The Case for the Scourging, the Beating, and the Cross
Most men grew up with a Sunday school version of the cross. A clean wooden symbol on a wall. A verse on a bulletin. They’ve heard the sentence a thousand times. It often has stopped meaning much of anything.
Most men grew up with a Sunday school version of the cross. A clean wooden symbol on a wall. A verse on a bulletin. They’ve heard the sentence a thousand times. It often has stopped meaning much of anything.
That is not their fault. It is what happens when the most violent, most physical, most costly act in human history gets reduced to a metaphor. We believe men cannot receive a revelation they have never actually been truly confronted with. And you cannot be confronted by a sentence you’ve heard since you were five years old. You can only be confronted by the truth.
The Scripture Doesn’t Flinch — So Why Do We?
Isaiah saw it seven hundred years before it happened and didn’t soften it: a man so disfigured by suffering that people turned their faces away from him (Isaiah 53:2–3). Beaten. Pierced. Crushed. The prophet doesn’t use church language. He uses the language of a brutal battlefield and a butcher shop, because that’s what it was.
Th Gospel writers didn’t edit this out to protect the reader’s comfort, we don’t have the authority to edit it out to protect ours. Is it uncomfortable to think about what happened to our Lord? Yes, however, too few people truly comprehend what happened to Jesus Christ, for each of us individually, there is an awakening in telling and experiencing the incredible love God has for us, in that He would suffer to pay the debt for us.
Men Don’t Wake Up to Concepts. They Wake Up to Cost.
Every man who walks into The Encounter (Man to Man Men’s Conference) has paid for something. A failed or failing marriage. A prison. sentence. Unforgiveness. A bottle, drugs. A betrayal he caused or one that was done to him. Abuse he suffered, or caused. The death of love ones. Disappointment, and a myriad of other things. Men know what it costs to actually pay for something — in flesh, in years, in blood, in tears, in pain, in memories. He is suspicious, rightly, of anything that sounds cheap.
“Jesus loves you” can be cheap to a man who has heard it from people who didn’t mean it.“Jesus was scourged, mocked, spit on, crowned with thorns driven into His skull, humiliated beyond understanding and nailed through wrists and feet — why? For you, specifically, knowing exactly what you would do with your life” is not cheap. That is a debt a man can recognize, because he understands debt. That is a love a man can respect, because he understands what real love costs in this world.
We are not trying to glorify the price paid by Jesus Christ, nor are we trying to traumatize men. We are trying to show them a love violent enough to match the violence many of them have lived through — and the violence they’ve caused.
Most importantly men, you are not alone, you are not dealing with something unique, many of us are in the exact same boat so to speak. "
There is help, to become all you can be in Christ. Jesus offers peace.
Reconnect with God, reset, receive grace and move forward with renewed strength and purpose.
"We drown alone or we swim together."
See you at 'The Encounter'."
MyEncounterMyFreedom.com
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all record the scourging and the beating without ceremony — a few short, brutal sentences, because everyone in that century knew exactly what those sentences meant. Rome’s flagrum wasn’t a symbol. It was leather and bone and metal brutal torture device designed to tear open a man’s back through the skin, through the muscle and into the bone. Roman soldiers didn’t hold back, because mercy wasn’t the point — humiliation and agony were the point. By the time Jesus (God in human form) reached Golgotha, He had already been unfathomably tortured to the brink of death. The cross was the finishing blow on a body that had already been completely destroyed. Then there was Jesus' purpose and why He did this willingly for you!
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The Wound No One Sees Needs
Most of the men in our encounters are carrying wounds nobody else can see — shame, abandonment, addiction, rage, the things they’ve buried so deep even they’ve stopped naming them. A sanitized cross cannot reach an un-sanitized wound. You cannot offer a man a clean, bloodless Jesus and expect him to bring you his dirtiest, bloodiest pain and the confidence to share his hurts unless he knows he is with other men sharing similarly.
He will sense the mismatch immediately and he will keep his mouth shut, like he always has. We men suffer in the silence and when alone.
But when a man sees and feels the full weight of what was actually done to the body of Christ — the scourging, the beating, the slow suffocation of crucifixion — something shifts. He realizes this Jesus is not a stranger to brutality. He is not asking the man to clean himself up before approaching. He has already walked through worse than what the man is carrying, and Jesus Christ walked through it on purpose, for each man. That is the moment a Sunday school, Jesus becomes a Savior a man will actually trust with his real story.
This Is Why "The Encounter" Exists
We didn’t build these conferences to repeat what a man can hear in thirty polished
minutes in a bible study. We built it because the polished version does not work until the mean feels the depth of Jesus' love.
Men are going through life un-transformed, un-confronted, un-awakened — not because the gospel has lost its power, but because the version they’re hearing has been edited for comfort.
We preach the scourging with hands-on experiences because Christ endured the scourging. We preach the beating because Christ endured the beating. We tell the whole, unedited, physical truth of the cross because that is the only version with enough weight to break through years of calloused hearing. A man does not need a nicer Jesus. He needs the real one — beaten, bloodied, and risen — standing in front of him with nothing hidden.
That is the revelation. That is the wake-up. That is why we don’t look away.
Man to Man Men’s Conference
"The Encounter"
MyEncounterMyFreedom.com
