Our Divine Suffering Substitute
The blood of Jesus Christ is all-sufficient to accomplish all
that God purposed to achieve for our eternal salvation. The death of Christ shall never
fail to fulfill the eternal purpose for which God proposed for our redemption.
“For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the
unjust, so that He might bring us to God, having been put to death in the flesh, but made
alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18).
A just God must deal with sin, and this He did in the substitutionary
sacrifice of Jesus Christ for our sins. Any system of religion that fails to take this
Bible doctrine seriously or that denies it is inadequate to justly deal with our sins. God
saves and maintains His justice by the atoning death of Jesus Christ. How can there be
full justice and mercy at the same time? Only at the cross of Jesus Christ is it possible.
Why do we dare say only in the death of Jesus Christ? It is because
only Jesus Christ was fully man and fully God. He
is the God-man. Because He was truly man and truly God He was qualified to suffer in the
place of the sinner, as man’s substitute, “once” for our sins. He never
experienced personal sin. He was the perfect man, and the only one who could ever deal
with the penalty of sin on behalf of anyone else. Jesus was the Lamb of God “without
spot or blemish.” “He was without sin.” Christ was “the seed of the
woman,” and therefore did not fall in Adam. Christ did not receive any of the imputed
sin which fallen men received from Adam in his fall. At every point of His life He was
sinless, pure, holy, spotless, and perfectly acceptable unto God.
Therefore, when Jesus died He was not paying a death penalty for any
sins He might have committed. The sufferings of Jesus were not necessary for Himself. He
had no personal need to suffer and die because of sin.
The only reason Jesus suffered and died do the cross was to secure
the salvation of His chosen people. All our sins were placed upon Him.
Moreover, Jesus was and is “very God of very God.” The full
humanity of Jesus Christ did not limit in any way the full and perfect deity of Jesus. His
deity was infinite. He possessed all the attributes of the eternal Jehovah God.
“We know nothing of a human atonement apart from the Deity of
Jesus Christ,” declared C. H. Spurgeon. “We dare not trust our souls upon a
savior who is but a man. If all the men that have ever lived, and all the angels that
exist, could have wrought together, and striven throughout eternity to offer a sacrifice
that should be a propitiation for the sins of a single man, they must have failed. None
but the shoulders of the Incarnate God could bear the stupendous burden.”
We have a divine, substitutionary sacrifice in the person and work of
atonement in Jesus Christ. The blood of Jesus Christ is sufficient to accomplish all
that God has purposed to accomplish. The shedding of the blood of Jesus Christ can never
fail to accomplish our redemption.
We may now put our complete confidence in the perfect man and His
perfect substitutionary sacrifice to save us from the wrath of God.
Any other and all other religious philosophies can never bring
“the peace that passes all understanding.” We can and must rest our faith for
all eternity in the finished work of Christ. Anything else will fail, and the soul will
perish.
At the cross of Jesus we see our divine substitute dying for our
sins. “The infinite merit of the Godhead was imparted to the suffering of the
manhood. Neither your sins nor mine can ever exceed the merit of the precious blood of
Christ,” wrote Spurgeon. “If our sins are as high as the mountains, the ocean of
His atonement . . . covers the utmost summits of the mountains.” The blood of Jesus
Christ covers every sin. Nothing in His death goes uncovered for all who will call upon
His name.
Jesus Christ “is able to save them to the uttermost that come
unto God by Him.”
Nothing can limit the efficacy of the power of the precious blood of
Jesus. Nothing is so sinful that His blood cannot cleanse. Believe in this saving truth
and you shall be saved for all eternity.
Selah!
Message by Wil Pounds (c) 2006
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