Jesus came to give himself as a sacrifice for all peoples so that we could escape our corruption and reconnect with God. This plan was announced at the beginning of human history, such that even the ancient Chinese knew of it. It was signed by God in the sacrifice of Abraham by pointing to Mount Moriah where Jesus’ sacrifice would be provided. Then the Jewish Passover sacrifice was a sign pointing to the day of the year when Jesus would be sacrificed. Further details were predicted in various prophecies in the Old Testament.
Why
is his sacrifice so important?
This is a question that summarizes the whole Bible – it is its main
message. The Bible declares a Law when it states:
“Death”
literally means ‘separation’.
When our soul separates from our body we die physically. Similarly we are
even now separated from God spiritually. This is true because God is Holy
(sinless) while we have become corrupted from our original creation and so we sin.
This
can be pictured with two cliffs with God on the opposite side from us
separated by a large gap. Just like a branch that has been cut from a
tree is separated and dead, so we have cut ourselves off from God and become
separated and spiritually dead.
This separation causes guilt and fear. So what we
naturally try to do is build bridges to take us from our side (of death) to
God’s side. We do this in many different ways: going to church, temple or
mosque, being religious, being good, helping the poor, meditation, trying to be
more helpful, praying more, etc. These deeds are often through religion
to gain merit and can be very difficult – and living them out can be very
complicated. This is illustrated in the next figure.
The
problem is that our hard efforts, merits, and deeds, though not wrong, are insufficient because
the payment required (the ‘wages’) for our sins is ‘death’. Our efforts
are like a ‘bridge’ that tries to cross the gap separating us from God – but in
the end cannot do it. This is because good merit will not solve our root
problem. It is like trying to heal cancer (which results in death) by eating
vegetarian. Eating vegetarian is not bad, it may even be good – but it
will not cure cancer. For a cancer cure you need a totally different
treatment.
This
Law is Bad News – it is so bad we often do not even want to hear it and we fill
our lives with activities and things hoping this Law will go away. But
the Bible stresses this Law of sin and death to get our attention to focus on
the cure that is simple and powerful christian post.