|
"How could Jesus,
the perfect Son of God, ever become sin?"
The power, love and grace of God at
work in saving the human race is much greater than the schemes
of human religion care to imagine. God is not driven by
religious ideas in His compassion toward us, in His willingness
to rescue us from our own wrong choices, or in His perfect
righteousness or justice in taking away our guilt.
Religion, all too often, has its own
agenda, depending on the men and women who fashion it. A
living faith in God and in the saving work of Jesus Christ,
however, has only one aim: to bring lost human being out of the
darkness and slime of sin into the brilliance of God's truth,
love and eternal power.
Because of the true righteousness of
God sin had to be truly dealt with. If we were to be truly
forgiven, truly rescued from of all guilt and penalty and power
of evil, the wrongdoing itself had to be truly done away with.
God's plan was not a religious scheme or system of rules.
His plan was intended to restore, reconcile and fully redeem us.
His plan is to have us become His children, to live in His home,
and to remain in His good Presence for all eternity.
As the Law of Moses predicted, God's
Savior would have to become as a lamb of sacrifice. Sin
would have to be punished by death, paid for once and for all
time. The universe, so to speak, would have to be set
right again, and all the power of evil once and for all removed.
Only a spotless lamb could take away sin under the Law, and only
a perfect Savior could take away the sins of the whole world, as
revealed through the prophet Isaiah (chapter 53).
John the Baptist told a crowd at the
Jordan river that Jesus is the Lamb of God that takes away the
sins of the world. Both the old Hebrew Scriptures and the
New Testament, written by the apostles of Jesus Christ, give us
the story of what God had to do in Jesus Christ, the Messiah.
Jesus, the sinless Son of God, would have to take on Himself all
the sins that you and I commit, and all the sin of all time.
On the cross, Christ became sin for
us, so that we might be made truly righteous by God's grace.
Jesus willingly took our place so that all who believe in Him
can have true righteousness written into their account, as it
were, and have all their sins truly and forever forgiven.
In Jesus, the sin debt is fully and forever paid. There
remains no more sacrifice for sins because all sin, of all time,
was fully dealt with in Jesus Christ when He suffered and died
on the cross for us.
This salvation does not fit into the
schemes of any religion (including any of the so-called
Christian religions) because sinners are saved solely by God's
grace, through faith in Jesus Christ, and not by religious
deeds, religious rites, or religious proclamations. The
Bible is very clear in its teachings. Only God's grace in
Christ can rescue us from our wrong choices, our evil deeds and
our foolish thinking.
As John 3:16 proclaims, God loves
the people of this fallen world. He knows full well that
we are sinners by virtue of our humanity, inheriting a sinful
bent from our own parents, as they did from theirs, and so on,
all the way back to the very first two people on earth.
When Adam chose sinful disobedience over the will of God, he
brought the curse of sin on all his descendants. And until
Jesus came into the world to save us, there was no hope of true
life being restored to us. God's love for us in Christ
opens the way to eternal life and the forgiveness of sin.
By faith in Jesus, we are fully reconciled to God.
To better understand God's salvation
and love for you, I urge you to read the Bible, and to devote
time each day, or as often as possible, to studying its message.
To experience this salvation for yourself, you only need to turn
your attention to God and believe in Jesus.
God's promises are always very
great, and they may often be bigger than our faith, at first.
But the grace of God is not only for the very wise, for the
great of faith or for the really determined people of this
world.
The door to God's Presence is always
open (thanks to Jesus Christ) for any sinner who needs to pray
for the faith to simply believe. As one man once cried out
to Jesus, "Lord I believe! Help me with my unbelief!"
That man's prayer was answered by our Lord, and your prayers for
better understanding and faith will also be heard and answered
by God.
In the mean time...
Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and
you will be saved.
Trust in the Lord with all your
heart, and don't merely rely on your own understanding.
In all your ways acknowledge Him,
and He will make your paths straight.
The Lord Jesus made this very
special promise: "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for
righteousness, For they shall be filled." (Matthew 5:6
NKJV)
|
