The Gospel for Christians

What did Jesus pay?

Over the past two days, I’ve talked about how it is by looking at the Cross that we experience God’s love for us.  Yesterday, we focused on our debt that was paid at the Cross.  Today I want to focus on the price that Jesus paid.  Yes, the debt and the price are really the same thing, but seen from different angles.

Let’s start with one of the most beautiful passages of the Old Testament.

Isaiah 53:5-6
But he was wounded for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement (punishment) that brought us peace,
and with his stripes we are healed.
6 All we like sheep have gone astray;
we have turned—every one—to his own way;
and the Lord has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.

All that I talked about yesterday… all the sin and wickedness, all the wrath that our sin and wickedness deserve, the eternal punishment of hell… ALL of this was upon Jesus. He paid this debt for us.

Again, 1 John 4:9 In this was the love of God MANIFEST among us, that God sent his only Son into the world…10 In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Propitiation is the satisfaction of God’s righteous wrath that Jesus accomplished when he, as our substitute, experienced the wrath and punishment that we deserve to experience. This is something that many people are denying today: Although it is difficult to comprehend, Jesus bore the rejection of the Father that we deserve, so that we should not be rejected. Jesus was abandoned at the cross. Remember his cry from Psalm 22:1 “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”

God’s righteous wrath against sin is revealed in two places: in Hell and at the Cross of Christ. In Hell, unrepentant sinners are forsaken eternally by God. At the Cross, the Father forsook his beloved Son.

All sin is judged either in Hell or at the cross. If we want to understand better what Jesus experienced at the Cross, we can look at Hell, because Jesus took our Hell upon himself. We might be tempted to think: “But how could what Jesus experienced have been as bad as the agony of an eternity in the Lake of Fire. He was only dead for a few days, but Hell is eternal.”

I confess that I don’t fully know the answer to that question, but the Bible is clear that the wages of my sin is eternal death, punishment in Hell, and Jesus really paid my penalty, and he paid it fully.

The pain and agony of death that Jesus experienced at the cross was more than just the physical pain of nails in his body, and the agony of crucifixion, (although we should never minimize that pain). I believe it is Jesus’ cry from Psalm 22:1 that brings us the closest to understanding what he went through for us. We can never comprehend the infinitely intimate love relationship that God the Father and God the Son eternally share. Their love for each other is immeasurable and infinite. And yet God the Son, incarnate in human flesh, cried out on the Cross, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me!”

Imagine the pain that we as human beings experience when someone close to us dies. It is an excruciating agony. At times it feels as if it will smother us and kill us. But consider the difference between the pain of losing a close pet, and the pain of losing a child or a spouse. The greater the love, the greater the pain. The pain that Jesus experienced at the cross, was the pain of experiencing his infinite and perfect love relationship with the Father being broken, as God’s wrath for our sin was upon him.

The torment that Jesus went through for us was more intense and more agonizing then all the agonies of all condemned sinners in Hell together for all eternity. For even after an eternity in hell, their debt will still not be paid, but Jesus completely paid our debt, he completely experienced our hell.

Conclusion
Jesus said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19) Paul said, “As often as you eat this bread, and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes.” (1 Cor. 11:26) When we remember, and when we proclaim the Lord’s death, meditating on what we have just seen that Jesus experienced, God reveals his love to us. He “demonstrates” his love in this: Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).

I pray that from now on, during every passion week, and every time you celebrate the Lord’s Supper, you will remember that God loves you so much that Jesus took your hell upon himself. That was your debt, and that was what Jesus paid for you. How I pray that the Holy Spirit would reveal this truth to our hearts, and not just our minds. I pray, that we “may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (Ephesians 3:18-19)

Nowadays, we don’t like to think about Hell; we are a bit ashamed of this doctrine and want to avoid it, but by avoiding it, we are robbing ourselves of a fuller understanding of what Jesus did for us on the cross, and by robbing ourselves of that fuller understanding, we don’t experience the love of God that we would if we would look at the cross and try to fathom what Jesus did for us, and when we don’t experience the love of God at the cross, we don’t overflow with love for one another (which takes us back to where I started, in Thursday’s post).

Yesterday I talked about two barriers that often keep us from appreciating what Jesus did for us on the cross. 

1.  We fail to understand the magnitude of our debt.

2.  We fail to understand the magnitude of Jesus’ payment.

Today I want to tackle the first barrier, and then tomorrow, I will wrap up with the second barrier.

What is our debt?

We deserve God’s wrath because we are sinners.  Do we really believe that?  Consider what the Scriptures say about us:

Psalm 51:5  Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.

Isaiah 1:2-6 Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth; for the Lord has spoken:  Children have I reared and brought up but they have rebelled against me.  The ox knows its owner and the donkey its master’s crib, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.”  Ah sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity, offspring of evildoers, children who deal corruptly!  They have forsaken the Lord, they have despised the holy one of Israel, they are utterly estranged.  Why will you still be struck down?  Why will you continue to rebel?  The whole head is sick, and the whole heart is faint.  From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it…”

Jeremiah 9:5 Everyone deceives his neighbor, and no one speaks the truth; they have taught their tongue to speak lies; they weary themselves committing iniquity.  Heaping oppression upon oppression, and deceit upon deceit, they refuse to know me, declares the Lord.

And in the New Testament we read in Rom. 3:10-12 None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.  All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one.

We could go on and on with many Scriptures, (and we should read and consider such scriptures often!), but the problem is that although we read such words, in our sinfulness, we struggle to believe them.  We read them and immediately start thinking of all of our good qualities and we think, “I’m really not that bad!    We hear Paul say in Romans 10:12 that “no one does good” and we immediately think of all the many good things that we HAVE done.

But if there IS anything good in us, where does it come from?  If the Scriptures are true, and we really are as bad as what we just read, and there really is nothing good in “not even one”  of us, and we have “together become worthless”, then where do those good qualities and good actions come from?

The answer is that they come from God.  Romans 1 hints at this when three times Paul uses the phrase, “God gave them up” or “God gave them over” when referring to the wickedness of the gentiles.  He implies that God had been keeping them from being as wicked and as evil as they could have been.  It is only God’s restraining influence upon us as sinners that keeps us from displaying every day in our actions the kinds of things we just read about in Isaiah and Jeremiah and Romans.

For example, when a non-believing parent loves his/her child and protects and cares for that child, that love is coming from God.  It is God’s grace to the human race as he keeps our sin from fully manifesting itself.  

But as sinful human beings, we take God’s grace to us and appropriate its fruit as our own.  We fail to give thanks to him (Rom. 1:21), and we are so bold as to tell him he should overlook our rebellion and wickedness because we have these good qualities that didn’t even come from us to begin with!

Not only does Scripture tell us how wicked we are, but God reveals to us what our sin deserves:  his holy and just wrath.  Ephesians 2:3 describes it well, “we were, by nature, children of wrath”  

ALL of us, even those of us who are believers, apart from Jesus’ saving work on our behalf are facing the wrath of God in Hell for all eternity.  Consider these Bible passages:

Isaiah 63:6  I trampled down the peoples in my anger; I made them drunk in my wrath, and I poured out their lifeblood on the earth.

Jeremiah 21:12,14  …Thus says the Lord:  “Execute justice in the morning, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed, lest my wrath go forth like fire, and burn with none to quench it, because of your evil deeds.…I will punish you according to the fruit of your deeds, declares the Lord; 

Romans 2:5  But because of your  hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.

Romans 1:18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men…

Colossians 3:5-6 Put to death therefore what is earthly in you:  sexual immorality, impurity, passion, evil desire, and covetousness, which is idolatry.  On account of these the wrath of God is coming.

Revelation 6:16-17 Then…everyone, slave and free, hid themselves in the caves and among the rocks of the mountains, calling to the mountains and rocks, “Fall on us and hide us from the face of him who is seated on the throne, and from the wrath of the Lamb, for the great day of their wrath has come, and who can stand?”

God clearly and explicitly reveals in His Word that this wrath is real, and will be eternally experienced by all unrepentant sinners in Hell.  

2 Thess. 1:7-9 …when the Lord Jesus is revealed from heaven with his mighty angels 8 in flaming fire, inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. 9 They will suffer the punishment of eternal destruction, away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of his might…

Matthew 25:41,46  Then (the King) will say to those on his left, depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels….And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.

Revelation 20:15 And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.  Revelation 21:8  But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the detestable, as for murderers, the sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their portion will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulphur, which is the second death.

This is our debt.  We are by nature sinners, who do NOTHING good.  Anything good in us is due to the grace of God.  We are under God’s wrath, and even suffering that wrath for all eternity, our debt could never be paid, for it is an infinite debt.  And THIS is what Jesus paid for us when he hung on the cross!

The more we understand the magnitude of this debt, the more clearly we will see what Jesus did for us, and the more real and manifest to us will be the expression of his love at Calvary.  Tomorrow we will look at God’s love from the angle of what Jesus paid for us.

Over the next three days, I want to post some thoughts on the death of Christ.

Because my access to the internet is limited, I will probably not be able to post anything on Resurrection Day, but I pray that anyone who may run across these thoughts will be better prepared to appreciate the joy of Resurrection Day by meditating on the tremendous grace displayed in the death of Christ as our substitute.

As God’s people, I believe we all desire to truly love one another.  We want to be a community of selfless, giving, servant-hearted brothers and sisters in Christ.  As God’s people we also long to love lost people with God’s love.  We want to be compassionate and caring and earnest in our love for those who do not know Jesus the way we know him–as Savior and Lord.

As God’s people, we know that these desires are within us because of what God did for us through the cross of Christ.  And we know that these desires can only be fulfilled in us because of what God did for us through the cross of Christ.  

We understand that love for one another flows from the love that God has shown us at the cross.  But isn’t there often a disconnect between knowing this in our heads and experiencing it in our daily lives?  What exactly is the connection between God’s loving act in sending Jesus to be our Savior, and the loving acts that we desire to see manifested in our relationships with one another as believers and with the lost people around us?

As we celebrate passion week, I want us to meditate together on the Scripture and ask the Holy Spirit to help us “connect the dots” between God’s love for us shown at Calvary, and our love for each other shown in our life together as a community of believers and in our evangelism of unbelievers.

Basically the dots can be connected with this truth:  We can only love with the love that we have received.  We must be experiencing the love of God in our lives if we hope to love those around us.  And the Scriptures are clear that the way we experience the love of God in our lives is through considering the supreme manifestation of that love at Calvary.

Here are two important Scriptures that point to this truth: 1 John 4:9 and Rom. 5:8. 

1 John 4:9  In this was the love of God manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world…10 In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 

God’s love was “manifested” among us when he sent Jesus to die as our substitute.  Therefore, when we meditate on what Jesus did for us at the cross, it is a means of experiencing personally the love of God that was manifested at the cross of Christ

And Romans 5:8

But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.  

Here Paul says that God “shows” us his love in THIS:  “Christ died for us.”  It is Christ’s death on the cross that shows us God’s love.  This is why the Lord Jesus left us the sacrament of Communion.    If we want a present experience of the love of God for us, we should consider the cross of Christ, because it is in the sacrifice of His Son that God DEMONSTRATES (present tense) his love for us.

However, even understanding this and doing our best to apply it, there are still two barriers that often keep us from experiencing the love of God when we take Communion or whenever we think about what Jesus did for us at the cross.  

1.  We fail to understand the magnitude of our debt.

2.  We fail to understand the magnitude of Jesus’ payment.

Obviously, since Jesus paid our debt these two barriers are related, and therefore, the more we see the magnitude of our debt, the more we will understand what Jesus did for us.  Likewise, the more we see the magnitude of what Jesus experienced as our substitute, the more we will understand what we owed.

Imagine that you are a small business owner whose accountant comes to you and informs you that you owe a huge amount in fines, taxes and penalties.  But out of his generosity, he pays everything you owe and then comes to you and says, “You know, you had a huge debt, but don’t worry about it, I paid it for you.”  

If that is all he says, you may think that he paid just a few dollars, and you may very well appreciate his generosity.   But there are two ways that you can begin to appreciate better what he has done for you.  First of all, he could show you all the paperwork in which the fines and penalties and taxes are listed.  You could look at each one individually and after awhile begin to get a sense of the magnitude of the financial problem you were faced with.  Secondly, he could show you his bank account and as you begin to add up the payments of everything that he had paid for you and see that it cost him everything he had, you would understand the magnitude of what he had done for you.

Applying this to our spiritual debt, we can do the same thing.  First of all, we need to consider our debt, and then we need to consider the payment that Jesus made for us.  Over the next two days, I want to post some thoughts on these two things.