OPPOSITION TO CHRIST

Both classes are trying to put up a cross that would take the place of the cross of Christ. People ask the Lord to accept their offering for sin. Every cross men bear in that way is hard. If that were all that is in the cross, those crosses ought to have served the purpose; for they were bitter and cruel enough. Then there must be something else in the cross besides hardness. Popularly the idea is that anything that is a discomfort, that a person doesn’t like to do, is a cross, and some men perform their duties as the Catholic wears his hair shirts, to make themselves uncomfortable all the time.CRCH 4.1

It makes no difference how much people talk about the Lord; how much they say they believe in Christ; how much they call themselves Christians; the setting up of a cross aside from the cross of Christ, is opposition to Christ. Although there is much about Christ and much about crosses, in Roman Catholicism, we know that in the system itself there is none of Christ. Of course many individual Catholics have Christ, and many more would gladly know of Him; but, as a system, with its penances put upon the people, we know that Catholicism tends to eclipse and shut out the cross of Christ; so that each individual is virtually to have his own cross, and atone for his own sins. In many cases the individual is deluded with the idea that what he is enduring is the cross of Christ, and that is worse yet.CRCH 4.2

Now thousands of professed Protestants are doing what amounts to the same thing, and yet all the time they are preaching and talking against the papacy. These crosses, men have thought, were going to bring them nearer the Lord. The idea has been, “No cross no crown;” the more we suffer, the more we shall enjoy by and by. This is the time of suffering; by and by we shall have the time of enjoyment. So we will endure it. Certainly, we thought, these crosses will bring us nearer to God.CRCH 5.1

But as a matter of fact, try as hard as we could, even at things that were right in themselves, we couldn’t get nearer to the Lord than before. We were always wanting to get nearer, and yet finding ourselves afar off. Then we did not have Christ in the cross, although we persuaded ourselves that we were believing in Christ and bearing His cross. For if we had had Christ in the crosses that we bore, we should have been brought near to God. The trouble was that we had a cross in the place of the cross of Christ,-a substitute for it.CRCH 5.2