I have addressed over the past few posts, mankind’s desperate and dire condition as sinners before a Holy God, subject to God’s justice, objects of His righteous judgement and wrath for our rejection of His purpose for and rule over our lives. I have written of what the Bible has to say of the destructiveness of sin to both ourselves (2 Thessalonians 1:9) and God’s good creation (Romans 8:20-22) as well as sin’s offensiveness to the Holy and Righteous God (Romans 1:18-21) who created us for His glory (Isaiah 43:7).
However, in my most recent post I wrote of the richness of God’s mercy and love, of His delight in justly forgiving our sins and restoring us to the glorious relationship with Him for which we were created (Micah 7:18). However, this glorious salvation from His judgement would not be accomplished by divine fiat, by Him just declaring us forgiven when we express sincere sorrow and regret for our sin, as some would teach. The Bible emphatically reveals God as a God of justice (Isaiah 61:8), and thus He would not pardon sin without satisfaction being made to that justice or He would have been seen as unrighteous and the devil a truth teller when he convinced Adam and Eve, and everyone since that there are no ultimate consequences for our sin (Genesis 3:4).
Even though the Bible says that God’s love and mercy are abounding and free, God’s justice demands payment for our sin, namely death and ultimately Hell. There is no compromise with God on this. The soul that sins will die, the wages of sin is death. Every single sin we commit against God will be punished either by our death which culminates in Hell, or the death of a substitute, one approved by God who would atone for our sins, taking the penalty of death and the wrath of God upon Himself in our place. This was God’s gracious plan from the foundation of the world, a plan which culminates in the coming of the Lamb of God, Jesus Christ (Revelation 13:8), who would take upon Himself, on the cross at Calvary, the penalty for all of the sins of all who would trust in Him as Savior and submit to Him as Lord while in this world (Luke 2:11).
This motif of substitutionary atonement for the sin of men was prevalent throughout the Old Testament, being prevalent from Genesis 4:2-5 on. The slaughter of innocent animals, animals with no physical imperfections for man’s sin was ordained by God under the ceremonial law of Moses (See Numbers, Chapters 28 and 29). This included the Passover lamb, whose blood was shed to save Israel from the curse of the death of the firstborn that God was bringing on the land of Egypt (Exodus 12). This was subsequently done annually as a memorial to God’s great deliverance. Under the Old Covenant, there were daily Temple offerings of a spotless lamb in the morning and evening, that were doubled on the Sabbath. There were sin and trespass offerings for individual sins and festive offerings of lambs, bulls and goats. The inner court of the Temple was literally a slaughterhouse. And then there was the annual Day of Atonement, Yom Kipper, which was/is the holiest day of the year in Judaism. On the Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16), prior to the destruction of the Temple in Israel in 70 AD, the high priest was to kill one goat to atone for His own sins, another for the sins of the nation, and yet another was to be driven out alive into the wilderness, symbolizing the removal of the sins of the nation with God forsaking the goat rather than the nation for their sin (from this we get the term “scapegoat”). But as we are told in Hebrews 10:4 that the blood of bulls and goats could not take away sin, could not expiate (atone for) man’s guilt and propitiate (appease and remove) God’s wrath – it only pointed to the One who could and would.
If our penalty for sin is to be paid by a substitute it must be paid by a man since man brought sin into the world (Romans 5:12). The Law of Moses demands individual personal obedience and individual bearing of the curse for disobedience (Ezekiel 18:20).
Because the penalty or wage of sin is death (Romans 6:23), the substitute would have to die to satisfy the penal obligation of sin, and he would have to suffer the torments of Hell to satisfy the wrath of God for our slander and offense against his Holy person. And by the way, this substitute would have to be sinless, otherwise his death and suffering would be for his own sins (Hebrews 4:15).
Finally, this substitute would have to have the power of life in himself to survive the grave, and only God who is the author of life has this power (John 5:26). And even if He does survive the grave on man’s behalf – how does He include us in His ascension into Heaven since the qualification for that position is perfect righteousness (Psalm 24:3-5) which only the substitute would possess.
The answer to these apparent dilemmas is found in God the Son, Jesus Christ, who in the ultimate and defining expression of God’s love, comes into this sin-cursed world as a man (John 1:14), the only man who can fulfill the above requirements on man’s behalf, as He hides his glory in the weakness of human flesh and joins His divine nature to a human nature. He comes as the promised seed of the woman (Genesis 3:15), conceived miraculously in the womb of a young virgin by the Holy Spirit, born into the humblest of worldly circumstances and destined to fulfill all of the prophetic characteristics of the suffering servant, the one who would suffer in our place presented in Isaiah 53.
Upon initiating his public ministry, He is introduced by John the Baptist as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world (John 1:30-31), John testifying that the entire purpose of Jesus’ coming was to do for guilty men and women like you and I, what we could never do for ourselves; namely, to rescue from Hell and to qualify for Heaven all who would repent of their sin and entrust their lives to Him. Jesus would do so by, on our behalf, living the perfectly righteous life God required for man to enter His into presence, which we as sinners could never do; and then, in our place, taking upon Himself on the cross the divine judgement we deserved for our sin, sin that, unatoned for, condemns us to Hell.
Thus, I would conclude by encouraging you to worship our all-sufficient Substitute by rejoicing in the great old hymn in which Jesus Christ is extolled as the One who “in our place condemned He stood”, titled Hallelujah, What a Savior.
Grace and Peace ×
BUT GOD !