From Here to Eternity: Why Jesus Christ died for our sins

Central to the Christian faith is the belief that that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; deity incarnate, God made flesh, who nevertheless emptied himself of his divine powers, privileges and prerogatives to come, live and die as a human being (Philippians 2:5-8). Not only that, Christians further believe that Jesus lived a sinless life which he voluntarily gave up for us by suffering an obscenely excruciating and undeserved death on the Cross at Calvary. As a result it one of the most oft-repeated proclamations of our creed that,

‘Jesus Christ died for our sins’.

As a pastor, I believe every word I have just written and have been pleased to answer people’s questions by teaching and writing a great deal about grace and faith, how salvation works, and the efficacy of Christ’s blood shed for our sins. But perhaps the greatest question is not only the one that is least understood, but the one most seldom asked:

‘Why did Jesus die for my sins?’

Ask most Christians today and I suspect you will receive some trite prepared response based upon what they have been taught and never taken the time to really question. Answers like:

‘So that I might be saved and go to heaven’ - Wrong.

‘So that God could forgive my sins so I wouldn’t go to hell’ - Wrong.

What? - So Jesus didn’t die to save me from my sins or so that I could go to heaven and not hell?

Not entirely, no. According to the Bible those things are most certainly true in an ancillary sense, inasmuch as they are consequences that do occur when we surrender our lives and place our faith in Jesus’ finished work on the Cross. We are indeed saved by grace through faith and not by any works or self-effort on our part. But, believe it or not, that isn't the Gospel - or at least not all, or even most of it - because they are not the ultimate purpose of God for our lives.

To say that Jesus died for my sin so that I can go to heaven and avoid hell, is rather like saying that my wife and I travel to Yorkshire to see Catterick. Now, as a lovely town in a beautiful corner of that magnificent county, I am sure that many people do go there for precisely that reason. But we go there because that is where our son is stationed with the Scots Guards, and where he and his wife live with our grandsons. We don't go for the drive or the sightseeing, but to visit our family.

The true Gospel is somewhat like that - much grander and far more majestic than just some Escape Clause in the Bible. Furthermore, the Good News about what God actually has planned for his children is no secret, although it is a mystery which, like all God’s mysteries, he conceals from those who do not care to diligently seek it.

So what you are about to read is not some crazy New Age theory plucked from a few obscure scriptures and sprinkled with a few half baked drivellings of some raving theological mystic. It is the truth of Holy Scripture that has always been there, unhidden and in plain sight. I’m not making anything up that any Biblically literate believer has not already read for themselves at some time. But, should any of it come as a revelation may be due to this being the first time anyone has joined the dots for you.

Our daughter and her husband will remember this, but at their wedding reception, in my toast as the father of the bride I expressed my hope that their wedding day would be the worst day of their married life together. If that appears a strange sentiment, then consider. If the very first day of a couple’s life together as husband and wife (as wonderful as that may be) is the very worst day that they experience in their marriage, then every other day henceforth must in consequence be even better. In a day and age when weddings have become an industry in their own right, one has to question what makes so many couples seem willing to feed it by impoverishing themselves and their family, just to pay for a single day of extravagant excess that they can call ‘The Best Day of their lives’.

They seem to have lost perspective and sight of the fact that their wedding is only be the beginning and not the end goal of their marriage. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the lavish celebration of notable life events, and that includes saving for and planning and celebrating one’s wedding. Special is special and there’s nothing wrong in recognizing that by pushing the boat out with as much extravagance as you can afford and sharing it with as many family and loved one as you can. But not at the expense of making our wedding such a focus that the rest of our marriage is seen as such an a anticlimax that we begin to wonder what all the fuss was about.

Sadly, however, that’s what making an industry out of getting married has done for the modern concept of marriage: One great crescendo of joyful excess followed by the inevitability of interminable insipidity. No wonder perhaps, that our age, in which so many couples have never spent more on their weddings, has become an era of ever-increasing divorce.

Many things can erode or destroy a marriage but I suspect few more so than the blight of unrealistic expectations - or perhaps, no expectations whatsoever. In a day and age when so much focus and attention is expended on planning our weddings that no consideration has been left over for the enduring lifetime relationship together that it is supposed celebrate.

And so it is for too many Christians, that the greatest wedding fest hat history will ever see - the marriage supper of the Lamb (Revelation 19:19): The much promised and prophesied union that takes place when God the Father gives the Church to his Son for a Bride.

Is it going to be lavish? - Yes.

 

Will it be an outstandingly joyful celebration? - Without doubt.

 

Is it going to be a magnificently special occasion? - Absolutely.

 

Will it be the sole culmination of every expectation for all eternity, in an incomparable event, never to be surpassed? - I sincerely hope not…And neither does God.

You see, weddings are great, but as great as they are, the marriage that follows is much greater than the wedding that preceded it. Because a wedding is an event and a celebration which is all about spectacle, whereas a marriage is about a lifetime of loving commitment and intimacy that that day of spectacle celebrates.

One day as you sit doting on your fifth grandchild at a family get together, will you smile in the pleasure of the moment or in joyful anticipation of the future? Or will you reminisce over the fine cake and champagne at your wedding? As you hold your wife’s hand when she is unwell, or grieve with one another over the loss of a loved one, will you rest in the arms of a relationship forged in the fires of shared adversity? Or will your relationship fall to pieces like a two-dollar suitcase because this was not what you signed up for on the day they threw the confetti.

Marriage is a big deal for God, not only because of its immediate benefits to us and to the wider society in which we live, but because it illustrates the intimate relationship he desires to have with his people.

Time and again, Jesus honoured marriage by illustrating his teachings and parables with wedding and marital imagery.

We see this in many scriptures, like Matthew 22:2 where Jesus said:

“The kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king, which made a marriage for his son…”

And famously in Matthew 25:1-13 Jesus likens himself to the Bridegroom:

"Then the kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins who took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. For when the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them, but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps.

 

As the bridegroom was delayed, they all became drowsy and slept. But at midnight there was a cry, 'Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.' Then all those virgins rose and trimmed their lamps.

 

And the foolish said to the wise, 'Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.' But the wise answered, saying, 'Since there will not be enough for us and for you, go rather to the dealers and buy for yourselves.' And while they were going to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast, and the door was shut.

 

Afterward the other virgins came also, saying, 'Lord, lord, open to us.' But he answered, 'Truly, I say to you, I do not know you.' Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.”

His listeners would have understood Jesus’ imagery perfectly, as a cultural reference to their wedding custom in which the groom would come for his bride at night and take her from her father’s household to his father’s house to be married.

In Revelation 19:6-9 Jesus makes a rabbinical parabolic reference to an event we often call the Second Coming, and the wedding at which Christ the Groom take the Church for his Bride.

Then I heard what seemed to be the voice of a great multitude, like the roar of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, crying out,

 

"Hallelujah! For the Lord our God the Almighty reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him the glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure" - for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints.

 

And the angel said to me, "Write this: Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb." And he said to me, "These are the true words of God."

In John 2:1-11 Jesus honours marriage both by his attendance at a wedding and by performing his very first miracle at the reception.

On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus also was invited to the wedding with his disciples.

 

When the wine ran out, the mother of Jesus said to him, "They have no wine."

 

And Jesus said to her, "Woman, what does this have to do with me? My hour has not yet come."

 

His mother said to the servants, "Do whatever he tells you."

 

Now there were six stone water jars there for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons.

 

Jesus said to the servants, "Fill the jars with water." And they filled them up to the brim.

 

And he said to them, "Now draw some out and take it to the master of the feast." So they took it.

 

When the master of the feast tasted the water now become wine, and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), the master of the feast called the bridegroom and said to him, "Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now."

 

This, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory. And his disciples believed in him.

Meanwhile, we see marriage further commended in these words in Hebrews 13:4,

Let marriage be held in honour among all, and let the marriage bed be undefiled, for God will judge the sexually immoral and adulterous.

As an aside, this also deals with the common misrepresentation of God as some kind of sexual prude, whereas he actually created sex and does not have a problem with it. Where God does have a problem with is in the way that this sacred physical representation of an even a deeper spiritual union has been perverted into something profane.

To God, fornication and adultery are identical to idolatry - in which we cavort with false gods. While homosexual acts traduce the imagery of Christ and his Bride, by substituting the twisted image of a relationship between two Christs or two Brides - or between two heads, or two bodies, as we shall see next.

In Ephesians 5:31-32 (as part of a larger discourse from verse 22 to 33) the apostle Paul explicitly links the institution of marriage between a man and woman with God’s relationship to his Church:

Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Saviour. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands.

 

Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendour, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish.

 

In the same way husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ does the church, because we are members of his body.

 

"Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh."

 

This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church.

 

However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.

Tragically, this type of Jesus and his Church has been too often perverted into license, promoting the domination or abuse wives by their husbands in a way that would have horrified Paul and most certainly disgusts God.

In Romans 7:1-6, Paul cleverly parallels the marriage covenant with those of the Old Covenant of Law and the New Covenant of grace.

Or do you not know, brothers - for I am speaking to those who know the law - that the law is binding on a person only as long as he lives? For a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies she is released from the law of marriage.

 

Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man she is not an adulteress. Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God.

 

For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code.

What Paul is essentially saying is that under the Old Covenant we were married to the Law, to whom we were subject as our husband, and since divorce is unthinkable, that meant 'Until death do us part'. If however, our husband died, we would be free to marry another.

But, since the Law never dies, the only way out of the union is if we die...or if someone else dies in our place. That, says Paul, is precisely what Jesus did for us, thus freeing us from the Law when we identify ourselves with his death through faith, by which we are also identify in his resurrection. Therefore, we are now free to marry another because death has broken the old marriage bond to the Law, while new life (having been 'born again') has freed us to marry Grace in the person of Jesus himself.

There was even a provision under the Law forbidding remarriage to a former spouse whom you had previously divorced and since remarried another (Deuteronomy 24:1-4). So Paul says, don't do it. You're married to Grace and dead to the Law in Christ, so don't presume to divorce Chirst to return to your former husband the Law - which is spiritual adultery.

Nor would any of this have seemed strange to the Hebrew ears of the early Church, since on of God’s repeated themes throughout the Old Testament is the illustration of his relationship with Israel with that between a husband and wife. Indeed, God equates adultery with idolatry, as essentially betrayal of the same kind. But how does any of this explain why Jesus died for our sins?

The answer lies in John 17:1-3.

When Jesus had spoken these words, he lifted up his eyes to heaven, and said, "Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.

Notice, in verse 3, that Jesus does not describe eternal life in terms of living forever, but in terms of our relationship to God.

And remember John 10:10?

The thief does not come except to steal and to kill and to destroy. I have come so that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

The word translated ‘more abundantly’ here, is the Greek perisson, which is an extravagantly generous term. Here is how Strong’s Concordance defines it:

From peri (in the sense of beyond); superabundant (in quantity) or superior (in quality); by implication excessive; adverb (with ek) violently; neuter (as noun) pre-eminence: - exceeding abundantly above, more abundantly, advantage, exceedingly, very highly, beyond measure, more, superfluous, vehement [-ly].

This is no word of half measure or reservation, but refers to a life replete in both quality and quantity - ‘eternal life’.

Also, in John 17:3 the word ‘know’ is ginóskósin, which is precisely the same Greek verb used in its aorist tense (egnó ) to describe the sexual intercourse between Adam and Eve mentioned in Genesis 4:1 of the Septuagint (the authoritative Greek translation of the Old Testament).

Life more abundant is life eternal, which means an intimate relationship with God.

So what about living forever? - Oh yes, that is part of it, but the unending duration of eternal life is a by-product of its quality, inherent through our relationship with God, not the other way around. Every soul in hell will live forever in torment in large part because of their awareness of the relationship with the God that they chose to foresake in this life.

The reason Jesus died for our sins was not primarily so that we could escape death and hell and go to heaven. Those are secondary benefits consequent on having an intimate relationship with God, but it is the intimate relationship with God that makes the real difference.

So, the real reason Jesus died for our sins was to make God’s principal purpose possible…Which was?

…That we should receive the Promise of his Father - the Holy Spirit.

This term occurs three times in the New Testament: once at the end of Luke’s Gospel and twice in the opening two chapters of Acts:

And behold, I send the promise of my father on you. But you sit in the city of Jerusalem until you are clothed with power from on high. (Luke 24:49)

And having met with them, he commanded them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to await the promise of the Father which you heard from me. (Acts 1:4)

Therefore being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this which you now see and hear. (Acts 2:33)

What makes every believer in Christ different from every non-believer is that the Holy Spirit of God himself has come to dwell in us, whereupon we were transformed and became a ‘new creation’ (2 Corinthians 5:17), or what Jesus described as ‘born again’ (John 3:3).

There’s an old saying that the Holy Spirit cannot dwell in a dirty vessel, which basically means that God will not co-habit with sin. What Jesus provided by his death was the means by which our old sinful nature could cleansed to the absolute degree of perfection required to make the indwelling of the Holy Spirit even thinkable.

That means was Jesus' Blood. Not because plasma and corpuscles have some magical quality but because, as Genesis 9:4 and Leviticus 17:11 stipulate, the life of every creature is in its blood.

When Jesus emptied himself of his divine prerogatives (Philippians 2:5-8) to come in the image of sinful flesh (Romans 8:3) he made it possible that he should atone for our sins in our place (Hebrews 9:22).

If that sounds unfair, there’s a reason for that: It is! Our salvation is nowhere founded on what is fair or just, but has everything to do with God’s goodness towards us. That’s why we are said to be saved by grace, because grace is simply God’s unearned, undeserved and unmerited favour. If we got what we deserved, God would wipe us out. Instead he gives us eternal life. Or, as Paul famously declared in Romans 6:23,

For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

That’s the real reason Jesus died for our sins, because Jesus didn‘t die to make bad people good; Jesus died to make dead people alive. His sacrifice on the Cross at Calvary was not merely to give us some celestial Get Out of Jail Free card, to be played when our game of Monopoly finally ends, but to provide himself as the Way to a living relationship with our heavenly Father and himself, through the indwelling presence of his Holy Spirit. Indeed, Jesus put it this way in John 6:44 and John 14:6 -

No man can come to me, except the Father which has sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.

And,

Jesus said to him, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life; no one comes to the Father but by Me."

These are complementary statements because it is the Father’s will that we be drawn to his Son through whom we might then enabled to come to him.

That’s not just an invitation to a Wedding. That’s an invitation to Life.