The Gospel of Jesus Christ (15) The Death of Jesus Christ (2)

“For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” (2Co 5:14-15)
 
Review
We’ve been talking about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Two weeks ago, we started to talk about the most important part of the gospel—the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.
 
In the last sermon about the gospel, we discussed the ultimate reason that caused Jesus to shed His precious blood and die on the cross.
 
We can answer the question, "Why did Jesus die?” in many ways. We can simply say that He died because He bore our sins in His body. And that’s correct.
 
However, we tried to focus more on who God is to address the issue because even though we were the direct cause of Jesus' death, it was God who actually decided to send Him to earth and have Him die on the cross. So, we tried to understand the reasons that led God to make that decision with regard to His attributes.
 
There are many important attributes of God, but we focused on His love and righteousness, which are directly tied to Jesus’ death.
 
What we know from God’s righteousness and justice is that He hates sin and He always requires a penalty be paid for sins. Even though He is God, He can’t just forgive sinners without a price  because that goes against His justice.
 
As God reveals in the books of Moses, He is not a god who acquits the guilty. It’s an abomination to God to call the guilty innocent and the innocent guilty. Therefore, for sinners to be forgiven, the price for their sins must be paid.
 
The problem is that the price for the forgiveness of one’s sins is too costly, and no one in the world is able to pay for their or others’ sins. That’s the reason God sent His Son into the world.
 
Jesus Christ could pay the ransom for all people’s sins because He was sinless as a human being, and He could represent all human beings as the Son of God. So Jesus Christ came to the world and died on the cross to pay the price for all our sins and thus meet the righteous requirement of God with regard to the penalty of sin.
 
And what we also know from this is the depth of God’s love for us. It wasn’t necessary for God to save anyone. He wasn't the one who sinned. He didn’t have to sacrifice anything for us. But still, even though God didn’t have any responsibility or obligation to pay the ransom for sin, He chose to sacrifice His most precious one—His one and only Son, Jesus Christ—for worthless sinners like us who don’t deserve His grace at all.
 
That’s the great love of God we see in Jesus being crucified. That’s why we can say that God's love and justice were the ultimate reasons for Jesus’ death. In order to meet the righteous requirement of God, Jesus died for our sins in our place. And this shows us how much God loves us. As 1 John 4:10 says,
 
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” (1Jn 4:10)
 
The Death of Jesus
All right. Let’s continue to talk about the death of Jesus. Today, we’ll talk about what Jesus had to go through to pay the ransom for our sins on the cross, the blessings it has brought to us, and how we should apply His death in our lives.
 
The Pain of the Cross
Even though Jesus went through hardships and difficulties even before being crucified, His suffering intensified as He drew near to the cross.
 
And Jesus knew exactly what He would soon go through. So, while He was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane right before being arrested, He told His disciples, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Mt 26:38)
 
So, it was on the cross that Jesus’ suffering for us reached its climax, for it was there that He bore the penalty for our sins and died in our place. Scripture teaches us that there were four different aspects of the pain that Jesus experienced. He suffered physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually.
 
(1) Physical Pain and Death
Let’s first think about the physical pain Jesus went through on the cross.
 
First of all, we  won’t  stipulate that Jesus suffered more physical pain than any human being has ever suffered. The Bible  makes no such claim anywhere. But we must remember that crucifixion was one of the most horrible forms of execution ever designed by human beings.
 
 
Even though we may not fully know how cruel crucifixion was because we’ve only ever read about it, many readers of the gospels in the ancient world would have had a vivid picture of it since they saw it with their own eyes.
 
As you may know, crucifixion was one of the Roman capital punishments reserved for the most vicious criminals. A criminal who was crucified was forced to endure a very slow death.
 
When the criminals’ arms were outstretched and fastened by nails to the cross, they had to support most of the weight of their bodies with their arms. The chest would be pulled upward and outward, making it difficult to breathe.
 
When they couldn’t breathe, they would push themselves up with their feet to give more support to the weight of their bodies. By doing so, they were able to release some of the weight from their arms so that they could breathe better.
 
But pushing themselves upward in this way was extremely painful because it required putting the weight of their bodies on the nails holding their feet.
 
The criminals’ backs were whipped before being crucified. So when they were crucified, their backs were already torn open. And their backs would repeatedly scrape against the rough wood with each breath.
 
As a result, the criminals would suffer severely every time they tried to breathe. It was like they were torturing themselves. But they couldn’t stop because they had to breathe while enduring severe pain in their arms, feet, and back. And it didn’t end quickly.
 
In some cases, crucified criminals would live for several days. This was why the executioners sometimes broke their legs, so that death would come more quickly.
 
That’s what we read in John 19:31-33, which says, “Now it was the day of Preparation, and the next day was to be a special Sabbath. Because the Jewish leaders did not want the bodies left on the crosses during the Sabbath, they asked Pilate to have the legs broken and the bodies taken down. The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs.” (Jn 19:31-33)
 
In order to make sure Jesus was dead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus’ side with a spear, and blood and water flowed out of Him.
 
By being crucified in this way, Jesus fulfilled what was prophesied in the Old Testament. Psalm 34:20 says, “He protects all his bones,
not one of them will be broken” (Ps 34:20).
 
And Zechariah 12:10 says, “They will look on me, the one they have pierced, and they will mourn for him as one mourns for an only child, and grieve bitterly for him as one grieves for a firstborn son” (Zch 12:10)
 
That was the physical pain Jesus had to go through on the cross. He was whipped severely,  nailed,  speared, and His head bled from a crown of thorns. But that wasn’t the only pain Jesus experienced.
 
(2) The Pain of Bearing Sin
More awful than the physical pain that Jesus endured would be the pain of bearing the guilt for our sin. In our own experience as Christians we know the feeling of anguish we feel when we sin.
 
And this mental and psychological pain is even greater for more moral people. In fact, the more we grow in holiness as God’s children, the more intensely we feel this kind of anguish in our hearts. That’s what prevents us from loving sin and makes us seek God’s holiness instead.
 
Jesus was perfectly holy. Unlike us, He was sinless. He never knew sin. We love sin but He hated sin with His entire being. There was no evil in Him. Sin contradicted everything in His character.
 
But, in obedience to the Father and out of His great love for us, Jesus took on Himself all the sins of the world, including ours. These sins included the kinds of sins we consider small like lying or laziness, but also all the horrible, vicious sins of the world that we can’t even imagine. Such sins would have been very difficult for us to bear even though we are sinners.
 
Imagine, then, how hard it was for Jesus to bear the weight of all the sins. Imagine the agony He had to go through as He actually, not metaphorically, bore every sin of the world along with their guilt.
 
But still, Jesus did so because He loved us and that was the only way to save us from sin and its terrible consequences. We find many passages in the Scriptures that say that our sins were put on Christ.
 
The prophet Isaiah said, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Is 53:6). And he continued, “He was oppressed and afflicted” (Is 53:7).
 
John the Baptist calls Jesus “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (Jn 1:29). The apostle Paul declares that “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Cor 5:21)
 
The author of Hebrews says, “Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many” (Heb 9:28). Lastly, Peter said, “He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth… [yet] He himself bore our sins” (1Pt 2:24)
 
What these verses indicate is that it was actually God the Father who put our sins on Christ. It means that God counted all our sins as if they actually belonged to Christ. This was possible because God is the Judge who has authority over all people. God could’ve left us in our sins, but He chose to put all our sins on His only Son in order to save us.
 
Some may think that it wasn’t fair for God to transfer the guilt of sin from us to an innocent person, Christ. Yet we must remember that Christ willingly and voluntarily took the guilt for our sins on Himself.
That was the second kind of pain Jesus had to go through as a result of bearing our sins in His body. But that’s not all.
 
(3) The Pain of Being Abandoned
Jesus also suffered emotionally by being abandoned by those He was closest to and even by His heavenly Father. While living on earth, a lot of people followed Jesus, especially His disciples. He chose them and spent most of His time with them.  Jesus even called them ‘friends,’ even though He was their teacher. They were the only people He confided in.
 
Before being arrested by soldiers, while Jesus was struggling in prayer, He asked three of the disciples to stay there with Him. They were the only ones Jesus could rely on on earth. However, Matthew 26:56 says that as soon as He was arrested,
 
“All the disciples deserted him and fled” (Mt 26:56). Peter even denied Jesus three times. When Jesus was hung on the cross, most of His disciples weren’t there. When Jesus was going through the most painful and difficult time of His life on the cross, His closest friends deserted Him and fled. Imagine the emotional pain Jesus had to go through.
 
However, what’s far worse than the desertion by Jesus’ closest human friends was that He was abandoned by His heavenly Father. The oneness, closeness, joy, and intimacy Jesus had with God was very deep. Since before the creation of the world, Jesus had never been separated from His Father. His closeness with His Father was His deepest joy throughout His entire life on earth.
 
But Jesus experienced separation from the Father. Right before dying on the cross, Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
 
It shows that Jesus was completely cut off from His heavenly Father. And that’s solely because He bore our sins.
 
(4) The Pain of Being Cursed and Bearing the Wrath of God
Jesus also suffered spiritually by bearing all the terrible consequences of sin, such as separation from God, the curse of sin, the wrath of God, and death.
 
In the Old Testament, to be hung on a pole meant to be cursed. When the Israelites were cursed by God in their rebellion against Him and were bitten by snakes, God commanded Moses to make a pole and put a bronze snake on it. Whoever looked at the bronze snake was healed. The snake was a symbol of the curse of sin.
 
And Jesus said that He had to be lifted up like the bronze snake in the wilderness. It meant that He would be cursed. But still, He willingly chose to be cursed by God by bearing our sins in order to set us free from the curse of sin.
 
As Paul said, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.” (Gl 3:13)
 
Not only that, but Jesus became the object of God's wrath on the cross. As Jesus bore the guilt of our sins, God poured out on Jesus the fury of His wrath, which we deserved as sinners. By doing so, Jesus appeased God’s wrath towards sinners.
 
1 John 2:2 says, “He is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not only for ours but also for the sins of the whole world.” (1Jn 2:2)
 
Here, the Greek word that is translated as ‘the atoning sacrifice’ is ἱλασμός (hilasmos), which is an important word to understand Jesus’ ministry of the cross.
 
It is also translated as ‘propitiation’ in other versions of the Bible. Propitiation is an important theological word which means “to satisfy the wrath of another person by means of an offering or a gift.”
 
So by calling Jesus hilasmos, propitiation, John makes it clear that Jesus wasn’t only abandoned or cursed by God, but was also subject to the wrath of God.
 
These were the pains that Jesus went through by bearing our sins on the cross. He suffered physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually. As a result, we became able to be set free from the curse of sin, the wrath of God, and eternal punishment and death.
 
We were sinners who deserved the wrath of God, but now we’re God’s beloved children. We were God’s enemies who were heading to eternal punishment for our sins, but now we’re reconciled with God through the precious blood of Jesus Christ and have eternal life in Him. Jesus took all our sins, along with their curses, so that He could bless us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms.
 
That’s the reason we celebrate the death of Jesus Christ, not because we think He deserved it, but because of all the great blessings He has given us through His death and His great love for us that He demonstrated on the cross.
 
How to Live out the Meaning of Jesus’ Death
Then, if we really believe that Jesus died for our sins, how should we respond to His death?
 
The apostle Paul clearly stated how we should apply the meaning of His death in our lives. He said, “We are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.” (2Co 5:14)
 
After saying, “He himself bore our sins” in his body on the cross,” Peter also continues, “So that we might die to sins and live for righteousness” (1Pt 2:25)
 
Jesus died in our place. It was actually us who had to be cursed, abandoned, and subjected to the wrath of God and die on the cross. So if we truly believe in Jesus Christ and all the work He did on the cross, we should consider ourselves dead to sin.
 
We shouldn’t go back to our past lives where we used to follow the ways of the world and try to gratify our desires of the flesh while disobeying God. If we claim to believe in Jesus Christ but still do these things without repenting of our sins and returning to God, it’s like “a dog that returns to its vomit” (2Pt 2:22)
 
We should remember that the reason Jesus died for our sins is not only to cleanse us from them but to reconcile us with God so that we might live as His holy children by doing good deeds in His sight. So, if we claim to have faith in Jesus but neglect to repent of our sins, return to our heavenly Father, and live a holy life in Him, we make Christ’s death in vain.
 
We shouldn’t go back to the sins for which Jesus died. If we really love Him and are loved by Him, we shouldn’t make His noble sacrifice simply a means to rationalize our sins. Rather, we should live for righteousness as those who are freely justified, saved, and redeemed by God’s grace.
 
When Paul said “where sin increased, grace increased all the more” (Rm 5:20), some people started to ask him, “Shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase?” (Rom 6:1)
 
They were people who tried to use God’s grace as a means of rationalizing their sins. But Paul firmly rejected this idea. Rather, he answered,
 
“We are those who have died to sin; how can we live in it any longer?” (Rom 6:2)
 
To Paul, believing in Jesus is no different from dying to sin. Then, this must be true for us as well. If we really believe that Jesus died for our sins and are thankful for all the kinds of pain He went through to pay the ransom for our sins, we should also crucify ourselves along with Christ to sin and try to live for righteousness with the new life He has given us. I believe that’s the purpose of Jesus dying for our sins.
 
If we only take advantage of His death while neglecting the gospel’s call to repent of our sins and live a sanctified life in God, we make His sacrifice meaningless.
 
So, I want us to consider more deeply the meaning and the purpose of Jesus dying for our sins so that we may live lives worthy of the calling we’ve received from God as His justified and sanctified people in the world.
 
Now, let’s read Titus 2:11-14 before we wrap up.
“For the grace of God has appeared that offers salvation to all people. It teaches us to say “No” to ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright and godly lives in this present age, while we wait for the blessed hope - the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all wickedness and to purify for himself a people that are his very own, eager to do what is good.” (Ti 2:11-14)
 
Now, let’s sing ‘Living Hope’ one more time and take time to pray.
 
________________
Today, we talked about the kinds of pain that Jesus Christ had to go through on the cross. Because He bore our sins in His body, He experienced all kinds of extreme pain on the cross. He was physically tortured,  abandoned, cursed by God, and subjected to His wrath.
 
Because Jesus was punished, we’re healed. Because He was cursed, we’re blessed. Because He became the subject of God’s wrath in our place, we are able to be forgiven and be God’s beloved children.
 
If we really remember all these things and sincerely believe them, we shouldn’t make His sacrifice be in vain by returning to our sins for which He died. Rather, we should consider ourselves dead to sin and alive to God.
 
So let’s think about the meaning and the purpose of Jesus’ death more deeply. And, let’s pray that God opens our minds and hearts to the truth of Jesus Christ so that we may realize the meaning of His death and have true faith, which clearly demonstrates that Jesus Christ is our Lord in our transformed lives.
 
We may want this life, but we can’t do it alone. So, let’s humbly ask God to fill us with the Holy Spirit so that we may experience Christ in our lives and continue to be conformed to His image day after day. Let’s pray.
 
[Prayer]
Dear God, thank You for giving us this opportunity to think about the meaning of the death of Jesus Christ, Your Son.
 
Oh Lord, even though we claim to have faith in Him, there have been many moments that we’ve lived without Him. Rather, we constantly go back to our sins without even realizing it.
 
Please have mercy on us, Lord. We don’t want His death to have been in vain. We don’t want to make His sacrifice mean nothing. So, let us be thankful for His death, but more than that, help us live out the reason for Jesus’ death.
 
We invite You into our hearts. Please come, cleanse us, and rule over us so that we might die to sin with the death of Jesus Christ and live in righteousness with His resurrection. We pray that only Your name is revealed and glorified through our lives. Continue to work in us and change us according to Your good purpose in Christ Jesus.
 
In the name of Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord, we pray. Amen.
 
[Reflection Questions]
1. Do you believe that Jesus died for your sins? If so, what changes do you think your faith in His death must bring to your life? Have you experienced or seen any of them in your life?
 
2. What do you think it means that you die to sin and live in righteousness with Jesus Christ? How should Christians live this out? What are some obstacles that prevent you from doing so?