Jesus has set us free from our sins
As any Christian can tell you—even the newest or youngest one—the reason Jesus died on the cross was to take away our sins. Isn’t that great! Because of Christ you are forgiven. You really are. The ultimate significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection is that he has somehow made peace between us and God by the shedding of his blood. His act of obedient sacrifice has cleansed us of our sins and put an end to the state of hostility that existed between us and God; because of the cross, God counts our faith in Jesus as real righteousness. This is what Paul means when he says that “God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.” (2Co 5:21)
In theological language, this act of Christ on the cross to make peace between humanity and God—to ‘set us free from the penalty of sins we had committed’ and ‘bring us home safely to God’ by the shedding of his blood—is called the atonement. (Hb 9:15, 1P 3:18) Remember, the problem of Sin is death: death in this life all around us and eternal death in the life to come. When the Son of God became a man, he took this problem upon himself and made himself subject to death, just as we are. But because he never sinned, never chose to ‘do it on his own’ but to always submit to the Father’s plan, he death was a different kind of death than ours. For us, death is the ultimate and understandable consequence of a life filled with sinning. When Jesus Christ died on the cross, however, it was as “a sacrifice that would take away the sins of the people,” not as the enactment of a punishment that he himself deserved. (Hb 2:17)
Why did he do it? Why did he ‘offer himself as a sacrifice for us’? (Eph 5:2) He did it because he loves us. God, knowing that we were helpless on our own, but filled with love for us and deeply caring that our friendship with him should be restored, took it upon himself to do all of the work to make things right between us, to reconcile us to himself, even “while we were still sinners.” (Ro 5:8) It is the greatest theme of the Christian faith, that “God loved the world so much that he gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (Jn 3:16) The significance of the death and resurrection of Jesus is not merely the cosmic defeat of Sin by our mighty God so as to make the salvation of humanity possible, but, for the believer, a very personal demonstration of the love of God for me. Christ died not just for the sins of the world, but for me, and for my family, to atone for our sins and to bring us safely home to God.
Jesus truly is both son of man and Son of God
This very genuine and specific love of God for you and me, the kind of love that motivated his willingness to intervene in our situation even at great personal cost, is a reflection of his character. You see, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ—what he did for us—is always the result of who he is as the God of love who became human for our sake. The atonement is therefore a crucial demonstration of his identity. In his death we are reminded that the Son of God genuinely became 100% human, just like us. The story of his life was of course not identical to the story of each of ours, that’s not what it means to be a human being. As Thomas Oden reminds us in his book The Word of Life, being human means being particular: having one place of birth, one gender, one set of experiences, one life’s journey, and one experience of death. Jesus was not like us because he was exactly the same as you or me or anyone else, but because he was a unique person just like each one of us is. Because of his death we are assured of the completeness of his humanity, that the incarnation really goes all the way down, right to the bottom of what it means to be human, and that Jesus really did take the totality of human experience upon himself. Not every possible experience, but the actual experience of a genuine human life, like ours, the kind that occurs in one place and at one time, and goes from a beginning to an end. But more than even that, his burial teaches us that we have nothing to fear from what comes after death (and before our own resurrection at the end of time) because, wherever it is that we go in the moment after death, our ‘elder brother’ Jesus has gone there ahead of us and emerged as Lord and victor over it.
So too, just as the death of Christ is the clearest marker of his full humanity, his resurrection means that without doubt he truly is the Son of God. As the apostle Paul says in Romans 1:4, “he was shown to be the Son of God when he was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit.” His resurrection to a glorified and perfected body—the kind of body we ourselves will one day possess—is the ultimate vindication of everything that he taught about who he is and why he had come. Because he was raised again we know that he really is ‘God with us’, really is one with the Father, and really is the Good Shepherd come to seek and save the lost. The resurrection means that God really “was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people's sins against them.” (2Co 5:19) And so, when Paul sums up the good news of Christianity in 2 Timothy 2:8, he simply challenges the reader to “always remember that Jesus Christ, a descendant of King David, was raised from the dead. This is the Good News I preach.” Jesus is the descendant of David, and he died: he truly is a human. And he has been raised from the dead: he truly is the divine Son of God he claimed to be. For Paul, this was enough to encapsulate the whole heart of the Gospel: the true God of love became a true human, and died and rose again, so that he could save us. The death and resurrection of Jesus—the climax of his mission to save us—is also the most important testimony to his identity as both the son of man and the Son of God.
Jesus is the victor over Sin and Death
Finally, his death and resurrection mean that Jesus has decisively triumphed over the power of Sin and Death in the world. It’s part of the reason he came: “to destroy the works of the devil.” (1J 3:8) Jesus is the victor over Sin, having put himself under the influence of our Sin dominated world his whole life long and yet never caving to its dominion. And he is the victor over Death, having died, but yet conquering the grave and returning to a full and glorified life. Jesus says of himself in Revelation 1:18, “I am the living one. I died, but look—I am alive forever and ever! And I hold the keys of death and the grave.”
To say that Jesus has risen, then, means more than just saying that Jesus himself is alive, it means that the whole range of domination that Sin previously held over our lives has been taken away. In part, this means that the power which Sin had exerted over us, so that we could do nothing but keep on sinning, was broken at the cross. Because of Christ’s victory over Sin, we do not have to live according to that old pattern any more. Jesus Christ, our new Adam, has made a new way of being human, a way that does not have to live as a slave to sin. This is why in the Alliance we say that ‘sanctification is in the atonement’: at the cross, Jesus not only atoned for our sins, but also totally dismantled Sin’s control over us and made it possible for us to live lives that are pleasing to God.
Our healing too is ‘in the atonement’, not meaning something altogether too mystical or magical, but rather the simple truth that God still heals people in response to the prayers of his people, and that when he does so, his healing power is based in the authority that Jesus, because of his cosmic victory over Death, has over sickness and death in our present world. The power of Sin and Satan was to keep us as sinners and to direct all of our existence toward frailty and death; the power of the atonement—the power of Christ Jesus, the victor over Sin—is to set us free from the necessity of sinning and to give us the opportunity to place our health and our lives in the hands of the one who loves us, rather than into the fist of our enemy. Because Christ has died and risen—because the heritage of Sin’s control over humanity has been defeated—we are once again free to entrust ourselves to God’s plan rather than go it on our own. The cross and the empty tomb mean that Christ’s victory over Sin, Death, and the Devil is complete.
If I was preparing for accreditation I would . . .
• Read “The Grand Miracle” by C. S. Lewis, from his book God in the Dock, chapter nine
• Make sure I understood the term ‘atonement’ and could explain it to a person in my church
• Memorize 2 Corinthians 5:21 and either 1 Peter 3:18 or Hebrews 9:28
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