Splitting the Horizontal and Vertical

The God of the Bible is intrinsically complete in the eternal community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Thus, creation is a work not of God’s loneliness or lack, but of His love. Love binds, love makes perfect, love completes. Love bridges the chasm of isolation bringing fellowship where there is separation, making true community a reality. And the wider the chasm, the greater measure of love needed to bring distant parties together.

Between God and man, the chasm is unfathomable; in fact, it’s unbridgeable. Without divine intervention, communion with God is impossible. Yet between that divide stands the Cross. Jesus Christ, through His life, death, and resurrection, reaches over the infinite expanse in an unequaled act of love.

Along the Vertical

In everything, the Cross is central. As the vertical penetration of God into spacetime, the Cross allows God to present Himself to man and man to present himself to God.

At the head of the Cross, God’s love flows earthward from a thorn-gashed brow. At the foot of the Cross, man’s gaze moves heavenward to a pair of nail-pierced feet. In divine descent, the Son atones, the Father forgives, and the Spirit indwells. In response, man reaches up to receive and, then, marvels at the wonder of the divine gift. In this divine-human interchange, the Cross brings together the earthly and the heavenly, uniting what was separate and imparting life to what was life-less.

Across the Horizontal

Across the horizontal, the Cross links all that has gone before with all that is yet to come. Standing at the interface of eternity past and eternity future, the Cross is the junction of both historical time and historic time. Although these two expressions of time appear synonymous, they reflect the differing aspects used in the New Testament: chronos and kairos.

Time as a quantity is chronos: a linear measurement of historical change. It’s from chronos we get the term chronological time: the continuous thread of time sewing the past, present and future into a seamless fabric.

Kairos time is qualitative of a moment or event metaphysically pregnant with meaning and importance. It is the time spoken of when Paul writes the Galatian church, “But when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman, born under law,  to redeem those under law, that we might receive the full rights of sons.” Kairos brings together the types, “shadows,” and prophesies of the scriptures with their fulfillments in the spacetime continuum in which, the Cross is central.

In chronos, the Cross splits historical time into B.C. and A.D. In kairos, the Cross stands between the epochal phenomena of the Creation and the New Creation, the Fall and Redemption, Israel and the Church, the Old Covenant and the New, law and grace, and the pre-incarnate Word and the Word made flesh. In kairos, the eternal transcends and fulfills the temporal.