But as I study the crucifixion of Christ this week before Easter Sunday, I feel my eyes have been opened, and I am astounded and humbled.
Every step of Christ's ministry here on earth, He raged a war against the devil, the world, and our sinful flesh. The battle began as soon as His heart beat miraculously inside the womb of a virgin girl who thirty something years later would weep at the foot of her child's cross.
Jesus came to earth to do exactly what His people, the Jews, wanted Him to come and do--overthrow an evil, oppressive kingdom. It just wasn't Rome. It was bigger than Rome. So much bigger. No, He came to wage war and defeat the principalities, the powers, the rulers of darkness, and spiritual wickedness of this world. (Ephesians 6:12) He came to destroy everything and anything separating His people from eternity in His Father's presence.
So He became sin (2 Corinthians 5:21). In His human form, God the Son became the very disease that plagued His creation and slaughtered it once and for all--for all mankind, for all eternity.
What does it look like to become sin?
It looks like an innocent man who lived a life of peace and miraculous provision, freedom, and healing for all who encountered Him to be accused falsely. For this man to be treated to one of the most unjust trials in the history of trials only to be condemned by not just Jews who were suppose to know Him, who should have been studying for His arrival and known the signs of prophecy He fulfilled, but to also be condemned by the indifference and cruel apathy of the Gentiles under Pilate's cowardly sentence. Becoming sin looks like suffering injustice, indifference, apathy, having a blind eye turned, and cold hearts in charge.
How the Jews must have hated him! In their self-righteous hypocrisy, they schemed for the murder of an innocent man choosing to release a known criminal instead. To become sin, Jesus bore their hatred, vehemence, murderous hearts, their jealousy, ignorance, fear, and pride. His battle looked like bearing suffering with dignity and self-control. Always speaking truth.
Even when they stripped His dignity. Skin ravaged, probably hanging in strips from His flogging, He endured the shameful mocking of bored Roman soldiers who treated Him like their afternoon entertainment. They did not know Him. They didn't care to. Their hearts were foreign to the words of God, unlike the Jews steeped in them. They fashioned a crown of thorns to shove on His head for fun. To make fun. The mocking robe of purple they threw across His beaten back must have felt like sand paper on His open wounds. Only for a rough piece of heavy lumber to be strapped to His back. Only for it all to be ripped off His body again. I'm sure some of the blood from His wounds at started clotting around the cloth pressed into His back only to be ripped off once again. Agony! Torture! To become sin, Jesus carried the weight of humiliation, cruelty, the depths of the depravity of a human mind and heart to the hill of Golgatha, the place of death.
Take note of every detail friends, we are watching the Creator of the Universe battle our greatest enemy for us, in front of us.
Naked. Completely exposed. Blood dripping over every sinew of His form. Nailed with scientific precision to be lifted up between two known criminals, yet Jesus takes center stage. There in utter torture He would suffocate in front of a watching world on a hill near the entrance of Jerusalem where all coming to celebrate Passover would be sure to see Him. King of the Jews. Innocent. Not giving up His Spirit one second before every prophecy was fulfilled concerning His death. Not one prophecy went unfulfilled. He didn't give up His Spirit until He had fully become sin, right there on the cross for all to see, for all history to re-read.
As sin, Jesus was mangled beyond recognition. Scripture says He was so disgusting in form, many could not even look at Him (Isaiah 53:3). As sin, the sky darkened over all the land as He drank the full cup of the Father's wrath and for the first time in all of time, the Son was physically, emotionally, spiritually severed from the Father's presence. Forsaken. If you read the details, every Gospel account together, and if you ask the Spirit to open your eyes and open your heart, you see Jesus become sin, what sin looks like, what sin smells like, what sin feels like, what consequences sin ravages on our souls. What we always complain is so hard to see and understand because it exists in a spiritual realm is right there in front of you, on display, for all the world to see on a perfect, innocent, spotless human.
You want to know what sin looks like? What it does to the heart and soul of a man or woman? Look to the cross. Don't pretend it's not real. Don't turn away and believe the lie it's not that big of a deal. Don't be indifferent. Let your eyes gaze upon the picture of sin, the very real proof and evidence, the unseen we're always asking to see. Gaze upon Christ on the cross, and let the nausea, repulsion, and anger be turned back upon yourself because my sin put Him there.
My sin put Him there. My rebellion. My need for control. My selfishness and self-righteousness. My pride. My greed. My jealousy. All of them. All the sins. They are mine, and He took them and became the picture of them, so I would understand their cost. A cost I am incapable of paying despite all my good intentions and positive thoughts and right motivations. In the eyes of God, my life looks like the ravaged form of Christ hanging on the cross. That is what sin does. That is what sin looks like.
And until a perfect sacrifice was made we were condemned to that fate, that gruesome fate, eternally severed from connection with God. Living tortured, broken, scarred, shame-filled lives, marred inside if not also out.
But the more I study the crucifixion, the details, the intention of Christ, the more I believe we are watching the battle for eternity be fought in front of our very eyes. Satan threw his absolute worst at Jesus, tempting Him to give up His mission with every excruciating breath. Yet, we watch Jesus stay the course. Fulfilling every prophecy to the last detail. What the crucifixion of Christ shows is the innocent Son of God, human in every way we are human, yet also one with God the Father and God the Spirit--we watch Him become sin before our very eyes.
And in willingly and purposefully giving up His Spirit at the exact perfect time in history, we watch our innocent, perfect, omnipotent, obedient Lord defeat sin. He became sin and crucified it on the cross.
He became sin and crucified it on the cross.
No other human in history could have done this. Born of the seed of Adam, we are all born with sin (Romans 3:23). That ugliness already exists within us from our first heartbeat. It's in our DNA. Only God Himself in His perfection could have planned a way to save us. So now, once again, as in the Garden of Eden at the beginning of all mankind, we have a choice. Because there can be no true love without free will, so there must always be a choice.
At the fall of Adam and Eve, Satan thought he had stolen our choice, and for God to make a way for another one once again for all time, He had to provide a better choice, one we could better see and understand the consequences, counting the cost of our choice. The choice not to eat the fruit of a physical tree or not, but the choice to eat of the Body of Christ or not, to be one with Him in the Body of Christ by the body of Christ or to be separated from God belonging only to sin. There only ever has been and only ever will be two choices.
Christ willingly bathed Himself in the blood of our sins, so we could choose to be cleansed by that same blood, wrapping our sinful lives in the righteousness of Christ's sacrifice, the innocence of His sacrifice. We can now choose sin's guilty rags or Christ's innocent robes. We can choose to live in an eternity of filth or in an eternity of the cleansing, bathing Light of Christ. We can choose separation from God or unity with Him forever. We can choose death or life.
I cannot help but love my Jesus for the hurt and unimaginable pain He willing endured both emotionally, psychologically, and physically on my behalf, in my place, for my sin, choosing to do something I could not do even if I had wanted to. I LOVE Him for that choice He made. I am moved to a deep realization of gratefulness I too often forget. Satan, this world, this flesh, too often distracts me from the love, devotion, and gratefulness I have for my Jesus.
May we all take the time to truly appreciate the cost of having a choice, and the Love it takes to be able to willingly give that choice to children who despise their Father, their Creator, in their ignorance. Because sin breaks, bruises, mars, ravages, and fatally wounds every aspect of our senses, yet God loved us enough to send His only Son to not just die, but suffer, becoming sin, in our place, just so we could have the CHOICE to choose Him again.
Whatever you think you know of God, whatever false image of judgement, wrath, suffering, indifference, etc. that may be stamped on your heart or mind of who He is, I pray the scales of blindness and the walls of false, self-preservation will fall this Easter season in light of the reality of what God orchestrated just to give us the opportunity to choose Him again. Knowing too many still wouldn't choose Him, God the Father sacrificed His only Son to give us all the same chance anyway. The same choice. The same chance. Equal opportunity.
WHO DOES THAT?!?!? Who do you know who would willingly, intentionally do what Jesus did? Because whoever that person is, they deserve my whole heart for my whole life.
