Quotes about Victory

has happened before—literally, with the ending of the slave trade and the subsequent freeing of the slaves—and it needs to happen again. And happen it will, because the victory of the cross is real, and the power of the Spirit to implement that victory is real as well.

Sports provide us with dangerous metaphors. A sporting contest is a contest: a game of winners and losers.

But the early Christians—who themselves knew only too well that the world had not turned into Utopia overnight and that they still faced suffering, prison, and death—firmly believed that what had happened on the cross was the Messianic victory. That is why they told the story the way they did.

We have reduced the kingdom of God to private piety, the victory of the cross to comfort for the conscience, and Easter itself to a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale.

As we have seen throughout this book, the revolution he accomplished was the victory of a strange new power, the power of covenant love, a covenant love winning its victory not over suffering, but through suffering.

We expect to suffer, but we know already that we are victorious.

But the sacraments are the very opposite of this. They are the celebration that Jesus has paid the price and that he has all power on earth and in heaven. They are the powerful announcement of his victory. They can and should be used, as part of a wise Christian spirituality, to announce to the threatening powers that on the cross Jesus has already won the victory.

All this talk of "victory" means what it means because, as we have seen, on the cross Jesus died for our sins; the blood of the new covenant was shed for the forgiveness of sins. Sins, to say it once more, were the chains by which the dark powers had enslaved the humans who had worshipped them. Once sins were forgiven on the cross, the chains were snapped; victory was won. This opens up several vistas on the church's mission.

Both these elements, sin and death, need to be dealt with on the cross.

But if there had been an earlier "victory," when did it take place? Matthew, Mark, and Luke all supply the answer: at the beginning of Jesus's public career, during his forty-day fast in the desert, when the satan tried to distract him, to persuade him to grasp the right goal by the wrong means, and so to bring him over to his side (Matt. 4:1—11; Mark 1:12—13; Luke 4:1—13).

And the reason that death can be defeated—and was defeated in principle when Jesus rose again—is that on the cross Jesus dealt with sins.

reality. It is the resurrection that declares that the cross was a victory, not a defeat. It therefore announces that God has indeed become king on earth as in heaven.