The Cross In The Creator’s Heart

The lamb that was slain from the creation of the world. Revelation 13: 18

As the flash of a volcano briefly reveals the fires at the earth’s centre, so the light on Calvary was the bursting forth of the very nature of the Everlasting – the great love which like a fire burns always in God’s heart.

Celtic Christians profoundly understood the truth that there was a cross in the heart of God before there was a cross on the hill outside Jerusalem.

God foresaw that evil would enter the creation and prepared for it by building into it a cross. But why did God go ahead with a universe in which evil was a possibility? Just think what kind of a world it would have been if sin was an impossibility: a world in which creatures would have been like robots and would have responded to God’s commands in the way a computer responds to our touch. By creating beings with the dangerous gift of free will God brought into existence the conditions in which evil became a possibility. Evil was not God’s intention, but by creating a universe in which evil could break out, higher good could be achieved for human beings and greater glory for God.

In designing the universe God made sure that the possibility of sin was met by the possibility of sinful people being redeemed.
Thus the broad beams on which the universe is built are in the shape of a Cross. The Cross, the ultimate expression of the law of self-sacrifice runs like a scarlet thread through the Bible, through human experience, and through all creation. Will I sense this and know this in my life today?

I see his blood upon the rose
And in the stars the glory of his eyes
His body gleams amid eternal snows
His tears fall from the skies.
I see his face in every flower
The thunder and the singing of the birds
Are but his voice – and carven by his power
Rocks are his written words.
All pathways by his feet are worn
His strong heart stirs the ever beating sea
His crown of thorns is twined with every thorn
His cross is every tree.
Joseph Mary Plunkett Ireland, died in the 1916 rebellion.