Jesus Christ, both God and man, died to pay for our sins. To make us holy. To repair the relationship between sinful man and his holy God. This was the crucifixion.
We’re at the midpoint of our exploration of what your soul craves, and we’re turning from the problem to the solution. As we already established, we come into the world already broken by sin and unable to access our Creator – on our own. Last week we “celebrated Christmas” again as we saw the solution start to emerge.
This week we focus on what happened on what we now call Good Friday. What God, the man Jesus, did not just for the people of His day, but for everyone ever born, including us. It was a terrible day. But for we humans, it was a very, very good day.
You get to choose
Knowing He created us with the will to choose – He didn’t make programmed robots – Jesus stepped out of eternity and into recorded time to walk the earth, living the only perfect life ever lived, so that we would have the choice to live forever with our Creator.
And it is our choice. Theologians ponder this – the idea that “is it really our choice if God already knows what we’re going to choose?” – but a Superior Being’s foreknowledge does not change the fact that you and I clearly CAN choose. You have autonomy; for instance, you can stop reading this right now, or you can choose to continue. You literally make countless choices every day.
So we consider again the holy God who made us. Holy means set apart; wholly good. Sin and evil cannot coexist in His presence, because He is the definition of good. (This aspect of God’s nature, by the way, is often glossed over.)
God is also the definition of love. God is love. And that love was never more abundantly evident than in His plan to make a way for bad-choice-people to live with a perfect God – if they choose.
It was a simple plan, but not an easy path. God would Himself come to earth to pay a price, a ransom if you will, for all the sins of the world. Jesus’ earthly life ended with a horrific death on a cross to pay my debt, and your debt, for sin.
The moment you fully understand this, believe it was done for you personally, you’re on the path to having your slate wiped clean, and the only real High Court will pronounce you “not guilty” – of everything you’ve ever done wrong, and everything you will do wrong in the future (because you will still be tempted to sin in this life, but more on that later).
In other words, Jesus died so you could live. The Bible puts it this way:
He made Him (Jesus) who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. – 2 Corinthians 5:21
The evidence is real
Quite a few people have a vague idea that Jesus might have been real, someone who lived and died a long time ago. Many others, ignorant of the historical record, claim He never existed. Both groups would do well to consider the evidence of his life and death on earth, recorded in the Bible — but also in extrabiblical sources, as John Daniel notes:
The existence of Jesus is confirmed outside of Christian writings, which is exactly what we would expect if He were a real historical figure. Tacitus, writing in the early second century, records that “Christus” was executed under Pontius Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. Josephus, a first-century Jewish historian, refers to Jesus in his Antiquities, including a passage that mentions His crucifixion. Later Jewish traditions preserved in the Talmud also acknowledge Jesus as a figure who was executed. These sources are not attempting to promote Christianity, and in some cases are openly opposed to it, yet they still affirm the basic outline of Jesus’ life and death, which provides an independent historical anchor for the discussion.
Indeed it does. He is real today, as well.
But what if Christ had only lived his life, and then died a peaceful death, and that was the end of the story?
It would still be the most remarkable chapter of human history, when God visited us. But it would have been just that, a glorious visit.
What if the story ended with the Crucifixion, on Good Friday?
We probably wouldn’t understand the cosmic transaction that had taken place to save us. We certainly wouldn’t understand fully His power over death.
And that is just part of what we’ll talk about next time.
Next up (spoiler alert): Jesus did not stay dead. By his own infinite power He rose from the dead, as was witnessed in person by hundreds of people…