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April 8, 2007 - Easter – The Essence of Sin,
the Essence of Salvation
Dennis Mullen
Read together:
ISA 53:3 He was despised and rejected by
men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
ISA 53:4 Surely he took up our
infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
ISA 53:5 But he was pierced for our
transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
ISA 53:6 We all, like sheep, have gone
astray,
each of us has turned to his own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
This prophecy from Isaiah is the essence of the Good Friday story and therefore, of the Easter story too. It was for my transgressions that Christ Jesus was pierced, my iniquities for which he was crushed. It was my sin and yours that was laid upon him, and he was punished so that I might have peace with God.
But this raises a big question in a lot of minds that are better than mine. “Why did it have to be this way?”
A family story: When my cousin was 15, he did something pretty awful. He was basically a good kid but he made some friends who were a poor influence on him, and one night they (and therefore he) broke into a hardware store and stole a couple thousand dollars of merchandise. They were caught and arrested, and my cousin just missed being removed from his parents' home and sent to an institution, but he did get probation and a juvenile record.
This was hard for his mom and dad, but especially his mom, because she had such high expectations for her son. And in fact, this was the cause of disaster. On the very day my cousin learned from the court that he wouldn't be taken from his home, his mother told him to pack his bags and leave. She told him that he wasn't her son any longer, that his actions had ripped apart their relationship and that though she had thought long and hard about it, she couldn't get past it. He had to go.
My cousin was heart-broken. He hadn't chosen the life of a criminal, after all, he just did one stupid thing. He tried to bargain with her. “What if I get a job and pay back all the damages I caused plus interest? What if I start going to church and really turn my life around? What if I work harder around the house to earn back your trust?”
To all of this his mom said “no.” She said, “No matter what you do, it cannot erase the past. You'll always be a thief, and I cannot get past it. Leave!”
You know...that isn't a true story. But a lot of people think it is, only they think that it's the story of God, and us. With one exception: God, after a long time of saying that there is nothing we can do, finally said: “All right, I'll tell you what...justice has got to be paid. I cannot just forgive. Someone's got to die. How about Jesus?” And so (people think), in some kind of crazy economy we can't understand, the Lord laid upon Jesus the iniquity of us all, and Jesus died and God relented and gave us another chance.
Probably no one here subscribes to that view, but perhaps you have entertained the question which is tightly related to it…Why can’t my good works fix the relationship with God? Oh, we KNOW that they can’t. One of the first things I remember about Sunday School was a cartoon in the handout paper that showed a skydiver with a parachute pack on his back labeled “Good Works” and the thrust of the cartoon was that good works is a parachute that won’t open! (Kinda scary for kids’ Sunday School). I get it that good works won’t heal the relationship. But why not?
Think about this for a minute. What if your dad told you when you were three years old: “You have messed up your diaper. That’s it. It’s done. You’ve sinned, and there is nothing you can do to make up for it. Even if you get potty-trained now, that “good work” will not heal our relationship”. To call that “unreasonable” is an understatement!
Or, maybe a little more realistic: You’re seventeen, and your Mom catches you with marijuana. She says: “I’ve put up with a lot of things, but I always told you that I have a zero-tolerance policy with drugs. I found three joints in a Ziploc bag in your dresser. Now I need you to pack up and get out of my house and never contact me again. Our relationship is forever ruptured, and there is nothing you can do about it!”
“What about drug counseling? What if I repent? What if I can stay completely clean for six months? Will you forgive me?” “NO! Your good works can never be enough to heal this relationship!”
Now a teenager using drugs is serious and requires action. But to declare a permanent, irreparable breach in the relationship over this offense is pathologically unreasonable, no less so than to break off contact with a toddler over a messy diaper.
And isn’t it exactly the opposite of how Jesus taught us to live? In Luke 17:3-4, he said: "…If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. 4 If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, `I repent,' forgive him."
And yet we teach that God cannot be moved to forgive by our repentance, nor even by our good works, and that is why Calvary was necessary. So we observe Good Friday and Easter Sunday as the day that someone had to die so that finally we could have a peaceful relationship with God. Maybe it makes sense to us only because we have heard it all our lives, and besides we really haven’t thought it through. But you can imagine how it sounds to adults who hear it for the first time. I have heard reasonable people say that they can’t believe in a God who is so unrelenting in his anger. The whole thing, to them, sounds so barbaric.
But of course we KNOW (do we not?) that there is so much more to the picture. My fictitious aunt isn’t a good illustration of God at all because she represents only ONE FACT about God, and it is an important one, namely that he cannot simply overlook sin.
People say: God is harsher than I am. I can't believe in a God who is less merciful than me, who can't forgive without a crucifixion. But did you ever stop and think about why we CAN forgive, why we CAN choose to simply overlook sin? It's because are not purely holy, as God is. We can let sin pass and not be all that offended by it and we might pat ourselves on the back for being so generous, but it isn’t generosity at all but rather the fact that we are sinners and sin is the ocean in which we swim. The real mystery of the universe isn’t “Why can’t God overlook all my sin?” but rather “How can a Holy God forgive ANY of my multitude of sins?” In the story I made up, my cousin found out that his mother was a woman of justice, in a way…but God is so much more. He is totally Holy and fully Just…and he is completely Love – and he is all of these things in a way that his love don’t soften his justice and his holiness doesn’t diminish his love.
Let me show you a passage, the first part of which is very familiar and the second part of which is very profound:
Romans 3:23-26 - 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. 25 God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished-- 26 he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
What a marvelous paragraph! In a few words, it captures almost every major truth about God action regarding our salvation. It says that:
And the sentence that crowns it all: He is both JUST and THE ONE WHO JUSTIFIES. He doesn’t compromise His own righteousness to make me righteous. He doesn't put aside his own justice to make you just. But neither does he let his love be trampled by his justice. A price needs to be paid for my sin, or he isn't just. He PAYS it, for he is not only Justice but Love. In Jesus Christ crucified, God shows Himself to be both just and the one who justifies.
If I DID have that aunt I spoke of, and she treated her son the way I described, you'd have to say that she cares about justice – you have to give her that much. But there would be SO much missing. But if she forgave her son – if she said: “Yeah, come on back. We'll pretend the past didn't happen, and we'll start over” - we'd call her loving, and much more human than if she didn't forgive – but we'd have to admit that she wasn't being just. That's OK, BTW. The Bible tells us to forgive BECAUSE we have been forgiven so much. That isn't true of God. He is without sin, and he is totally just (and we need a JUST God – in an unjust world, we know how much we need the Ruler of the Universe and the judge of our souls to be just), and for us to be forgiven, a price must be paid.
The title of my sermon is The Essence of Sin...Salvation...
The essence of sin – is me substituting myself for God. In Genesis 3:5 the serpent told Eve - 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil." When I decide that my ways are best, my plans are higher than his, and my truth trumps his, this is sin. The essence of sin is me substituting myself for God.
The essence of salvation – is God substituting Himself for me. 1 John 4:9-10 says: 9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10 This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
The essence of sin is me substituting myself for God.
The essence of salvation – is God substituting Himself for me.
Morrison
Hill Christian Church
P.O. Box 59 - 1008 E.
Race St.
Kingston, TN 37763 (865) 376-5205
