Read: Romans 5:1-11 - STEP Bible, Bible Gateway
The salvation that you and I are offered through faith in Christ did not come without a price. It cost nothing less than the life of the Son of God; and it was the sacrifice of his life which made it possible for those of us who have faith to be saved.
How? The old system of the Jewish Law required sacrifices to be made to ‘cover over’ (as it were) failures on the part of the Jews to maintain their special relationship with God. The idea was that if sacrifices could be made, then God’s anger and pain at the Israelites’ unfaithfulness to him could be deflected on to whatever animal was being sacrificed. Of course, the sacrifice never fixed the underlying problem – that the Israelites just couldn’t seem to stay faithful to God. But it did as a way of keeping the special relationship between God and Israel alive even in the midst of the Israelites’ infidelity to him.
What was needed in order to reconcile God’s chosen people to the God they so frequently abandoned was a sacrifice of faithfulness that far outclassed anything mere human beings could offer. What was needed was a sacrifice of faithfulness that matched God’s faithfulness in sticking with Israel and continuing to choose them even as they had consistently and repeatedly rejected him. What was needed was nothing less than the sacrifice of a life, perfectly lived and offered up (in death – in blood – as in life) to God. Only a sacrifice of that magnitude – a sacrifice of faithfulness just as big as God’s faithfulness – could atone for the infidelity of God’s people.
That is what Jesus’ death was.
Preachers drone on incessantly about how the death of Jesus is the centre of the good news about God’s love. That’s because it is. The death of Jesus is nothing less than God loving us so much that he chose to fix the shortfall in divine-human relations himself, by dying for us, at our hands. There is, and there has never been, a love story as great as the one God tells in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. May we make it our own story of salvation this Lent, through our faith in the one who achieved it.
These devotions were originally written for the parish of All Saints, Ascot and we are grateful for permission to republish them on Fulcrum.
Patrick is curate of All Saints’, Ascot in Berkshire. A musicologist by training, he is married to Lydia, a university lecturer, and dad to Madeleine. He writes (sporadically) at benedixisti.wordpress.com and tweets (even more sporadically) as @patrickgilday.