Jesus’ Death Shows God’s Love for Us

Good Friday is coming, but Jesus’ death offers gifts Every Day.

Jesus’ suffering and death accomplishes many things. Some people want to assert that the cross means one thing only. There’s nothing in the Bible that says this. Indeed, Paul himself uses multiple terms for Jesus’ death. Let’s look at some of these, in no particular order:

Jesus’ Death Shows God’s Love for Us

It shows that God loves us. There isn’t an angry deity like Zeus, ready to smash us.  Everything else about the cross should be seen through this lens. No matter how you or I might feel, God loves us. His love looks like a cross. Paul affirms this by saying that while we were dead in our trespasses and sins, God acted for us:

  “But God, being rich in mercy,  because of his great love with which he loved us, and us being dead in our trespasses, made us alive in the Messiah (Christ; by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:4-5).

We are Redeemed

By Jesus’ blood we were bought back. “In whom we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our wrongdoing, according to the riches of his grace” (Ephesians 2:7). The word redemption was normally used for buying back prisoners. It was also be used for releasing slaves.

If you’ve ever watched a movie that has a prisoner swap, e.g., “Salt,” you’ve seen there is a prisoner exchange, the prisoner you want released is bought back with the payment of the person you gave to the enemy. We have been Redeemed.

Jesus was our ransom. The price that God paid was Jesus’ blood. Buying us back from our sins.

The consequences required that God himself, in the person of Jesus, died for us.

This was not God shrugging his shoulders like some doddering grandfather over our sins. No, justice had to be done. God takes our sins, our disobedience, very seriously. The first human couple sought to know what God knows in order to be like him. They treated themselves as their own gods. We continue to follow in the sins of Adam and Eve. We want to be our own gods. However, God will not allow us to try to rival him. There is only one true God, and it is not us.  Our redemption was hugely expensive to God. If you wonder whether you matter to God, consider the price he paid to buy you back.

We have been Reconciled

We have been reconciled. You might know of spouses who separated, but did not get divorced. They worked on their relationship and were reconciled to each other. They could now live peacefully together again. Or, you might have had a good friendship wrecked by betrayal. gossip, or some other cause. If the two of you make up, you repair the damage and are reconciled to each other.

By our sin, we broke our relationship with God. However, while God does not need us, he wants us to know him. So, he took the necessary steps for us to be reconciled with him.

Paul wrote that those who are in Christ are a new creation, and “all these things are from God who reconciled us to himself through the Messiah and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their sins against them, giving to them by us the message of reconciliation. Therefore, in behalf of Christ, we are ambassadors as though God is making an appeal through us. We plead on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Corinthians 5:18-20). This is no small matter to God. He wants us to be right with him, but as with any human relationship, we have a part to play. This is not a passive activity. God goes most of the way, but we  have to go the rest of the way.
 
 4. Righteousized. Believers are “justified” because of Jesus’ death for them, a sinless victim for sinful humans. There is debate about the precise meaning of this term. However, it basically means to treat as righteous. I take it to mean, therefore, that justification is being declared righteous, as opposed to the view that humans are given the gift of possessing righteousness (imputed righteousness).

The term, while it can mean vindication, does not mean that God somehow sees humans as just and right in his sight. Instead, we are declared to be righteous because of our connection to Jesus. He was fully righteous. The verb for justification in Greek, is dikaio-o. We can do best by rendering “righteousize,” for it is about being presented as righteous in God’s eyes.

We owe that to Jesus. Paul wrote that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. (Romans 3:23). Believers, “having been declared righteous by the gift of his grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus, whom God set forth as a propitiation through faith in his blood. This was to demonstrate his righteousness because of his forbearance of sins committed in earlier times” (Rom 3:24-25). This is dense material. Our justification is based on trusting that Jesus’ blood paid for our sins., We could not do anything to merit this favor from God.  This happened when God in times past determined to wait for Jesus to give his life for us, rather than pouring out wrath  on us immediately.

The really difficult word here is “propitiation.
The NIV renders this as “atoning sacrifice.” This is to avoid a controversy over the word. In Paul’s day, people offered sacrifices of animals to absorb the punishment that the human deserved.  When Paul uses this word, therefore, he is speaking of “penal substitutionary atonement.” Let’s break that down.

Since all have sinned, and the penalty for sin is death, Jesus, having been made sin for us, suffered our penalty, which is death. He did this in our place. That is, he was our substitute. Atonement Is to be made right with God by our sins being forgiven based upon the sacrifice of another.

was not extremely angry and dealt with our sin by making Jesus take our place. This was not “divine child abuse,” a false understanding of what Jesus’ death meant.

It is clear from the New Testament letters, like Romans and 1 Peter, that God the Father and God the Son agreed together on what needed to be done to deal with our sin. Someone had to die. Jesus voluntarily took our place. Yes, we still die physically, but because of Jesus’ death, we won’t die eternally. As C. S. Lewis put it in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe,  when an innocent victim dies in place of the one how has done the wrong, death works backwards. After Jesus, who did not sin ever, died in our place, he was resurrected bodily from the dead. That shows that indeed, our sins have been paid for. We could never do enough to overcome our own sins. Therefore, God had to take care of them. Since “propitiation” implies the wrath of a deity, many want to translate the word as “expiation.”  That still means that one dies for another, but it has no element of divine wrath.

This won’t do, In Rom 1:18, Paul wrote that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven. God could not simply forgive our sins, as that would be unjust. Someone had to experience Divine punishment for us. Jesus did that. If we understand Paul’s word to mean paying the price required to satisfy the deity, we are left with no clear reason why Jesus had to suffer. He suffered by taking our place and dealing with the just penalty of our sins. Death is the penalty for sin. If Jesus’ death was not substitutionary, he didn’t die for you or me. If it wasn’t penal, he did not experience death as the penalty for our sin. His death makes those who trust in him to be declared righteous before God. We can never earn this status, no matter how much good we might do.

These are many of the things that Jesus did for us in his suffering and dying on the cross. He willingly chose to follow God’s wil in giving himself in our place. Good Friday should mean that we daily give thanks to Jesus for all that he went through for our sake.

There are important aspects to the Christian faith, and those require talking about doctrine. As you can see, that doctrine is spelled out in the New Testament.

Jesus Gave Us an Example

There is one more ting that Jesus accomplished in his death. In the Roman Empire, every 3rd or 4th person was a slave. This is not like the slavery in U.S. history, where white people with power kidnapped black people in Africa. To be a slave in the Greco-Roman world, you either lost a battle/war or you might sell yourself into slavery rather than starving or being a beggar. Some slaves were tread well. Others were treated horribly.

Peter, in 1 Peter 2, speaks to slaves to live for God in their situation, he wrote, “For to this you were called, because Christ also suffered on your behalf, leaving for you an example in order that you may follow in his footsteps” (1 Pet 2:21).

To follow in someone’s footsteps is to do as they do. Jesus walked into undeserved punishment for us, in order that we, when faced with temptation and suffering, would choose the same path that Jesus chose. Jesus “never promised you a rose garden.” Instead he invites us to deny ourselves, take up our cross, and follow” him (Matt 16:24).

I’ve heard people joke about their personal cross, like having to give up chocolate, or live someplace that they don’t like, but can afford. That’s not how Jesus’ disciples would have heard this. Crosses were used to cause maximum pain and humiliation to those being executed this way. To follow Jesus’ example, look for things in your own life that keep you from being fully devoted to God in your finances, relationships, sexuality, career, etc.

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