the cross

The cross is the central Christian object through which the book identifies Jesus Christ’s death as the basis of salvation and eternal life. It appears not as a decorative religious emblem but as the decisive point where sin, forgiveness, resurrection, and personal conversion meet. The book’s closing appeal asks readers to believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross and rose from the dead so that believers may live forever with God, making the cross the foundation of the promised new life.

Appearance and Theological Meaning

The book gives the cross its meaning through the relationship between Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection. In the final prayer, the reader is invited to confess faith in Jesus Christ’s death on the cross, his rising from the dead, and the promise of eternal life with God. The cross therefore signifies both the cost of redemption and the possibility of transformed existence: forgiveness is requested, repentance is expressed, and a life pleasing to God is undertaken in response to what Jesus Christ has done.

The cross also appears in the book’s account of spiritual abandonment. While discussing the persistence of Blind Bartimaeus, the author compares the man’s cry of abandonment with Jesus Christ’s cry on the cross, rendered through the words, "My God, My God why hast thou forsaken me?" This association places the cross at the meeting point of darkness and appeal. The cross represents an experience in which apparent silence or forsakenness does not cancel the relationship with God; instead, the cry itself remains directed toward God.

The Cross and Persistent Prayer

The book’s larger principle is that people should not leave God alone but should continue seeking, asking, and calling until the answer comes. The cross gives this persistence its Christian center. The final prayer connects devotion to Jesus Christ with an ongoing pursuit: the believer asks Jesus Christ to enter the heart and life, forgive sins, receive repentance, and draw the person into deeper fellowship with God. Persistence is thus not presented merely as a technique for obtaining desired circumstances; it culminates in continued attachment to the one whose death and resurrection make salvation possible.

This pattern is echoed in the book’s many crisis narratives. A bleeding young man struck while attempting to cross an interstate is prayed over by the author, who calls on God, prophesies life, and urges the injured man to call on Jesus. An elderly hospital patient is described as lying in a coma and nearing death without having asked Jesus to be Lord and Savior, so the author instructs the family to awaken her in Jesus’s name and share the gospel before the stated deadline. In both accounts, urgent prayer moves toward a decision about spiritual life, not only physical survival. The cross supplies the implied ground for that invitation to salvation.

The Cross in Testimony and Crisis

The book repeatedly places Christian claims beside scenes of bodily danger: the interstate victim is barely alive and breathing, a newborn girl has an incurable disease affecting her liver and blood with an eleven percent chance of survival, and a family member suffers septic shock after an undetected ruptured bowel, medical coma, extreme fever, and multiple-organ failure. These stories are framed as testimonies in which prayer confronts conditions that appear beyond ordinary human control. The cross is not the object physically handled in these scenes, but it is the theological horizon toward which the testimony points: God’s power is invoked, Jesus Christ is named, and life is interpreted in relation to salvation and divine intervention.

The cross also stands behind the book’s discussion of conversion and spiritual change. Gilgal is described as a place of new beginnings, total conversion, commitment to God’s ways, and the removal of fleshly habits in preparation for something new. The closing prayer adopts the same movement in personal form: the sinner asks for forgiveness, repents of wrongdoing, declares allegiance to Jesus Christ, and asks the Holy Spirit to fill and draw the believer closer to God. The cross consequently marks not only an event in the past but the beginning of a disciplined, continuing identity.

The Cross and the Book’s Final Appeal

The cross gathers together the book’s recurring contrasts between death and life, apparent abandonment and continued fellowship, crisis and testimony, and passive distance from God and persistent pursuit. Moses refuses to leave God alone after the golden-calf apostasy, while Abraham ultimately stops interceding for Sodom and Gomorrah; the book uses these biblical episodes to argue that prayer can affect the course of judgment. Against that background, the cross represents the book’s most concentrated assurance that God’s redemptive purpose has already been disclosed through Jesus Christ.

At the conclusion, the reader is personally invited to begin a new life by knowing Jesus Christ and pursuing God daily. The prayer treats the cross and resurrection as the grounds for forgiveness and eternal life, then turns belief into commitment: the new believer chooses to remain near Jesus Christ until blessing is received. The cross therefore functions as the book’s final threshold. It leads from testimony to response, from recognition of need to repentance, and from fear of death to the promised life with God.