us.

He gave us love by giving us Himself to love. He does not make His love and goodness just to pass before us in a panorama; nor does He lay it out parcelled so that we may readily just take it or leave it....

.....He takes the last pains to get it home to us, He carries it home Himself,  he does it all Himself. He "commends His own love". He does not woo us by proxy. Christ was no mere messenger, but present God.

The divine Lover is His own apostle. He did not simply send His Son; He came in His Son, and in His Son's cross. God was in Christ's reconciling. He did not simply make use of death, of His Son's death - He died.

Surely what the Son suffered cost the Father even more. When Paul spoke to the Galatians about his preaching of Christ, he says he "placarded Christ" before them (Galatians 3:1), made a great exhibition of Him, writ Him large, made a show of Him, and glorified Him openly.

That was an apostle's work. He depicted Christ, and pointed to Christ, and commended Christ. He said "Hear me,"—not, "Look to me," but "Look to Christ," "Receive Christ."

He was continuous with God as He is not with us. He did not represent God to us on the same principle as He does us to God. Christ dying therefore was God commending His own love to us.

The Cross was no mere assurance of God's love, but its action. Christ was the love of God giving itself to us, the grace of God bestowing, spending, pouring itself out on us, the holiness of God reclaiming us to holiness, not turning us toward it, but replacing us in it.

God does not love us by deputy; He does not give us by deputy; He does not save us by deputy. He brings and wings His own love. His holiness takes its own consequences in an evil world. He does His own suffering and ,saving.

He is a jealous God. None but Himself shall redeem us for Himself. He is a monopolist of sacrifice. He does not part with the agony and glory of the Cross to any creature. None shall outdo Him in sacrifice.

No creature has a right to sit with God on the throne of the Cross. It was no created being that died for us. Creatures as we are, it is in no created Spirit that we can live. Our Redemption is too costly for any but our Creator, and a creature must let it alone for ever.

P. T. Forsythe