Salvation Achieved

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I have to say, when I started preparing for this sermon, I realized that this is the passage

we should not only understand correctly,

but also allow it to affect our lives.

If what this story tells us is true, then it necessitates life transformation.

It paints, in vivid color, the sacrifice my savior made for me.

This is what we will be exploring today; how is it that God simultaneously loved sinners & judged sin?

To do this we need to ask ourselves: what is in our passage that helps us make sense of the crucifixion?

Please Read Matthew 27:27-66 with me

The Pride & Sin of Man

In a way, the crucifixion was the triumph of man over God.

It was Friedrich Nietzsche who said “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed Him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers. What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?”

In Gen 3 we rebelled: we chose to rebel rather than submit -

when presented with the option to submit to God and His rule in our lives, or to take our fate into our own hands we chose the later.

There was nothing magical or supernatural about the fruit in the garden that made Adam & Eve sinners.

It was their own decision to reject God that made them sinners.

Adam & Eve’s biggest mistake was that they took their eyes off God, and looked only to themselves.

They saw that the fruit was good for food and that it “was to be desired to make one wise”, so they completely forgot what God had told them.

that they would die if they ate it.

the word wise in the Bible is overwhelmingly positive, however this is one of those cases where it is not.

They wanted to be wise in their own estimation of what wise meant. They wanted to be wise in their own eyes

and as Isaiah 5:21 says “woe to those who are wise in their own eyes ...”

Adam & Eve wanted to be like God, but they overstepped when they disobeyed God.

they sought to be like Him and inadvertently lost a part of what it meant to be “in His image”.

they lost their right standing before their creator.

When they took that fruit they made the call to reject God and His rule in favor of their own rule.

This led to death and separation from God.

This is the wisdom of man

Now in Matthew 27 we finally conquer.

Humanity spent all of the OT

disobeying God,

creating new gods for themselves,

rejecting His law and even at one point even losing it

so that when it was eventually found by King Josiah they had to read it to even know what it was!

Time and again we see that mankind has a particular talent for forgetting God, and even going out of our way to do so.

so God sends prophets that reinforce the law of God and are sent to show men that they need to heed His word,

but they killed those prophets.

and so with this backdrop of the OT ...

God finally decides to come Himself. He becomes man, physically in front of them. His name was Jesus.

They can no longer deny God, for He would stand in front of them.

He would eat with them and teach them, hug them and worship with them, heal them and help them!

yet … unbelievably … remarkably … mankind did what mankind does best: reject God

God himself was killed by man

we read that the soldiers of Pilate mocked Him (Matthew 27:27-31)

stripping Him, beat Him, put a crown of thorns on His head, and mocked respect.

and that Jesus was crucified by them (Matthew 27:32-44)

and there he was given bitter wine, just to add insult to injury

they took his clothes from Him

even the two robbers, as they hung on their own crosses, were mocking Him!

The crowd tempted Him to show His power as God, not knowing why He hung there.

That in the very moment of them mocking Him, He hung there for them …

even those watching from the roadside mocked the God of the universe …

This was the single most heinous moment in human history, and it shows the depravity of the human condition.

when confronted with the physical manifestation of their creator, face to face, they still refused to believe

I once went back to my elementary school and found my art teacher, and she said she would only believe in God if a hand reached down from Heaven and told her that He was truly real.

the sad reality of her statement is that He has done that in the person of Jesus. He came down, and asks us to follow Him!

We are all too good at rejecting God, not matter how many times He puts Himself in our way.

And we are no different!

I am reminded of the line from “How Deep the Father’s Love” that says

It was my sin that held Him there

Until it was accomplished

His dying breath has brought me life

I know that it is finished.

It was my sin … your sin that held him there.

You & I are the reason He hung on that cross, and so we are just as much responsible for the death of our God as those who put Him there!

The truly humbling part is that when the crowd was deriding Him and mocking Him for not coming down from the cross, it was His love for those who mocked Him that kept Him there …

The Humility & Righteousness of God

The one who deserved to be proud, humbled himself, sacrificing Himself for those who killed Him.

“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

This has been called “Christ’s Moment of Crisis” when He felt the separation from God.

for the first time, and utterly.

It was in this moment that Jesus accomplished what He came to do!

In this moment Jesus felt the weight of sin. Not just one sin, nor one person’s sin, but all the sin of all those who He would save by His sacrifice.

Isaiah 59:2 says “your iniquities [sins] have made a separation between you and your God”

We don’t really appreciate what it is like to lose it because we haven’t experienced it!

It is sin that separates one from God and Jesus is now feeling this for the very first time.

Jesus took on sin, literally becoming sin (2 Corinthians 5:21) for us, separating Himself from the Father so that we do not need to be.

He who “knew no sin” became sin, He took on sin.

Jesus, up to this point, had not sinned. This was the only way the He could make the sufficient payment for sin.

This will be covered next Sunday when we talk about the resurrection!

So in this moment Jesus, who had …

1. never sinned

2. never been separate from God before

felt the emptiness of being separate from God

and the wrath of God against sin.

This moment should cause us to weep!

The only Righteous God humbly submitted Himself to the wrath of the Father to pay for the sins of those who killed Him ..

Jesus actually died (57-66)

Joseph collected the body, and prepared it for burial

Joseph placed Jesus in a tomb, covered it and left.

And on top of it all, the Jewish leaders requested Roman soldiers be placed at the tombs entrance to be sure no one stole the body to claim Jesus had risen from the dead.

funnily enough, they actually listened to Jesus!

They knew He had claimed to rise again, even though the Disciples had forgotten!

The short of it is, we are certain that Jesus did in fact die.

you cannot prepare a body for burial, lay him in a tomb for 3 days and have a guard posted at the entrance and NOT notice that Jesus was still alive.

and this is to say nothing of the spear pierced side!

So we can be certain Jesus did really die.

And when He died He carried our sins with Him to the grave.

The righteous God of the universe died for sins that were not His own.

As Philippians 2:8 says: “And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross”

The humility God had, to die for sins He didn't even commit, is starkly contrasted by our own pride and sin.

When we understand the pride and sinfulness of man & the humility and righteousness of Christ

we have to sit here and say to ourselves “how backwards is the crucifixion?!”

Why, did God (as Isaiah 53:10 says) “crush” His righteous Son?

The Backward Wrath & Love of God

This is the glory of the Gospel!

While, in a way, the crucifixion was the ultimate triumph of man over God, it is also true that the crucifixion was the ultimate triumph of God over sin.

Because The Wrath of God was Laid on Christ … The Love of God can be Laid on Us!

God cannot and has sworn not to pass over this brazen sin, that pridefully seeks to usurp His authority.

We are all sinful, Romans 3:23 makes clear. And as such we deserve that wrath

And so God has a problem, because

He has promised to save, but cannot forget sin.

Too many times to count, in the Bible, God has sworn to judge sin and the sinner.

And so, to resolve that problem, the wrath that was meant for us was laid on Jesus.

The only one who deserved the love of God received His wrath.

His sinlessness meant that when He died, He did not die for His own sins (as we would) but died for ours!

Jesus took the wrath of an angry God, who He had known intimately for eternity, and died in our place.

The Love Laid on Us

Sinful though we are, we received the love and acceptance of God, because our sin was paid for!

You know Romans 5:8 says “But God showed His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us”

The Bible calls us to love our enemies, and the greatest example we have of this is the cross!

While we were still sinners, dead set against Him, God sent His Son, He came in the flesh and died for us

so that we could be made righteous in Him

This kind of love is backward

God pours out His wrath on the one who had His Love

and pours out His love on the ones who had His wrath.

To reject that kind of love is crazy!

Nowhere else will you find it,

not even in a spouse!

today I would encourage you to embrace this crazy backwards love that God showed us on the cross.

Closing

This is the passage that we should all get right. Without a correct understanding of the cross the rest of the Bible does not make sense

Let us be grateful for this crazy kind of love that He showed us.

Because without it we can only look forward to the eternal separation from God that Christ experienced on the cross when he cried out

“my God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Matthew 27:51-54

Next week we will see how our hope in Christ is not misplaced, but that He rose again!

When I say that this passage is the most important to get right, I am only partially correct

because without the resurrection the Crucifixion makes no sense.

Let us celebrate that He has risen!