Among the songs of worship that I will find myself singing this Easter, I am sure these words will be sung at some point:

‘This, the power of the cross:
Christ became sin for us,
Took the blame, bore the wrath:
We stand forgiven at the cross.’

I believe those words – mostly – and I will sing them with both gusto and gratitude. I am a sinner and daily fall short, offending God and hurting other people, with the line of my conflicted and fallen nature dividing my heart in two, so that I do what I do not want to, and do not do what I should.

Only the cross of Christ can save and heal me. It is the single most important event in human history, and the moment I first trusted in the crucified and risen Jesus was the single most important event of my small life. Because of Jesus’ death on Friday, I am rescued and have a way out of all the spiritual greasiness and grubbiness of how sin clings to me, and because of Jesus’ resurrection on Sunday, I have hope of life beyond this life, of that better world to come of ‘darkness defeated and Eden restored’.

So: why the qualification? Why is it only ‘mostly’ that I believe those lyrics?

The sense of resistance comes from a concern that as modern Reformed Christians, we have made the cross a narrower and smaller act of God than it truly was. We view Christ’s greatest act not with wide eyed lenses of expansive vision but only through the monocle of personal salvation. Our understandable urgency that people grasp the gravity of their sinful condition, alongside its consequences and the way out the cross offers, means we have made the cross – in some ways – spiritually parochial and provincial.

Jesus did more than deal with sin upon the cross, and I earnestly believe our modern world – beset as it is with complexity and cruelty, division, and exploitation – needs to be told what else happened at the cross. Proclaiming those additional realities does not mean personal salvation should be shrunk in any way, because the vast greatness of Jesus’ sacrificial shoulders and his arms stretched wide upon the cross, were big enough to accomplish more than one thing at one time.

The adversaries of God – the unseen forces of the evil one, the ruler of the kingdom of the air – seek day and daily to cause dark havoc in the world, and yet, whatever damage they might do, they fight a losing battle. Because, upon the cross, Jesus disarmed the powers and made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in his greatest act. And so, as he sits at God’s right hand, angels, authorities, and powers are in submission to him.

The cross deals with both sin within us and evil around us. The cross deals – personally – with gossip and greed, lust and moralistic pettiness, idolatries big and small, and so much more besides. But as well as dealing with the ways sin has made me cracked and broken, it also deals with sinfulness scaled up to cosmic levels, all those dark things that are way bigger and more powerful than little old sinful me: addiction and extraction, inequality and misogyny, nationalism and pornography, racism and trafficking, and on and on I could go…

It sometimes seems to me that as modern Reformed believers, we have so elevated the idea of God’s sovereignty that we’ve no idea what we should then do with the reality of evil around us. Rather than putting all my eggs in the basket of sovereignty, I also derive enormous trust from the truth that Christ has won. The dogs of the devil can snarl and bite and do their worst, but their master has – in a sense – already been put down, and so, one day, will they be.

But there is another thing Jesus did upon the cross. In a world where culture itself is at war and we argue and fall out over all too many things – Brexit, the disputed reality of climate change, human sexuality, the direction of American politics, and the constitutional future of Northern Ireland – the cross of Christ was a place where dividing lines were erased.

As well as defeating sin and death, and putting the powers in their place, Jesus also – upon the cross – made Jews and Gentiles one people, destroying the barrier, the dividing wall between them. Indeed, ‘His purpose was to create in himself one new humanity out of the two, thus making peace, and in one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostlility.’

As Jesus was himself put to death, so tribalism, inclusion and exclusion, ethnic superiority and shibboleths were also dying with him. Rather like the powers, those forces of division still fight back, but in our world where people adopt censorious and entrenched stances over countless sources of conflict, hope can be drawn from the truth that conservative or progressive, black or white, Nationalist or Unionist, rich or refugee, every one of us is of equal worth to God: all worth the life of Jesus Christ laid down.

So, to all those who are confused and anxious this Easter about the direction of our world and the follies of those who lead: draw hope from putting a magnifying glass over the cross of Christ and see afresh the love of our Saviour and the vastness of all he’s accomplished.

Please note that the statements and views expressed in this article of those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of Contemporary Christianity.