“Death is swallowed up in victory.”
“O death, where is thy victory?
O death, where is thy sting?”
The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” [1 Corinthians 15:51-57, RSV]
Thus the resurrection of Jesus offers to man both God and immortality. It is almost too wonderful, too incredible to believe. But the facts are there. God has revealed Himself in history, and the evidence is there for all to see.
But the question now becomes, How am I to appropriate the immortal life God offers? In order to answer that question, I want to share with you by means of four points the message proclaimed by the New Testament Christians.
1. God loves you and created you to have a personal relationship with him. Man is not the accidental product of nature. Rather God created man to be a personal being, just as God is personal. In that way man could know and commune with God. John reports the words of Jesus in prayer to the Father: “And this is eternal life, to know you, the only true God, and him whom you have sent—Jesus Christ” (John 17:3, Phillips). What a striking definition of eternal life! Eternal life is knowing God. That is why God created us as persons: that we might have a personal love relationship with Him.
2. Man’s own evil has broken the personal relationship between God and man. In creating man as a free personal being, God took a terrible risk. Man might freely choose to reject God’s love and not to have a personal relationship with Him. God could have made man like a puppet, so that when God asked, “Do you love me?” all He had to do was pull the appropriate strings and man would mechanically respond, “Yes, God, I love you.” But what sort of personal relationship is that? Love must be freely given to be meaningful. But that, as I say, involves the risk of being rejected. And that is exactly what has happened. Man freely chooses to go his own way and commits evil acts and thoughts that are contrary to the absolute goodness of God. The Bible indicates that all men have succumbed to and are therefore under the sway of such evil. If any biblical truth has been proved by the experience of mankind, it is certainly the fact of evil in man. There are at least three terrible consequences of that fact.
a) Man stands morally guilty before God. What man has done is really evil, for it goes contrary to the very nature of God. God’s nature is absolute goodness, so that before Him man is morally guilty. To be sure, some are more guilty than others. But it is only a matter of degree, since no man reaches the moral perfection of God’s nature. Therefore, all men are accountable to God for their evil thoughts and deeds and must be punished. If God did not punish evil, then He would not be all-good, for His justice would be flawed. Before the bar of God’s perfect justice, man stands condemned as morally guilty.
b) Man’s personal relationship with God is broken. “God is light and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5). And just as light dispels darkness, so the light of God’s absolute goodness dispels the darkness of evil from His presence. Man in his sinful state cannot have a personal relationship with God. The prophet Isaiah said:
Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save, or his ear dull, that it cannot hear;
but your iniquities have made a separation between you and your God,
and your sins have hid his face from you so that he does not hear.
Isaiah 59:1-2, RSV
Because man is stained with evil, his personal relationship with God is broken. Hence, Paul could write, “Everyone has sinned, everyone falls short of the beauty of God’s plan” (Romans 3:23, Phillips).
Man senses in this condition that he is lost and often tries to get back to God by his own efforts. He invents religions, develops philosophies, meditates, takes drugs, or chooses any one of a number of other avenues to reach God, but in vain. For none of those self-his being by separates man from God. Were man to die in this state, he would go into eternity forever cut off from God. This is really what the New Testament means by “hell.” Paul warned, “This judgment . . . will bring full justice in dazzling flame upon those who have refused to recognise God or to obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus. Their punishment will be eternal loss—exclusion from the radiance of the face of the Lord, and the glorious majesty of his power” (2 Thessalonians 1:8-9, Phillips). Thus the separation from God brought about as a result of man’s evil destroys any personal relationship with God, which man was created to have.
c) Man is spiritually dead. Morally guilty and separated from God, man is spiritually dead. Paul reminded the Christians at Ephesus, “You were [spiritually] dead in your trespasses and sins” (Ephesians 2:1). Man is like a light bulb with a burned out filament. Externally he may look fine, but internally he is defective. That aspect of his being by which he should know God is rendered inoperative and dead because of his evil.
Thus, man stands morally guilty before God. His personal relationship with God is broken, and he is spiritually dead. If this were all the Bible had to say to us, it would be bad news indeed.
3. Through Jesus man’s personal relationship with God is restored. We have already said that in creating man as a free personal being, God was running the risk that man would turn away from Him. That in fact has happened. As a result, God puts Himself in a moral dilemma: on the one hand, God’s goodness and justice demand that man be punished for his evil, but on the other hand, God’s love and mercy demand reconciliation of man to God. God’s goodness demands punishment and God’s love demands forgiveness. Neither can be compromised. What is God to do? Now I do not mean to imply that God has unwittingly got Himself into this situation. God is all-knowing. Before the creation of the universe He knew that the man He would create would go astray, and that this dilemma would arise as a result. But He also knew what He would do to solve it.
What God has done reveals His genius. He Himself became a man, lived a sinless life, and died in man’s place to pay the penalty for man’s sins. Now when the New Testament says that God in Jesus took the form of a man, it does not refer to the sort of transformation by which the gods of Greek mythology turned into swans, bulls, men, or whatever. The incarnation does not hold that God somehow turned into a man, which is self-contradictory. Rather, in Jesus God took on a human body without at the same time ceasing to be God. Jesus was thus both God and man simultaneously. That is, the mind of Jesus was God. Jesus of Nazareth was thus the unique Son of God, the God-man. John wrote:
At the beginning God expressed himself. That personal expression, that word, was with God and was God. . . . So the word of God became a human being and lived among us. We saw his glory (the glory like that of a father’s only son), full of grace and truth. . . . It is true that no one has ever seen God at any time. Yet the divine and only Son, who lives in the closest intimacy with the Father, has made him known. [John 1:1, 14, 18, Phillips]
Jesus did what no man had yet done: He lived a sinless life. This meant that He was therefore not morally guilty before God and not obligated to be punished for sin. Because of that, only Jesus could offer Himself voluntarily to be punished for someone else’s sin. That He did on the cross. There He took upon Himself, the sinless Son of God, the punishment for all the billions and billions of sins ever committed by all the billions of people who ever have lived and ever will live. That is why in the Garden of Gethsemane prior to His crucifixion Jesus prayed to God with tears and loud cries. It was not that He feared the physical suffering, gruesome as that was; it was the knowledge that He was about to be punished for the sins of the world that shook Him to the core. While Jesus was on the cross, the Father turned His back, as it were, on His Son, and He who had never known separation from the Father went through hell for us. At the cross, therefore, we see the fulfillment of God’s justice and love. We see God’s justice in His punishment of sin. We see His love in that He does not punish us for our sins as we deserve; but rather in Jesus He Himself pays the penalty He had exacted. That is why Paul could exclaim, “The proof of God’s amazing love is this: that it was while we were sinners that Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8, Phillips), and why John could write, “We see real love, not in the fact that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to make personal atonement for our sins” (1 John 4:10, Phillips).