If you
watch a movie about the death of Jesus Christ on the cross you would have an
understanding of what happened. It’s important that we know the details of
what happened during the passion of Jesus, but it can’t end there, we need to
know more. We need to know why God would
not only allow this brutality, but plan it.
We need to know what God was trying to accomplish by sending his only
Son to die a martyr’s death. There has
to be larger purpose to the cross.
Isaiah
53 contains a detailed description of a servant sent by God who would one day
be rejected by his people, suffer, and die.
In Isaiah’s prophecy we see that this servant would not attract people
to himself because of his beauty (not a celebrity), and that instead he would
be “despised and rejected by men”.
Sadly, that wouldn’t set him apart from the rest of the prophets, the
majority of whom, like Isaiah, were rejected by the people of God. We’re also told that he was a “man of
sorrows, and familiar with suffering.”
So, what is God up to? Why would
he send an ordinary looking servant, only to have him suffer real sorrows, what
would that accomplish?
In
verses four through six we find out that “he took up our infirmities and
carried our sorrows”, and that “he was pierced for our transgressions, he was
crushed for our iniquities”. How can
this be? You or I can’t do anything of
the sort for those we love; any loving parent would do that for his/her child
if possible, but we can’t. So, how can
this servant of God actually take these horrific things from us? As a man just like us, but without sin, Jesus
could do something you or I could never do.
Here is where we understand why
the cross was necessary. It enabled
Jesus to stand in our place so that the “punishment that brought us peace was
upon him.” Sin is rebellion against God,
it has consequences, it has to have consequences or else our existence is
meaningless. Without judgment, anarchy
reigns. Therefore God cannot just ignore
our sins; he can’t just pretend it doesn’t matter. Jesus wasn’t hiding our sin on the cross, he
was carrying it. Jesus wasn’t finding a way
around the consequences for our sins, he was paying for them.
Why did
Jesus die on the cross? To save us from
our sins. It wasn’t to be a good
example, it wasn’t to prove a point, it was to do the only thing that could be
done to reconcile humanity to God. The
next time you watch a depiction of the crucifixion, or contemplate an artist’s
rendering, consider something beyond the nails and the crown of thorn. Consider the heaping pile of moral filth
resting on the shoulders of the innocent Lamb of God. It was this sin that caused the Father to look
away for three hours as darkness covered the land; it was this sin that caused
Jesus to cry out, “my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And it was this sin that Jesus knew he had
fully paid for when he cried out at the end, “It is finished.”
To watch the video, click on the link below:
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