Secondly, by his death, Jesus took on himself the full consequence of living turned away from God.
We have already seen that when we live turned away from God, when we sin as the Bible puts it, we are cut off from God and that when we live cut off from God, death encroaches on us. We have already seen that because we have all at some point in our lives turned away from God, we all inevitably experience death as a consequence.
Jesus never lived cut off or separated from God. Ever. Not even for a moment. He lived fully in the light of God’s Love, fully in relationship with Him, fully aligned to God. Death was not a consequence he deserved or had to live with.
But he willingly chose to take on himself the effect of living turned away from God. He willingly took death on himself. Peter, one of Jesus’ closest earthly friends, says: “He himself carried our sin in his body.”
The Bible sometimes talks about the wrath of God, which people often misunderstand to mean his anger against us. The wrath of God is not directed at us as much as at ‘it’, at the way things have turned out, at the fact that death has a claim on us, at the way sin separates us from God and prevents us from being able to receive the Love He lavishes on us. God’s wrath can be compared to the raging anger a parent feels when their child is going through pain, or being bullied or abused in some way. It is not anger directed at the beloved child. Not in this case.
Jesus experienced the full impact of God’s wrath, God’s anger at how things had become and at all that which cuts us off from Him, from His Love. He experienced death and at the same time, for the first time ever, he experienced separation from God. As he dies, he bears the full brunt of that separation. “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?!” Jesus cries moments before he dies.
And so, in his death, the consequence of being cut off from God, the consequence of living separated from God, living turned away from God has been met. The consequence of sin for mankind might be death, but a man has taken the consequence! Using a transactional, legal analogy, the debt of sin has been paid. Sin no longer has a ‘legal’ right on mankind. It can no longer require death as a consequence! Turning away from God had trapped us and made it impossible for us to turn back to God by our own effort. But Jesus paid the ‘ransom’ that was required in order to release the world from sin that held us prisoner. The Bible tells us that living turned away from God, or sin to put it another way, is death’s sting. (1 Corinthians 1 5:56) And so through Jesus’ death, death has lost its sting[1]. Death can now no longer claim the right to separate man from God’s Love. Anyone who wants to is now able to turn towards God again. The way into the fullness of a relationship with God, a relationship characterised entirely by Love, is now free and open.
That is excellent news! [1] Once, when Jesus was chatting to a man called Nicodemus, he reminds Nicodemus of an incident that happened in the history of the nation Israel. It happened during the time in their history when they spent years wandering round in the desert. One day lots of poisonous snakes come into the camp, biting people and people died. God told Moses, the leader of the nation at that time, to make a snake out of bronze and to put it up on a pole. If people looked at the bronze snake, the poison of the snakes would have no effect on them. Jesus uses this picture to explain to Nicodemus that in the same way, anyone who looks at him (Jesus) and believes, would not be affected by the poison of sin, but would live. Because at the end of the day, God is Love. And he loves the world so much that he sent Jesus, the only one qualified to become the antidote to the poison of sin, so that whoever believes him will not die, but will live.
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