Sentimental Jesus

The death of the Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross on Calvary was not an accident; it was God’s work. It was God who ‘set him forth’ there. How often is the whole glory of the Cross missed when men sentimentalize it away and say, ‘Ah, He was too good for the world, He was too pure. His teaching was too wonderful; and cruel men crucified Him’! The result is that we begin to feel sorry for Him, forgetting that He Himself turned on those ‘daughters of Jerusalem’ that were beginning to feel sorry for Him, and said, ‘Weep not for me but weep for yourselves’. If our view of the Cross is one that makes us feel sorry for the Lord Jesus Christ it just means that we have never seen it truly. It is God who ‘set him forth’. It was not an accident, but something deliberate. Indeed the Apostle Peter, preaching on the Day of Pentecost, said that it all happened ‘by the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God’ [Acts 2:23]. ‘God hat set him forth’.

D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Romans, An Exposition of Chapters 3.20 – 4.25, Atonement and Justification, pg. 97