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First Monday of Lent - The Cross

 First Monday in Lent...

In 1st Peter, he says, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed." (2:24)

When Peter spoke to the Jewish Council in Acts 5, he said, "The God of our fathers raised Jesus, whom you killed by hanging him on a tree." (30)

The Bible opens in Genesis with human beings in a garden, where the tree becomes a focal point for their disobedience to God's word. The Bible ends in the book of Revelation where the picture of heaven reveals...
"The angel showed me the river of the water of life, flowing from the throne of God and of the lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations" (22:1-2).

In Lent, we remember our Christ-shaped heritage comes from our Savior, Jesus Christ, the lamb of God who "you killed by hanging him on a tree". Our family tree in Christ's family is shaped by Christ's sacrifice for us. The Cross is our family tree.

In our first parents, Adam and Eve, we are separated from God by our Sin, but in Jesus, we are redeemed in his death on the Cross, and so, we by faith in Christ Jesus, we became children of God, adopted into God's family.

Around 750 a.d., a Bishop named St. Andrew, while serving the Church on the island of Crete, wrote on why we Christians revere the Cross of our Savior:

"Had there been no cross, Christ could not have been crucified. Had there been no cross, life itself could not have been nailed to the tree. And if life had not been nailed to it, there would be no streams of immortality pouring from Christ’s side, blood and water for the world’s cleansing. The legal bond of our sin would not be canceled, we should not have attained our freedom, we should not have enjoyed the fruit of the tree of life and the gates of paradise would not stand open. Had there been no cross, death would not have been trodden underfoot, nor hell despoiled.

Therefore, the cross is something wonderfully great and honourable... The cross is honourable because it is both the sign of God’s suffering and the trophy of his victory. It stands for his suffering because on it he freely suffered unto death. But it is also his trophy because it was the means by which the devil was wounded and death conquered; the barred gates of hell were smashed, and the cross became the one common salvation of the whole world."

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