Dying Was His Reason for Living
The Plot: Why Did Jesus Have to Die
Brad Crocker
Landmark Christian Church, Chippewa Falls, WI
2/2004
Confusion happens when you miss the first part of the story.
If the first line you heard in Gone with the Wind was Rhett’s parting shot at Scarlett, you would probably have wondered, “Why is he being so rude to that poor lady?”
If you had walked in halfway through The Return of the King without having seen the other two in the trilogy, you probably would have wondered, “Why are they risking their lives over a ring, and why is that really ugly thing their guide?”
If you had walked in halfway through Tootsie or Mrs. Doubtfire, you would have wondered why Dustin Hoffman and Robin Williams were crossdressing.
Confusion happens when you miss the first part of the story.
The Passion of the Christ doesn’t give you the first part of the story. It picks up at the very end of Jesus’ life, which is also the most important part of His life – the reason why He came to earth. But because it picks up at the end, it leaves many people wondering, “Why did they hate this guy so much? Why did people want to kill Him? What does His death mean? Why did Jesus have to die?”
To understand Rhett’s rudeness, Frodo’s quest or Dustin Hoffman’s wardrobe, you have to go back and watch the movie from the beginning. Then it would all make sense. To understand the meaning of Jesus’ death you also have to go back – all the way back to the beginning of His story, which is also the beginning of the story of our world.
Today I want to help you better understand why Jesus died by tracing the plot line of our world, which just happens to parallel a classic plot line in many movies and books.
1. Classic Plotline
There are five major elements to the plot of countless stories.
The first element is
A. Idyllic Beginning
Many stories begin with the world, or at least some part of the world, as we all think it ought to be. This may be a family that is happily enjoying life together. It could be a whole community peaceful and prosperous. Romance movies illustrate this beautiful beginning with the famous couple montage that to the background of sweet music shows scenes of the couple together, running in the park, sharing and ice cream cone, laughing falling into each other’s arms – these make many men gag but they get the point across. The world couldn’t be better.
Finding Nemo begins with the world just right. The opening scene shows an in-love clownfish couple that has just found its first home (a sea anemone) and is about to have a bunch of little baby clownfish.
But then, a barracuda appears, and we are on to the next classic plot element
B. Ruinous Problem
The barracuda attacks the clownfish couple, killing the wife and all the babies except one – a little clownfish named Nemo that survives but suffers permanent damage to one of his fins. The father, Marlin, also survives, but is traumatized by the attack and becomes suffocatingly overprotective of Nemo. Nemo, during an act of rebellion, subsequently gets captured by a scuba-diving dentist and taken far away to the fish tank in the dentist’s office in Sydney, Australia. Marlin is devastated.
If there is one plot element that is universal, it is the intrusion of a problem. There is a problem or a conflict or a disaster in virtually every story ever told or every movie ever made. There is always something bad that happens or threatens to happen that sets in peril whatever goodness the people have found.
Sometimes there are dark forces of evil or a sinister plot. Sometimes there is a tragic death or a vicious crime. Other movies have more subtle problems like cultural conflicts, misunderstandings, or misplaced priorities. But there is always a fall, some sort of bad thing that ruins what was good.
This leads to the third classic story element:
C. Improbable Solution
In the case of Finding Nemo, his father has to go find Nemo, which means he has to figure out where Nemo sped off to in the boat, swim all the way there, and then retrieve him out of a fish tank – hard to do when all you have to work with is fins.
Mission Impossible put the name to this plot element, but it is very common. A task with virtually no chance of success has to be attempted.
The fourth classic plot element then is that, despite all the odds, the hero attains success.
D. Surprising Success
Amazingly, through perseverance, bravery and luck, the hero somehow accomplishes his feat.
[Show Finding Nemo clip which begins at 58:30 and ends at 59:37. The following takes place in the clip.]
A pelican named Nigel lands in the window of the dentist office where Nemo
lives and tells him and amazing tale.
“Nemo, your father’s been fighting the entire ocean looking for you!”
“My father?” Nemo incredulously asks.
“Oh, yeah! He’s been battling sharks and jellyfish,”
“It’s my dad! He took on a shark!” Nemo proudly exclaims.
Nigel says, “I heard he took on three.”
Nemo is dumbfounded, “Three?”
Nigel explains, “You see, kid, after you were taken, your dad started swimming
around like a maniac. He took on three sharks. He battled an entire jellyfish
forest. Now he’s riding a bunch of sea turtles on the east Australian current,
and the word is he’s headed this way right now to Sydney.”
One of the fish in the tank with Nemo sums up the feelings of all when she says, “What a great daddy!”
The impossible takes awhile, but it gets accomplished. Then comes the final element –
E. Enhanced Restoration
The beauty of the beginning is restored, and then some. The original goodness is back, but the overcoming of the difficulties has made it all sweeter, the characters stronger and wiser. At the end of Nemo, not only are Marlin and Nemo together again, but Marlin has a new confidence which makes him a far better father to his son.
So that is a plot line that you have read or seen countless times. Why is it so common? Why are parts of it almost universally found in stories?
I think this plot line continues to reverberate so profoundly in the human soul because it is an echo of the story of our world. This is the plot line of earth – of God, the world He made and the people who inhabit it.
Using these same 5 elements, let me share with you what the Bible gives as the history of our world. The Passion of the Christ depicts the dramatic high point of this story, so when understand the whole plot, you will understand why Jesus died, and what it means to you.
2. The Plot of Our World
A. Idyllic Beginning
The Bible captures the beginning of the story with the words “very good.” God creates the earth and all its inhabitants, surveys it and pronounces it very good. More, He graces it with His presence, walking and talking with the first people, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden which He planted for them.
Peace, harmony and openness exist between God and humans, between human and human and between humans and the rest of nature. All is as God intends and we desire. It is very good.
Sadly, the second plot element soon occurs
B. Ruinous Problem
Satan appears in God’s perfect world. While in The Passion of the Christ he fails to entice Jesus to sin, in the Garden of Eden he succeeds famously with Adam and Eve. Giving in to Satan’s persuasion, they grasp at being like God themselves. Unwilling to submit to God, they exalt their own personal interests over God, over each other and over nature. Soon God’s perfectly designed world is out of harmony. When people rejected God, they began fighting and exploiting each other, harming animals and corrupting the environment.
Perhaps the best picture of the corruptive effect of sin is The Passion of the Christ itself. It seems in the movie that evil from every direction gets funneled down to those Jerusalem streets.
Judas’ Betrayal
The religious leaders’ jealousy and hatred
The lies and distortions of the false witnesses
Peter’s weakness and deceit
The mob mentality of the people in the crowd
Pilate’s cowardice
The scourgers’ sheer brutality
The guards’ indifference
Mocking, taunting, spitting, beating, crucifying, stabbing, killing.
And notice where this takes place –not in the desperate slums of London in the 1850’s, not in Hitler’s Berlin or Stalin’s Moscow. This is not sin city, it is the holy city – not Las Vegas, but Jerusalem. This evil took place in Jerusalem – the spiritual center of three religions. Right in our most holy place our evil did its most heinous deed. If sin has corrupted Jerusalem, there is no place, there is no person, free from its ruinous effects.
A giant tear drop falls out of the sky after Jesus dies - God, weeping from heaven over the devastation wrought in the world He lovingly crafted.
God created the world beautiful, wonderful, just right. But we turned our backs on God, and now it is shot through with pain and suffering – the effects of sin, our sin.
And when you begin to contemplate how this world, and each person in it, can be set right again, you realize you are to the third element of the plot.
C. Improbable Solution
Two words sum up the seemingly insurmountable difficulty in overcoming the devastation of sin and setting this world right: Justice and Love.
Justice: Wrongs must be punished. Soon after Saddam Hussein’s capture, he was flown to a secret location for a meeting with four members of Iraq’s Governing Council. They wanted to confirm that it was Saddam Hussein.
When the men were offered the chance to see Saddam through a window or by camera, they said, "No, we want to talk to him."
Despite his condition, Saddam was defiant and unrepentant. Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, said: "He was quite lucid. He had command of his faculties. He would not apologize to the Iraqi people. He did not deny any of the crimes he was confronted with having done. He tried to justify them."
The four men spent about 30 minutes in the small room, confronting Saddam with his crimes. As they left, one of the council members in the room, Mowaffak al-Rubaie, who had been in Saddam’s torture chambers in 1979, delivered these final words to the former dictator:
"May God curse you. Tell me, when are you going to be accountable to God and the Day of Judgment? What are you going to tell Him about Halabja and the mass graves, the Iran-Iraq war, thousands and thousands executed? What are you going to tell God?"
Saddam answered with curses.
What if there is no day of judgment for Saddam? What if he were to get off scot-free? Would that be right? Would it be good for him to just be forgiven, let off the hook despite the atrocities he committed, for which he is not sorry? Does not justice demand that he be punished?
We feel, deep-down, that those who commit evil should be punished - be it Hitler, Stalin, Dahmer, or even people who harmed others in nonviolent ways, like the executives at Enron or Worldcom. We feel deep within that it is right that they be punished and that it would be wrong if they were not. This sense of justice comes from God Himself. He is a God of justice.
It seems good to us that God punishes evil, except when we realize that we ourselves are not excepted from His judgment. God is not partial. Every one must be punished for the harm he/she has done. While we may not be Saddam or Hitler, we certainly have done wrong, we certainly have turned away from God, we certainly have joined in and contributed to the despoiling of God’s world.
On the website www.notproud.com people post anonymous confessions. Here are a few.
-Sloth: I should be working now, but I am doing this instead.
-When my father was in a psychiatric hospital after a suicide attempt, I wouldn’t
visit him in order to get back at him.
-I go to college. I used the money I should have spent on housing to buy dope,
alcohol, entertainment and food. I am bad. I know it, but stopping is soooo hard.
-I wish I was rich. I want to buy things I don’t need with money I can afford
to waste.
If you were to go on www.notproud.com, you would have something to post, wouldn’t you. I would. More things than I want to admit. We have all entered the sin of our world, and so we all must be punished.
Romans 6:23: “The wages of sin is death.” Death is being cut off from the source of life, which is God. Since we have walked away from God, we deserve to be cut off from Him. That is justice. God cannot ignore the demands of justice. If our world is to be put right, justice must be served. We must be punished; we must all die. But that is a problem for God, because He doesn’t want us dead.
That brings up the second word –
Love – God loves us. He made us. He wants to be with us for eternity. He doesn’t want to destroy us. He doesn’t want us dead. He wants us alive with Him forever. That is what He created us for.
2 Peter 2:9
So God’s perfect justice demands that He punish us, while His perfect love demands that He preserve us. How can both of those moral demands be met? It seems impossible.
And then there is another problem for God brought on by love.
God doesn’t want us to merely survive in the corrupted world that we now live in, in our warped individual state. He wants a heavenly existence for us. He wants rid of all the evil so we can enjoy all the goodness He has and become all the goodness He designed us to be.
So God’s love moves Him to not just keep us alive, but to transform us, to get all the bad out of us and get all of His goodness into us.
How can He accomplish that? It seems impossible.
An Ohio newspaper printed the following news story.
Mr. Jenkins, it is claimed, was driving at a high rate of speed and swerving from side to side. As he approached the crossing he started directly towards it and crashed into Miss Miller’s rear end, which was sticking out into the road about a foot. Luckily she escaped injury and the damage can be easily remedied with a new coat of paint.
(taken from the 365 Stupidest Things Ever Said calendar)
Unfortunately, our flaws cannot be so easily remedied. A surface clean-up of our more noticeably bad habits will not make us fit for heaven. We need transformation from the inside out.
How can God meet the demands of justice, that we die for our sins, and the demands of love, that we be transformed to live with Him in His goodness forever?
Praise God – the fourth plot element is
D. Success
Despite all the odds, our genius God found a way. He came up with the only possible solution.
God Himself came down to earth in the person of His Son, Jesus Christ, and took on Himself the punishment for our sins.
Imagine two boys growing up as the best of friends. They go to school together all the way through college, but after college they go their separate ways. One does well, becomes a judge. The other goes down and gets involved in a life of crime.
One day the one man is accused of a crime, hauled to court and appears before his old friend, who now is his judge. The man is found guilty, so the judge has a dilemma. As a judge, he has to do what is right and give an appropriate punishment, in this case a heavy fine. But he loves his friend and cannot bear to punish him. So he bangs the gavel and declares the sentence, a fine this destitute man cannot possibly repay. The judge then stands up, takes off his judicial robe, walks down, pulls out his checkbook and pays the fine for his friend. He thus meets the demands of both justice and love.
The Bible says that God met the conflicting demands of justice and love by declaring us guilty but then receiving the punishment Himself:
1 Peter 2:24
2 Corinthians 5:21
Isaiah 53:4-6
The horror you witnessed on that movie screen was the Son of God meeting the demands of justice and love. All that Jesus went through you and I deserved to go through. That was our sentence He was serving, our suffering He was feeling, our pain He was enduring, our death He died. He took our punishment. Justice was done.
And oh, how love was also done there. Not a cheap, easy feel good love – a costly painful love. We mean so much to Him that He was willing to go through all that you saw on that screen, and more, for us. Even though we continue to reject Him, ignore Him, use His name as a profanity - He still went through all that so that we might be restored to Him.
“What a daddy!” they said in Finding Nemo, when they heard that his father fought sharks and crossed the ocean to rescue him.
When I think of what my heavenly father did for me – now that I have seen more vividly than ever before what my father did for me – “What a daddy?” That doesn’t even begin to do it justice, but what words do? The most common reaction after seeing Jesus suffer is speechlessness. There are no words.
But since I am expected to speak today – those words are as good as any.
What a daddy. What a daddy.
And what daddy did was achieve the most stunning and significant success. By dying on the cross and rising again, He countered the devastating effects of sin on our selves and ultimately, our world. This is the final plot element.
D. Restoration
This is the topic of my next two sermons, so I won’t go into detail. Suffice it to say that God has opened the door for His very presence to return in force to this world and transform us into people fit for heaven. And someday there will be a sequel. Jesus will return and fully restore His world and His people. And the new heaven and earth will surpass even the original. Beyond “very good,” it will be “as good as it gets.”
For today, let me finish by being very clear about the answer to today’s question, “Why did Jesus have to die?”
I sinned and deserved death. Therefore, if I was to live, He had to die in my place. That’s what He did, so now I can live forever.
The deadliest earthquake in the last ten years filled the nation of Iran with sadness. But in the midst of despair, one story gave people hope.
Cradled in her mother’s arms surrounded by the crumbled remnant of a collapsed building, a baby girl was found alive.
The mother shielded six-month-old Nassim from the falling debris and saved her life. Rescuers found the girl 37 hours after the earthquake.
Hessamoddin Farrokhyar, Red Crescent public relations deputy director in Teheran, said: “She is alive because of her mother’s embrace.”
You can live because of your Father’s embrace. The Son of God stretched out His arms, and in so doing, wrapped them around you, shielding you from the collapsing ruins of sin. You are alive because of your God’s embrace.
The question right now is, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to walk out of here saying, “That’s interesting,” and then go on with your life as it was before. Or are you going, to say, “I have to respond. After all Jesus did for me, I have to respond.”
Today, you can accept Jesus’ sacrifice as your own and receive the forgiveness and new life He offers.
Or if you want to respond but aren’t sure you are ready to accept it all 100% just yet, there are two responses you can make. First, start praying. Pray every day for God to show you what He wants you to do. Second, pursue the matter further. Just say the word to me or someone you know in the church, they and I will be glad to meet with you to discuss these issues further one-on-one. Also, come to our discussion right after the service today. This is your chance to ask the questions on your mind and heart.
But if you are ready to accept what Jesus did for you today, don’t wait. Step forward and declare your allegiance to him right now.
