Wear the Hell out of that Crucifix… Literally! -

By Theo Efantis

This is an independently submitted op-ed and does not necessarily reflect the views of The Tower.

To all my Catholic friends reading this: has a Protestant ever told you that it is idolatrous to wear the crucifix rather than a generic cross? Rest assured, dear friends, today we will prove them wrong! I came across an interesting argument this week online between a Southern Baptist minister and a Greek Orthodox Christian, wherein the minister was referring to the young Orthodox man as an idol worshipper, pointing to the crucifix around his neck as proof. The argument from the evangelical side, and the wider Protestant sphere, is that the moment Christ was crucified was Satan’s proudest moment, and therefore we of the ancient churches wearing our crucifixes is a way of actually celebrating Satan rather than Christ… this is such a twisted view of Scripture!

My argument, as well as that of all the ancient churches, is that Christ’s most triumphant moment over Satan was the entire Passion, rather than just the Resurrection. Before I prove this using Scripture, I must also add that if the argument is that Satan’s proudest moment was killing Jesus, then an empty cross is in no way less Satanic than a cross with Christ’s body on it, but I digress. Why then is the death of Christ a triumph over Satan rather than a triumph of Satan? Well, let us look to the Scriptures.

First, we know that Satan is the adversary of God and of Man since the beginning of our time here on Earth, as evidenced by the book of Genesis. We also see in Genesis God punishing the serpent (who is Satan) and saying that he will, “Put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; they will strike at your head, whilst you strike at their heel” (Genesis 3:15, NAB). The woman being referenced is implicitly not Eve, because there is no enmity between Eve and the serpent; in fact, there is unity enough that both are rebels against God. Because of this, we know that none of Eve’s offspring are the offspring mentioned because they are born possessing the original sin of their parents; ergo, it is the common consensus of the ancient churches, primarily the Catholic Church, that the woman and offspring to which God is referring are Mary and Jesus, who are both of Godly perfection. Jesus, by his very nature, and Mary by Jesus’ grace.

Fast forward to the Psalms and we see a pretty clear image of someone all too familiar to us. Psalm 22, composed nearly one thousand years before Jesus, sings the tale of an innocent man who is “the glory of Israel.” This man is mocked and scorned wherever he goes. Despite being the glory of Israel, he is born of a humble woman and raised in humble settings, but despite his holiness, dogs surround him, and they “pierce my hands and my feet, I can count all my bones. They stare at me and gloat” (Psalm 22:18 NAB). Clearly, this man is Jesus.

Fast forward again to the prophet Isaiah. This is again many centuries before Jesus’ coming to Earth. In Isaiah 53, we get a clear image of the Messiah, the anointed one of God. In his prophecy, Isaiah is perplexed by the means of humility by which the Lord is raised on Earth, and despite this, “Yet our pain he bore, our sufferings he endured. We thought of him as stricken, struck down by God and afflicted, but he was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity. He bore the punishment that makes us whole, and by his wounds, we were healed… My servant, the just one, shall justify the many” (Isaiah 53: 4-11 NAB).

By looking at these three Scriptures, we can easily deduce that the means by which the Lord would heal the Earth from her transgressions against God would be to suffer death on a cross. Satan, knowing Scripture better than any man, as evidenced by his attempted temptation of Christ in the desert, would have had clear knowledge of the fact that this was the intention of the Lord. You see, it was always prophesied that the Messiah would die on the cross and literally defeat death by rising from the dead. Christ dying on the cross is a declaration of his fulfillment of those prophecies found in the Old Testament, and because they are a fulfillment of those prophecies, we can look to the cross and know that the moment Jesus’ spirit left his body, Satan had lost the war entirely. Christ himself said in Gethsemane that he could just as easily call down a legion of angels to save him from death, but in doing that, he would have been going against those earlier promises of Scripture, and Satan would have been proven right in that God could not overcome death.

All this to say, when a person gives you grief for wearing the crucifix, when they tell you you are an idolater or a pagan or a non-Christian, you take heart! Take pride in the fact that you actively proclaim and celebrate the exact moment when Christ kept his promise to you: the moment when life became everlasting, and sin and death were conquered. Wear the hell out of that crucifix, because by the crucified Christ, he wears hell out of the earth!