Today is Good Friday, the day Christians commemorate the death of Jesus Christ on a cross. It can be hard to understand why Jesus had to die on the cross. What does “dying for our sins” even mean? To understand the gift of the cross, first we have to understand the attributes of God and our status as sinners.
The Attributes of God
God has many attributes, but two important ones to understand the cross are his holiness and his love.
God's Holiness: This points to “God’s majestic purity, or ethical majesty. Because God is morally pure, He cannot condone evil or have any relationship to it… His holiness is the moral and ethical standard; He is the law. He sets the standard.”
God's Love: John 4:8 says that “God is love.” The love of God “is not a mere emotional impulse, but a rational and voluntary affection, having its ground in truth and holiness and its exercise in free choice.”
The Doctrine of Sin
Sin is a transgression of the law of God. It is rebellion. It is wrongful acts committed against God and other human beings. But sin is “not only an act but also a principle that dwells within man.” It is a characteristic of our very being. From birth, we see ourselves as the measure of what is good and right. We depart from true righteousness and justice. Sin makes us enemies of God. We are all lawbreakers against a holy, all-powerful, perfectly just, perfectly righteous, perfectly good, eternal God.
Think of God as the judge and we as the criminals standing before Him in court. God is a just judge. This means that evil must be rightly punished. But God is also loving, and so He decided to show us grace.
The Cross
This is where the cross comes in. In order to satisfy God’s holiness/justice AND His love, He sent the Son (one of the three persons of the trinity) to earth to die on a cross.
Jesus was born into the world and took on an additional nature (humanity). Though He did not possess man’s sinful, fallen nature, He had to be a real human to die for humanity. But if Jesus were only human, His one death wouldn’t be enough to save us. His deity, His infinite value, was necessary for the full payment of sin. In fact, it was more than enough payment.
“Through Christ’s death the righteous demands of God have been met; it was a legal transaction in which Christ dealt with the sin problem for the human race. He became the substitute for humanity’s sin.”
The incredible love of this act should totally wreck you. That an all powerful, all holy, eternal God would come to earth in order to live, teach, heal the sick, suffer, experience betrayal, and die a long, painful death on a cross to take the place of sinners is an astonishing, beautiful thing. We do not deserve this love, but He gives it anyways.
You will not understand the true love of God until you understand the true weight of sin.
Sin is ugly and evil—not only loud sins like murder and rape, but also the quiet sins of the heart. Sin is sin. And the cost of sin is death.
Praise God for His mercy and grace, that while we were still sinners, while we were still His enemies, He redeemed us through the death of Christ.
“For while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will hardly die for a righteous man; though perhaps for the good man someone would dare even to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life.” - Romans 5:6-10
REFERENCES Quotations are from The Moody Handbook of Theology by Paul Enns
Photo by Thanti Nguyen on Unsplash
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