Easter draws us. By the compelling Spirit of God, the Cross/Resurrection of Jesus pulls us in. We may resist and go on our way to the bunnies and eggs. We may yield and converge with people and powers, with angels and demons, with sacrifice and suffering, with sin and death at the Cross – more precisely: at Jesus nailed on the Cross.
The last statement in Psalm 22, which Jesus expressed while on the Cross (see my previous article “My God, my God…”), is “They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!” What did he do? What is his righteousness that gets proclaimed? All the internet articles and all the books at Amazon can’t contain the full answer. So we can dig into only a portion of what God did with Jesus on the Cross.
Let’s look at Romans 8:3-4. This is the English Standard Version:
For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do. By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.
What God has done is deal with Sin. Sin: the choice of humanity to live in a way that is wide of the mark. We missed the target. We went astray. Our desires, principles, and actions and the societies that are built on them are misguided, unreliable, and downright dodgy, and therefore cursed and corrupted. Sin is essentially the exercise of pro-self and anti-God, which turns out to actually be anti-self.
So Jesus came in the flesh, a real human. He looked like all other humans; he was “in the likeness of sinful flesh;” he looked like a sinful human. But he came “for sin.” He came to do something about humanity’s faulty choice.
As Jesus hung nailed on the Cross, God “condemned sin.” He didn’t condemn sinners. He didn’t condemn Jesus. He “condemned sin in the flesh,” that is, in Jesus’ flesh. The Contemporary English Version makes it clear: “God used Christ’s body to condemn sin.” The exercise of pro-self, anti-God was condemned. Sin was judged and the appropriate sentence carried out.
Our sin sent Jesus to the Cross. Our sin held him there while the hatred, mockery, abuse, and evil attacked him. In that process, I think something happened, something unexpected. If you will let me use my imagination, I will personify Sin – give it form, feeling, and consciousness. I can imagine a point when Sin felt a change happening, a turning of the tide. With Sin doing its worst to Jesus – assaulting him, bludgeoning him, killing him (“the wages of sin is death”) – there comes a turning point. Sin realizes that it is no longer doing the condemning and killing. God is. Sin and its lord Satan can’t stop the swing in momentum and can’t escape. Sin is going down. Jesus held our sin on the Cross until it was done in. He died with it, took it to the grave and left it there. “He has done it!”
So, the Scripture says, “that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us.”
When God gave the Law to Israel he told them,
Now if you obey me fully and keep my covenant, then out of all nations you will be my treasured possession. Although the whole earth is mine, you will be for me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. Exodus 19:5-6
Simon Peter applied that to followers of Jesus:
But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light. Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 1 Peter 2:9-10
We are now God’s people, his Kingdom people, equipped to live as his true images.
Sin has been condemned. “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (Romans 8:1). No judgment and sentence on missing the mark, failing to live up to expectations, and straying from the set path. No curse and corruption on darkened minds, rebellious hearts, deadened spirits, and broken lives. Jesus leads us to the Cross into righteousness as we deny self, take up the cross, and follow.
Proclaim his righteousness and declare his praises because he has done it.
Leave a comment, if you like.
Subscribe to receive posts by email.
As you imagined a personified Sin, I thought of a great warship named Sin and commanded by Satan and Death, believing they were unstoppable and bearing down on everyone who comes in their sight. (Perhaps a Roman Ramming ship – I’m sure there’s a better name for it). Full of victories in their wake they make to easily conquer Jesus on the cross, only to find the hull is breached and the ship is going down, snd no longer able to function.
That’s an excellent analogy. Thanks for sharing.