Our expectations can often be a hindrance to recognizing an opportunity. Maybe you've heard the story of the man stranded on his roof during a flood. He refused the help of rescuers in a boat and helicopter because he said he was waiting for God to save him. After he drowned, he asked God why He didn't save him, and the story ends as God explains, "I tried to help – I sent a boat and helicopter."

The world never expected or looked for a king or savior like Jesus. He conquered His greatest enemy by dying. While His resurrection is the more glamorous part of His victory because it demonstrates His might and power, His death demonstrates other qualities rarely regarded in leaders – humility, submission, and love. Among Jews and Gentiles of the past and present, the kingship of Jesus was and is overlooked due to man-made expectations, so we must preach Christ crucified to our uninformed and rebellious generation (1 Cor. 1:23).

THE CRUCIFIED SAVIOR: PROPHECY
Jesus often referred to Old Testament prophecies concerning His coming death. Prophecies were given by statements and types. By this, God was preparing men of the past for the crucified Savior to come and providing undeniable evidence for those who would live long after Jesus left the earth.

Isaiah 53 is among the most well-known prophecies of Jesus' death. Words such as marred (52:14), stricken, smitten, afflicted, wounded, bruised, chastisement, stripes, grief, and offering broadly tell the story of the Savior around seven hundred years before He came. No Jew, of his own volition, would have described My Servant as a Man of sorrows (52:13; 53:3). They thought that their King would give wounds, stripes, and bruises – not receive them! And if any Jew could imagine the Messiah bearing griefs or carrying sorrows, he would not have thought that to mean that He would bear the sins of others (53:4, 5, 12). His humility, submission, and love were unexpected. In God's providence, this chapter and book was preserved by the Jews even though it did not fit their expectations. (Psalm 22 is an equally compelling prophecy.)

Types and anti-types provide prophecies in the form of historical events. God chose to give water a role in saving Noah as a type of God giving water a role in our salvation today (1 Pet. 3:20-21). Types show divine forethought carried out in the events of human history – an amazing demonstration of the sovereignty of God working with, and despite, the free will of man. For centuries, thousands of animal sacrifices were the forerunners of the Lamb of God (John 1:29). The Passover, in which the blood of the lamb rescued Israel from death, was a tutor to bring the thoughtful reader to Christ. The demand that the Passover lamb's bones not be broken was a subtle type that explodes with meaning in John 19:36 to one who delights and meditates in the law of the Lord (Exod. 12:46; Ps. 1:2). The crucified Savior is the Savior of longstanding prophecy.

THE CRUCIFIED SAVIOR: EYEWITNESS TESTIMONY PRESERVED
While our generation is often hypnotized by brief audio and video clips and bored by connected thought and reading, it is the written word by which we learn of the crucified Savior. Here the eyewitnesses join the prophets and together become a powerful team, convincing the world of Jesus' crucifixion.

Without their testimony being recorded and preserved, who else would tell us that He humbly refused to resist His arrest by the sword or legion of angels (Matt. 26:51-53)? How else would we know that He submitted in silence as a sheep before its shearers (Isa. 53:7; 1 Pet. 2:23)? Who else could testify that, from the cross (where even taking a breath would have been a painful struggle), the Savior spoke words of truth, love, and comfort (Luke 23:34, 43, 46; John 19:26)? Unless there were multiple witnesses who heard, saw, and handled the suffering Savior – who could believe in the crucified Christ (1 Pet. 5:1; 1 John 1:1)? But God deserves praise today because with the words of prophets and eyewitnesses recorded among the word of the LORD which endures forever, who is there with integrity that can deny the crucified Savior (1 Pet. 1:25)?

THE CRUCIFIED SAVIOR: UNPOPULAR IN THE PAST & PRESENT
. . . but we preach Christ crucified, to the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishness (1 Cor. 1:23).

Without question, many of the Jews missed the opportunity to be saved by the Savior when they refused His help. And why did they refuse His help? Because He did not fit their expectations. Paul said they wanted a sign (1 Cor. 1:22) – but not just any sign. They wanted to choose the timing and type of sign. They wanted a sign that involved the overthrow of Rome and the return of Israel's prominence (John 6:15). Thus Jesus' miracles and teachings never met their expectations. Modern Jews are likewise determined to define the terms of their Messiah, and many have decided that the Christ of the Old Testament is not even a literal person. Their speculations are endless as they miss the Savior who shared their bloodline.

While most Americans are not overlooking Christ due to a desire for a civil leader or new government, many make the same mistake as the Jews of defining the Savior in their own way. Some define Jesus in terms of race, talking about a "White Jesus," "Black Jesus," or "Hispanic Jesus," using Him to promote their own cause. Some define Jesus as an always-friendly leader who rarely criticized, debated, or condemned false ideas, teachings, and teachers. The idea that Jesus was crucified for spiritual redemption and not mainly for civil or social redemption misses the mark many have set. Most people who claim to follow Jesus today would wash their hands of the spiritual conflict and controversy in which Jesus was engaged that led to His crucifixion. Had these people lived in Jesus' time, they might not have fled from the cross as Christ was crucified, but they would have avoided the spiritual controversies that preceded and produced it, dismissing such conflict as "unnecessary theological disputes." (read Matthew 21-23 of conflicts over the source of authority, the resurrection, the meaning of "Son," religious titles, etc.) They would have been equally uncomfortable as the apostles were with Jesus' plainness in Matthew 15. As it did in many of the Jews, their love for Jesus would have failed, either before or after the cross, for His hard sayings which did not fit their expectations of how their King would speak in matters of religion (John 6:66; 4:22 unacceptable worship; Luke 9:23 deny self; 16:18 limits on marriage and divorce).

In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul also tells us that the Gentiles viewed the message of the crucified Savior as foolishness. One aspect of what they considered foolish is recorded in Acts 17:32, where many mocked when they heard Paul testify of Jesus' resurrection. In their highly-educated minds, such supernatural events were impossible. To others, the strict lifestyle required of Christians was laughable (1 Pet. 4:3-4).

These ways of the Gentiles live on today. The uninformed, modern skeptic both denies and despises the supernatural teachings of the Bible. Thomas Jefferson famously denied Jesus' miracles, including His resurrection, clipping the record of them from his personal copy of the Bible, preferring only the moral teachings of Jesus. Spiteful claims, like that of physicist Stephen Hawking, that at death the human brain is merely like a computer that goes offline when unplugged, have no answer to the question, "Who built the supercomputer called the human brain?" These people with brilliant minds, daily explore and perform experiments in the heavens and earth based on the scientific belief that something cannot come from nothing and that what is seen proves something unseen exists or has happened. Lacking Jesus' humility, they profess to be wise while denying that this house, called earth, has a builder though they would otherwise admit that every house has a builder (Rom. 1:22; Heb. 3:4). Also, the Gentile mind that rejects submission, self-control, and self-denial lives today among those who contend, "I don't get very drunk on a beer or two," "You are not going to your Senior Prom because dancing is lewd?," or "No one can tell me how to dress. Its my body." Many things have changed since the first century – many things have not.

CONCLUSION
The wisdom of man will always look down upon the message that accompanies the record of the crucified Savior for man's wisdom lacks the qualities that brought our Savior to the earth and cross: humility, submission, and love. The broad way has always been filled with unreasonable skeptics and rebellious servants of self. They will not be moved. But also remember that some in the broad way are deceived or uninformed and are searching for the narrow way. Will your words and life point them to the narrow way of the crucified Savior? There is no other way.

David Halbrook currently works among the church of Christ in Quail Valley (Batesville, AR; qvcoc.com) and can be reached at davidhalbrook@hotmail.com.