The Old Cross and the New

And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. LUKE 9:23

Few things Tozer wrote have travelled further than a short essay called The Old Cross and the New, which has been reprinted as a tract many times. Its argument can be stated in a sentence. A new cross, he said, had crept into popular evangelicalism, looking very like the old one but doing the opposite work. The old cross killed. The new cross entertained. And the difference between them was the difference between the gospel and a pleasant imitation of it.

What a cross is for

Tozer’s starting point was the plain historical fact of crucifixion. In a short piece now in the Ochorus library, The Cross Is a Radical Thing, he reminded his readers what a Roman cross actually was. It did not negotiate with its victim, or improve him, or give him a new outlook. It put him to death. Christ was alive when He was nailed to it and dead when He was taken down. That, Tozer insisted, is the cross the apostles preached, and it was this cross, carried into the world, that overturned paganism and turned persecutors into apostles.

For the preaching of the cross is to them that perish foolishness; but unto us which are saved it is the power of God. 1 CORINTHIANS 1:18

The cross lost its power, he argued, when it was changed from an instrument of death into an object of beauty — when men made it an ornament to hang about the neck or a sign to ward off evil. Revered as a symbol, it was no longer feared as an executioner. And a cross that is not feared cannot save, because salvation comes precisely through death.

The new cross

The new cross, as Tozer described it, does not slay the sinner. It redirects him. It leaves his old self largely intact and offers him a better way of living — cleaner, happier, more successful. It tells him that he can have Christ and keep the things he loves, only on a higher plane. It invites him to accept Jesus as a kind of addition to a life whose basic direction is unchanged. It promises him that he will enjoy the Christian life, and it delivers him into churches designed to make sure he does.

Tozer believed this was a counterfeit, and a deadly one, because it offered new life without the death that must precede it. It flattered the natural man instead of condemning him. It asked nothing of the self except that it be a little more religious. And it filled the churches with people who had never been told that the old life must end.

The old cross

The old cross, by contrast, speaks with the voice of Scripture. It says that the old man, the self that has lived for itself, has no future. It must go to the cross with Christ. God does not propose to improve it but to end it, and then to raise the believer to a new life that is Christ’s own.

Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. ROMANS 6:6

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me. GALATIANS 2:20

In the radical-cross piece Tozer put the choice starkly. There are only two things we can do with the cross: run from it, or die upon it. To modify it so that it no longer kills is to run from it while pretending to embrace it. He believed that a shallow and worldly leadership had done exactly this, trimming the cross to suit an entertainment-hungry age, and that the church would pay for it.

Almost

Another sermon in the Ochorus library, The Bridge That Was Too Short, comes at the same truth from the side of the unconverted. Preaching on Paul before King Agrippa, Tozer dwelt on the king’s reply.

Then Agrippa said unto Paul, Almost thou persuadest me to be a Christian. ACTS 26:28

Agrippa was moved, and moved deeply. He was nearly persuaded. But nearly is not enough, and Tozer pressed the point with a vivid illustration of a bridge built almost all the way across a gorge. The man who comes close to the cross but will not die upon it is lost as surely as the man who never came near. The new cross, he believed, produced a great many almost-Christians — people who had come forward and signed their names and been counted, but who had never died.

Weighing it

Tozer’s protest against a cross without death is one of the most necessary things he ever wrote. The Lord’s own words about self-denial and cross-bearing are unmistakable, and any gospel that omits them is not His gospel. But two notes of balance are worth sounding.

First, the cross in the New Testament is first of all the place where Christ died for us, and only then the place where we die with Him. Substitution comes before identification. The sinner is not saved by his willingness to die to himself; he is saved by Christ’s death in his place, received by faith. The call to take up the cross is the call of a Saviour who has already carried it for us.

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. 1 PETER 2:24

Tozer believed this and preached it. But in his polemic against the new cross the order is not always plain, and an anxious reader can be left feeling that he must die hard enough to be saved.

Second, the old cross leads to resurrection. Tozer knew this well — he wrote that the God who raised Christ raises the believer to a new life — but the severity of his warnings can leave that joy in shadow. The cross is death, and it is also the door into life, liberty and a gladness that the new cross, for all its promises, can never supply.

But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. GALATIANS 6:14

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Read the short piece The Cross Is a Radical Thing in the Ochorus library. Ask honestly which cross you first heard preached.

2. Name one area of your life where you have tried to keep the old self and add Christ to it. Bring it to the cross.

3. Read Romans 6:1–11 slowly, and give thanks first for what Christ did for you before asking what you must do.

4. If you know someone who seems almost persuaded, pray for them by name this week.

5. Look at the way the gospel is presented in your own church or your own witness. Is anything of the cross missing? Speak or pray accordingly.

A PRAYER

Lord Jesus, You bore my sins in Your own body on the tree. Before I ever took up a cross, You carried mine.

Forgive me for wanting You without wanting to die, for asking You to improve my old life instead of ending it.

I take up my cross today. Let the old self go down into Your death, and raise me into Your life.

Keep me from being almost persuaded. Make me altogether Yours. Amen.