What Did Jesus' Death Accomplish
Written by Ed Allen
Saturday, 17 June 2000 19:00
I want to make two comments today as a preface to our lesson.
First of all, I believe today's lesson covers the most important part of what Christians believe. I will never cover a more important topic. We will cover this same question in different ways at different times, but there will never be a more critical question discussed at Gateway! In order to properly handle such an immensely important topic we are going to discuss what is probably the most important paragraph in what I believe to be the most important book in the Bible. No where does the Bible give a systematic, logical, point-by-point outline of our faith ? no where except Paul's letter to the Romans. And Romans 3:21-26 is the epicenter of this weighty outline. That will be our focus today.
Secondly, you need to know in advance that this message will trace a theological argument. I like what C. S. Lewis says about discussing theology. (Read from pp.135-136 of Mere Christianity.) Today we are going to look at the map and I hope you will use it to go somewhere significant.
I want to begin today by reading a bad illustration. It's a very popular illustration. I'm sure many of you have heard it before. I bet some of you have used it before. But it is inadequate at best and in some ways very misleading as an explanation of the significance of Jesus' death. If we're going to understand what Jesus' death accomplished it will be important for us to see how we have missed understanding it.
The Great Depression settled like a funeral cloak upon the land. Oklahoma, John Griffith's native state, was turned into a swirling dust bowl by the dry winds, and his dreams were swept away with the wind. So he packed up his wife, his tiny baby boy, and their few meager belongings in an old car and drove away to find greener pastures. He thought he might have discovered those on the edge of the Mississippi, where he got a job caring for one of those great, huge railroad bridges that cross the mighty Mississippi.
It was in 1937, Dennis Hensley tells us, when this true story took place. For the first time, he brought his 8-year-old son, Greg Griffith, to work with him to see what Daddy did all day. The little boy was wide-eyed with excitement, and he clapped his hands with glee when the huge bridge went up at the beck and call of his mighty father. He watched with wonderment as the huge boats steamed down the Mississippi.
Twelve o'clock came, and his father put up the bridge. There were no trains due for a good while, and they went out a couple of hundred feet on a catwalk out over the river to an observation deck. They sat down, opened their brown bag, and began to eat their lunch. His father told him about some of the strange, faraway lands that some of these ships were going to visit. This entranced the boy.
The time whirled by, and suddenly they were drawn instantly back to reality by the shrieking of a distant train whistle. John Griffith quickly looked at his watch. He saw that it was time for the 1:07, the Memphis Express, with 400 passengers, which would be rushing across that bridge in just a couple of minutes. He knew he had just enough time, so without panic but with alacrity he told his son to stay where he was.
He leaped to his feet, jumped to the catwalk, ran back, climbed the ladder to the control room went in, put his hand on the huge lever that controlled the bridge, looked up the river and down to see if any boats were coming, as was his custom, and then looked down to see if there were any beneath the bridge. And suddenly he saw a sight that froze his blood and caused his heart to leap into his throat. His boy! His boy had tried to follow him to the control room and had fallen into the great, huge gear box that had the monstrous gears that operated this massive bridge. His left leg was caught between the two main gears, and the father knew that as sure as the sun came up in the morning, if he pushed that lever his son would be ground in the midst of eight tons of whining, grinding steel.
His eyes filled with tears of panic. His mind whirled. What could he do? He saw a rope there in the control room. He could rush down the ladder and out the catwalk, tie off the rope, lower himself down, extricate his son, climb back up the rope, run back into the control room, and lower the bridge. No sooner had his mind done that exercise than he knew--he knew there wasn't time. He'd never make it, and there were 400 people on that train. Suddenly he heard the whistle again, this time startlingly closer. And he could hear the clicking of the locomotive wheels on the track, and he could hear the rapid puffing of the train. What could he do? What could he do! There were 400 people, but this was ... this was his son, this was his only son. He was a father! He knew what he had to do, so he buried his head in his arm and he pushed the gear forward.
The great bridge slowly lowered into place just as the express train roared across. He lifted up his tear-smeared face and looked straight into the flashing windows of that train as they flashed by one after another. He saw men reading the afternoon paper, a conductor in uniform looking at a large vest-pocket watch, ladies sipping tea out of teacups, and little children pushing long spoons into plates of ice cream. Nobody looked in the control room. Nobody looked at his tears. Nobody, nobody looked down to the great gear box.
In heart-wrenching agony, he beat against the window of the control room, and he said, "What's wrong with you people? Don't you care? I sacrificed my son for you. Don't any of you care?" Nobody looked. Nobody heard. Nobody heeded. And the train disappeared across the river.
(Taken from D. James Kennedy, "Message from an Empty Tomb")
This illustration helps us see the subtle way that the significance of Jesus' death has often been misunderstood. Let's unpack Romans 3:21-26 and you will see what I mean.
Romans 3:21-26
(21) But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. (22) This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, (23) for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, (24) and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. (25) God presented him as a sacrifice of atonement, through faith in his blood. He did this to demonstrate his justice, because in his forbearance he had left the sins committed beforehand unpunished-- (26) he did it to demonstrate his justice at the present time, so as to be just and the one who justifies those who have faith in Jesus.
This letter was written to a group of people who were well-versed in OT concepts. In order to get the full scope of what he is saying we will need a cliff notes version of those concepts.
- Covenant outlined the scope of righteousness both for God and for us.
- Law given to outline our part.
- God is righteous in that He acts according to His end of the covenant. We are not righteous because we cannot keep the law, our end of the covenant.
- Summary of the first three chapters of Romans:
- Paul says that non-Jews never had the law, but that they know instinctively that they should behave in a way that mimics the demands of the law. When they don't do that they violate their own consciences. Since they can not consistently live within the demands of their own consciences, they are exactly the same as lawbreakers.
- Even more so, the Jews have the law and therefore know exactly what God commands. Yet they cannot keep the law. We are all lawbreakers.
- In OT the failure of God's people to maintain relational fellowship with God is usually called unfaithfulness. The failure to keep the demands of the law is called violating or breaking God's command or His word.
- In the NT the writers call on a new word. It is hamartia. In ancient Greek this word meant missing the mark or loosing something or to be mistaken. By the time of the NT, people used this word to speak of messing up relationships, missing the mark with others. We translate this word as sin.
- System of sacrifices was established to atone for our lawbreaking.
- Sacrifices were never adequate because the people did not stop breaking the law. We, all of us, are the kind of people who leaned away from God. You can tell a lot about a person by which direction they are leaning. We consistently lean away from God.
So we are trapped. We are people who move away from God. We are lawbreakers and the penalty for lawbreaking is destruction.
- Law of Gravity ? drop something ? it falls.
- Similarly, God has built a moral code into the fabric of the universe ? a law which cannot be cheated. Drop the ball = fall. Break the Law = death
Now, do you remember our bad illustration? The first serious problem with the picture presented by this illustration is that you and I were not innocently riding by on the train! We were the kind of people who were unfaithful to God. We violated His command. We were heading headlong into destruction, eternally separated from God. It is not just that we have ignored Him. We have scorned His universal moral law. We have recklessly flirted with disaster and we have lost.
Romans 3:21-23
"But now, a way of being right with God, a new kind of righteousness, apart from doing everything the law requires has been made known to us. This way was even hinted at in the Law itself and certainly by the Prophets. This new way of being right with God is accessed, not by perfect behavior, not by being born in the right family, not by thinking you believe in God, but by wholly trusting in him and in what He's done on your behalf. It comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. You don't even have to be one of those people who understands everything that the Law teaches. It doesn't matter who you are. In fact we all stand in the same place before God. We all have violated His commands. We all have been unfaithful in our devotion to Him."
If we have been unfaithful, if we have broken God's law and are now suffering the consequences; if we are falling toward eternal destruction like a ball dropped from my hand, then why doesn't God just forgive us and make it all go away? If death was the logical consequence of our actions, and this was God's standard, why not just drop the standard since He made the standard to begin with?
- The universe is a manifestation of God's character. God is just and He could not be other than what He is! He could not defy His own character. If He is perfect, then by definition He could not ignore the requirements of perfection. He could not choose to forget justice. By so doing, He would be less than what He is.
- Such cheaper terms of forgiveness would lower, or denigrate our dignity as God's morally accountable creature. He would in a sense, force us to be less than He made us to be.
Romans 3:24-25a
"Those of us who have violated God's design for us have had the demands of that design satisfied on our behalf. We are justified without actually having to meet those demands, by God's grace. This happened because someone else met those demands on our behalf. The demands of God's design for us ? designs that grew out of His character - have been met by Jesus Christ. God offered him up as the one who would suffer the negative consequences of our actions. His sacrifice cleared the way for us to meet the requirements of God. Again, this standing before God is accessed by faith in his blood, the result of his suffering."
I like how a Christian speaker named Stuart Briscoe imagined this ? Years ago when I was a young banker, we used big leather ledgers where all accounts were entered by hand. I remember daydreaming about those ledgers and God's ledgers in heaven. We are told those books will be opened. I imagined my name, David Stuart Briscoe, and God adding up the sum total of my indebtedness against him. I could never cancel the overwhelming indebtedness. In my mind's eye, I saw God take his pen and transfer the sum total of my indebtedness to the account of the Lord Jesus Christ. On the account of the Lord Jesus, he wrote, "Transferred from the account of David Stuart Briscoe. "
I thought God was finished. But then I saw him do something incredible. He added up the total righteousness of Christ and against it wrote these words, "Transferred to the account of David Stuart Briscoe." That's love.
CONCLUSION
All of this is accessed through faith. By faith, the Bible means a heart-felt devotion to God, a willful decision to trust Him with your life, and an intellectual understanding of what Christ did for us.
You see, Jesus' suffering was not a just a wonderful powerful example of self- sacrifice. It was an absolute necessity. God's justice demanded that His universal design be satisfied. The lack of satisfaction necessitated certain consequences. Jesus suffered those consequences so that we might enjoy the benefits of God's design and so that he might enjoy our enjoyment of them. When the Bible speaks of our salvation, it does not mean that we are saved from the devil or from Hell. We are saved from God Himself. If we have not trusted fully in the satisfaction accomplished by Jesus' sacrifice, then we stand unprotected in the sight of the fury of God's justice.
A duck hunter was with a friend in the wide-open land of southeastern Georgia. Far away on the horizon he noticed a cloud of smoke. Soon he could hear crackling as the wind shifted. He realized the terrible truth: a brushfire was advancing, so fast they couldn't outrun it. Rifling through his pockets, he soon found what he was looking for a book of matches. He lit a small fire around the two of them. Soon they were standing in a circle of blackened earth, waiting for the fire to come. They didn't have to wait long. They covered their mouths with handkerchiefs and braced themselves. The fire came near -- and swept over them. But they were completely unhurt, untouched. Fire would not pass where fire had already passed. The law is like a brushfire. I cannot escape it. But if I stand in the burned over place, not a hair of my head will be singed. Christ's death is the burned over place. There I huddle, hardly believing yet relieved. The law is powerful, yet powerless: Christ's death has disarmed it.
You can now see the real problem with our bad illustration. Christ is "the burned over place." He took the fall for my lawbreaking. He died my death. He did this to satisfy God's justice so that God could be both just and the one who justifies. All of this means that Jesus did not accidentally wander into the giant gear box of God's own fury. No, God threw Him there in our place.
Since I broke God's law, death was inevitable ? just as inevitable as falling is the consequence for this ball when I drop it. God placed my death on Jesus. I broke the law ? JESUS DIED. And because he died, I can now live.
All of this is accessed by faith. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son that whoever believes in him will not die but live forever." Do you believe?