Thank God for God, thank God for Jesus, thank God for The Cross, and thank God for the death of Jesus Christ upon it, because He died as an atonement sacrifice for my sins and for your sins, so that we do not have to die.
Because, brothers and sisters in Christ, we have discovered the truth.
The truth that God has been trying to tell us all along, that death is not final.
It never was, and there is life after our death in this world.
It’s an eternal life, and the only choice we have to make now is where do we want to spend our life in eternity, with God or without God. In the radiance of His glory, or in another dark place.
As we consider this decision, we should also ask the question, what was it all for?
Why did Jesus have to die in such agony.
Well as I been trying to explain for some weeks now our God is a God of balances. Checks and balances.
In heaven there is only perfection and before we, who are imperfect beings, can live again there, in the presence of Almighty God, our sins must be atoned for.
You remember atonement?
Atonement was the process by which Old Testament Jews recognised their offences against God and made a sacrifice at the temple to atone for it.
Last week I preached from 2nd Samuel 24 wherein the prophet Gad leads king David to the realisation that he had sinned against God and must make atonement for it.
That particular atonement cost David dear, about 12 pounds of silver which in today's money would equate to just under £2000.
That particular atonement came about because king David, the leader of a nation, had defied God and the consequences were enormous.
In response to David’s sin God punished Israel for the sins of its leader.
God sent The Angel Of Death to Israel and a plague descended up the people.
Over a period of three days 70,000 of them died and the only thing that stopped it was David’s realisation of his sin and his atonement sacrifice.
In previous weeks I have also spoken about God making corrections to the way that we relate to Him, the way we view Him and that was one of them.
The crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus was another such correction event.
The modern-day Christian has been conditioned to only view God in a certain light, and to most of us He is ‘The God Of Love’, and that’s great because He is, but we must not forget that He is also ‘The God of judgement’, and, as I proclaimed last Sunday, Judgement belongs to The Lord.
Remember 2nd Corinthians 5:10 wherein The Apostle Paul states; “For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each of us may receive what is due us for the things done while in the body, whether good or bad.”
John of Patmos, the last Apostle, saw the vision of that Day of Judgement which he describes in Revelation 20:11-15 (NIV); “Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. The earth and the heavens fled from his presence, and there was no place for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books. The sea gave up the dead that were in it, and death and Hades gave up the dead that were in them, and each person was judged according to what they had done. Then death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. The lake of fire is the second death. Anyone whose name was not found written in the book of life was thrown into the lake of fire.
So, as you can see judgement is a very real aspect of our relationship with God.
And I said just now, He is a God of perfection and everything in heaven and on earth must be perfectly balanced in His sight, and Jesus, Emmanuel, God with us, provided that balance.
His death in agony on the cross was the atonement sacrifice for all the world, for everyone in it, and for every sin they ever committed, and ever will commit.
Why would God come to earth in the flesh with the expressed intention to die in agony?
Surely there must be a better way, but actually there is no better way.
Remember that God is perfection and Jesus was the perfect atonement sacrifice for all the sins of the world.
It is not true to say that He is a perfectionist because that would suggest that ‘if at first He doesn’t succeed He would try and try again’ until He gets it right where in fact He never gets it wrong, because He is perfection.
Consider, if you can the amount of sin in the world, then and now, and I think you would agree with me that it is actually beyond our comprehension.
If we could comprehend it, we would be defeated instantly, squashed flat, with the weight of it.
But we are human and God is God and He is above us in every way, and He can see the sin of all the world. In fact, he can see all of the sin for all of the time.
He can comprehend it and He is not defeated by it; in fact, He is triumphant over it.
The bible clearly tells us that ‘the wages, or penalty, of sin is death’. We are all going to die in this world but the death that The Apostle Paul talks about in his letter to the church in Rome, Romans 6:23, is actually the second death that John of Patmos predicts in his vision of Judgement Day in Revelation 20:15.
But because God, in the person of the human Jesus Christ came to earth and willingly died as our atonement sacrifice we, who believe in Him and follow His teachings, are saved from the second death witch would snuff out our eternal life because, as Paul goes on to point out, ‘the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord’.
Hallelujah.
And today we remember that Jesus not only died so that we may have eternal life but He also rose again from death to show us, who have little faith, what God has been trying to tell us all along, and that is that Death is not final. It never was. There is more to come.
This week I read a prayer on twitter from Justin Welby, The Arch Bishop of Canterbury, in which he said, “Jesus has gone on ahead of us into the darkness. He has been there before us and He knows the way out”
Do not be deceived by those that tell you that there is some other way into heaven because there is not.
Following the gospel message of Jesus Christ is the only way.
Today is Resurrection Day and on this day nearly 2000 years ago Mary found the stone of the tomb of a dead man rolled away and she met the dead man again, and He was alive, and our way of relating to God was forever changed because of Jesus.
At the beginning I asked the question, why did Jesus have to die in such agony and the answer is that it was for you and for me.
And He rose again from the dead to take away our fear of death, because we now know that death is not final. We can live forever if we place our trust in the teachings of Jesus Christ and our faith in The Love of God.
Jesus said, “Very truly I tell you, whoever hears my word, and believes him who sent me, has eternal life and will not be judged but has crossed over from death to life.” John 5:24 (NIV)
In Jesus name, amen.
