By: Mike Kelly
Retired Pastor
“He is not here; he has risen, just as he said….”(Matt 28:6) are the keywords that hold the world in suspension. Without those words and what they represent, Christianity would have died long ago, and we would be helpless to ever know God. These words cannot be underestimated. Christ’s resurrection is the central event in all history.
Paul put it this way: “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins” (1 Cor 15:17). Christ’s entire mission from conception to birth to life to death on a cross were meaningless without the resurrection.
Why did Christ Jesus, the only son of God, leave his glory in heaven and submit to being born in a human body? John 3:16 says he did it because he and the father loved us: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
The horror of being crucified is unthinkable to us today. First, to have been beaten with whips with glass and rocks in the whip fall. The flesh was flayed off Christ’s back making it a piece of meat with torn muscles and bleeding blood vessels.
Then to be beaten by fists and have a crown of sharp thorns similar to our hawthorne pounded into his head. And we all know how freely the head bleeds.
Finally, he was forced to carry the wooden beam to which he would be nailed. That beam weighed about 70-90 pounds (and if it were the entire cross he was made to carry, it would have weighed closer to 300lbs).
The trip to Golgotha was uphill and the length of 6-7 football fields. After being jeered at, cursed, and laughed at, he would be totally humiliated by being nailed naked to that beam with 6” nails like we use in landscaping.
And as horrible as all that was, it was actually the least of the pain he suffered in that entire event. The real pain was when he became sin. Not that he sinned but that he actually became sin.
From being the Creator of all to being the exact anathema, sin. 2 Cor 5:21: “God made him who had no sin to be sin, for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
For that time in history, the Father and Son were no longer one. The Father turned his back on Christ. Matt 27:46 reads “About three in the afternoon Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (which means “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”). At that moment, Christ suffered a far worse death than the crucifixion. He died spiritually.
Why? Why would he do that? Look at that verse in 2 Cor 5:21 again…2 words “for us”. That’s why! For us! It was the only way to pay for our sin. It was the only way that we could ever have a right standing before God.
Can you imagine the final judgment when we will all stand before God, and he will judge us on our actions and thoughts? We will all fail.
We will all be judged to have sinned and earned the eternal fires of hell. All except those who have put their faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus.
The ones who chose to accept the death of Christ as payment for their sins will be seen not as sinners but as Saints…holy and forgiven.
Those Saints will be welcomed into Heaven not because of what they did on earth but because of what Jesus did on that terrible cross when he took away the sin of the world. John 1:29 “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!”
Note that it doesn’t say “the sins” but “the sin”. Christ carried the burden of the debt of SIN. All sin for all time committed by all people. The debt of sin has been once and for all permanently removed. None of us will ever need to pay the spiritual penalty of our sins.
Unfortunately for many, they fail to realize that the amnesty for sin is available, but it must be asked for. God didn’t make it hard, but he didn’t make it automatic either. We must realize our need and seek the forgiveness Christ has paid for.
And therein lies the pitfall for many. The need to humble themselves and admit that they cannot find eternal life in any way other than through the actions of Christ.
1 Tim 2:5-6 “For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people…” There simply is no other way.
Where does your future lie? Think about that now while you have time. No one knows the time of their death when they will pass from this life into the life after where they will find themselves in the presence of the Holy God who will judge them worthy of Hell based on their actions and thoughts, or worthy of Heaven based on Christ’s death and resurrection.
May this truly be a happy Easter.
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Mike Kelly is the founding pastor of Bryan’s Grace Community Church (retired) and Board Chairman of Bryan’s Sanctuary Homeless Shelter and Williams County’s Compassion (free) Medical Clinic.
