The Economy of the Cross

There is something wrong with every economy ever devised by human hands — and it has nothing to do with interest rates.

To understand what’s broken, and more importantly what has been fixed, we need to go back to the very beginning. Not to Wall Street, not to Adam Smith, not even to the first barter system scratched out in ancient Mesopotamia. We need to go back to a garden.

The Garden of Eden was, in many ways, a system for the production and distribution of goods and services. There was food, beauty, companionship, meaningful work, and the presence of God himself walking in the cool of the day. By any measure, it had everything you could want in a thriving economy. Except for one thing: it wasn’t actually an economy at all.

Here’s why. Economics, properly understood, is the study of the use of scarce resources which have alternative uses. That’s the formal definition, and it matters. Every economic decision you make — whether to buy coffee or save the money, whether to spend Saturday working or resting, whether to give generously or hold tightly — is a response to scarcity. We economize because we don’t have enough of something. In Eden, there was no scarcity. Everything was available in unlimited abundance. When there is no shortage, there is no reason to calculate, to ration, to withhold, or to hoard. The garden wasn’t an economy. It was a gift.

Then came the fall, and with it, the curse. Thorns and thistles. Sweat and toil. The brutal arithmetic of a world where there is never quite enough. Every economy since — from the earliest agrarian societies to the most sophisticated global markets today — is a monument to that original rupture. We are people shaped by scarcity, and it shows in how we love, how we give, and how reluctantly we let go of what we have.

Into this world of endless shortage, the Bible speaks a startling word. Proverbs tells us that the generous man will be prosperous, and he who waters will himself be watered. Solomon, who understood wealth better than perhaps anyone who ever lived, wrote plainly: do not withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in your power to do it. These are not merely moral suggestions. They are descriptions of a different kind of economy — one operating by different rules, governed by a different logic, rooted in a different reality.

That reality has a name, and it has a location.

The cross of Christ is the ultimate location of all goods and services in the universe. That is not a metaphor. It is a theological claim with the weight of eternity behind it. On the tree of Good Friday — that terrible and beautiful tree that echoes back to the very tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Eden — God placed every treasure, every gift, every blessing that his people would ever need. Forgiveness. Righteousness. Reconciliation. Peace. Life itself. Everything was nailed there in the body of his Son.

And then came Easter.

The Resurrection and Ascension of the crucified body of Jesus is the distribution of that fruit into all the universe. What was purchased on Friday was unleashed on Sunday. The righteousness of God found in Christ is now available — and here is the staggering word — in unlimited abundance. There is no scarcity. There is no shortage. There is no reason to ration the gospel, no need to dole it out carefully, no theological accountant keeping a ledger of who deserves how much grace. The economy of the cross has broken the mathematics of scarcity forever.

This means something profoundly practical for how you live.

If you have been hoarding grace — holding back forgiveness from someone who hurt you, reluctant to speak a word of mercy because it feels like letting someone off the hook — you are operating by the old economy. The economy of the fall. The economy of scarcity. You are treating the gospel like a finite resource that might run out if you give too much of it away.

It won’t. It can’t.

In God’s economy, the cross has always been both the beginning and the end of his narrative. He is the Alpha and the Omega, the first word and the last, the one in whom all things hold together. And to be more specific than that — to nail it down as precisely as the nails of Good Friday — it is the crucified God, in his resurrected and gloriously wounded condition, who is the key to understanding your life, your place in the universe, the reason reality is arranged the way it is, and the heart of a God who loves you without reservation.

You are not living in a world of scarcity. You are living in the aftermath of Easter. Give, and live, accordingly. God bless. 

Pastor Frank