MANY OF YOU reading this may remember the words to the classic hymn, The Old Rugged Cross:

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
the emblem of suffering and shame;
and I love that old cross where the dearest and best
for a world of lost sinners was slain.

The lyrics encourage us to remember Calvary, to picture a rough wooden cross on a hill outside Jerusalem, where a sinless Jesus suffered at the hands of the Romans. Christians rightly remember the cross, for it was there that God’s Son died on our behalf to rescue us from our lostness and sin. Any retelling of the gospel story necessarily centers on that cross. The cross, if you will, is crucial to the gospel; our English word “crucial” stems from the Latin word for “cross.”

The question, though, is how much we tell of the rest of the story. When I was first taught the gospel and how to share it with others, the story essentially went like this: You may not know it, but you have a problem. That problem is called “sin,” and the eventual outcome of that is damnation and hell. You can’t fix that situation yourself, but God can. In fact, the good news is that he already has, because Jesus paid the price for your sin on the cross. If you believe in him, if you call upon him as your Lord and Savior, then you can be saved and go to heaven instead. Wouldn’t you like that?

In the words of yet another classic hymn, Amazing Grace, the story is “I once was lost but now am found; was blind, but now I see.” In the cross, we celebrate what God has done for us through the sacrifice of Jesus. And as I’ve suggested before, all of this is fine as far as it goes.

But does it go far enough? Surely, for example, the Colossians already believed something like this. But Paul seemed to think that this way of framing the gospel wasn’t enough to keep them from heresy. For that reason, he speaks of Jesus in cosmic terms, as the “firstborn over all creation,” the one in whom, through whom, and for whom all things visible and invisible were created (Col 1:15). He speaks of him as the “firstborn from among the dead,” the first to be resurrected to eternal life, establishing the church and giving believers throughout the ages the confident hope that resurrection will be their destiny too (vs. 18).

And if Paul’s words are indeed to be taken as a hymn, then the song ends on a similar note, as Paul describes in cosmic terms what God accomplished through the cross of Jesus:

For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross. (Col 1:19-20, NIV)

This isn’t just about saving you, me, or anyone else from hell. As Paul has already said, all things in heaven and earth were created in the Son and have their unity in him. Sin didn’t just ruin things for humanity, but for all of creation. Indeed, in his letter to the Romans, Paul uses the striking image of creation groaning in pain like a woman in labor, waiting for the day of the resurrection of God’s children, for in that day creation itself will be liberated from the effects of sin (Rom 8:19-21).

Don’t ask me to explain what it means for creation to “groan”; Paul’s point, I think, is to say that God’s good creation continually suffers the consequences of human sin. In Genesis 1, God creates humanity in his image and gives them dominion over all other living creatures. The question is, how will humans exercise that rule and authority? More precisely: what would it look like to exercise it in a way that reflects God’s image and character?

I’ve actually heard a preacher say that our God-given authority means we can build freeways wherever the heck we want. Ignore the tree-huggers; forget about the endangered species that lie in the freeway’s path. We build it because we want to and can.

Personally, I’m not a tree-hugger, and I don’t typically lose sleep over endangered species. But I sat there listening with increasing horror as the preacher went on. I couldn’t see how the attitude he was communicating so forcefully could reflect the image of God, particularly the God who became human to die for our sake on a cross. What I could imagine, however, was how people could take his words to justify whatever they wanted to do to God’s good creation, for their own selfish purposes.

THERE IS NO question that we, as sinful human beings, needed to be reconciled to God. The word Paul uses for that reconciliation only appears three times in the New Testament; we’ll see it again a couple of verses down the line. The word implies the kind of reconciliation that is full and complete; there is nothing that remains to be done after the cross.

But Paul suggests that it isn’t just human beings who have been reconciled to God through the blood of Jesus. “All things,” he says, whether in heaven or on earth, have also been reconciled. But what did creation do to be estranged from the Creator? What sin did the mountains commit? What evil have the rivers done? Are some animal species endangered because God is punishing them for their wickedness?

Paul isn’t saying anything of the sort. But his understanding of who Jesus is and what his work has accomplished is all-encompassing, far more cosmic in scope than the way we typically tell the story. Through his sacrificial death on the cross, the firstborn over all creation has reconciled creation itself to God.

The implication is far-reaching. My sin isn’t just about me. As human beings, we are part of creation, and what we do matters to the rest of creation. Will we live in a way that reflects the gracious, loving, self-giving character of God? That’s the way of peace, as we’ll explore next.