Why Did Jesus Have To Die?

So this Good Friday, this Friday of Easter, we talk a lot about jesus dying on the cross and shedding his blood for us.

And I wanted to ask the question this morning, very simple question, why did jesus have to die?

And couldn't God have just said to us, hey everyone, you've been good people, I forgive you, come and join me for eternity in heaven?

Couldn't he have done it that way?

So I want to ask the question, why did jesus die and why did he shed his blood?

And the answer to this question means we have to start right back at the beginning to try and grapple with what this means.

And back in time, back if we can imagine the imagination of God, back in his imagination when he first created, what was it that he was thinking about us?

In Genesis chapter 1 verse 27, it says, So God created mankind in his own image.

In the image of God, he created them.

Says that we were all created in the image of God.

So we were to be like God in his nature, his character, his personality.

And he really wanted us to be like him.

And I thought of three attributes of God that we could examine.

And they are that God himself is holy, he is perfect, and he is a God who loves.

And the sense of being holy means that he is sacred and separate.

The sense of perfection is that he can do no wrong, and his heart is that he loves, and he loves us.

And being made in his image, what he wanted for all of us was that we would be holy, perfect, and love him.

He wanted us to be all those attributes of himself.

That was in his imagination when he made us.

I looked at some of the things that Paul says in his writings, in his letters about humanity.

And he said that humanity is like this.

And he described humanity in these ways.

He said that our human nature is full of immorality, idolatry, adultery, theft, greed, drunkenness, slander, swindling, impurity, witchcraft, hatred, discord, jealousy, fits of rage, and it goes on, selfish ambition, dissensions, factions, envy, obscenity, foolish talk, and coarse joking.

And I think we get the message that we could actually add more to that list, and maybe 100 more.

We just keep extending it and say, what is human nature like?

And I wanted us to demonstrate that we can't look at ourselves and say we are perfect before God.

You may think we are pretty good people, but 100% of the time, we are not perfect, and we are full of ungodliness.

When God spoke to Adam and Eve in the garden, he said this to Adam.

He said, you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it, you will certainly die.

So the idea was that there is a punishment for disobedience to God, that if they were to eat of the fruit of the tree, they would surely die.

And we know the story that Adam and Eve did eat from that fruit of the tree.

They didn't die physically, but they were cast out of the garden, out of that perfect place with God.

There was a disconnection from God that began at that point in the garden, and we experience that disconnection from God, even today, in our lives.

Paul also writes this.

He says, the wages of sin is death.

I don't want to be too depressing today, but the sense is that in our sin, whereas God is life, our sin postures us in a place which can be described as death.

God is light, we live in a sense of darkness.

So we've got a problem here that at one end of a spectrum, if you can imagine it, we have ourselves, the human race being imperfect in so many ways.

And then at the other end of the spectrum, we have God in his perfection and in God wanting us to be the wholly perfect people who love him, to bridge that gap.

But there's such a great chasm between those two extremes, the imperfect and the perfect.

And we wonder, can it ever be bridged?

And if you're thinking that this has something to do with jesus, then you're thinking correctly, and that's where I want to go, is that jesus, in some way, became the bridge between our imperfection and God's perfection.

And so what God did was something special, because he loved his people.

And he had a chosen nation called Israel, and he gave to the Israelites his law.

He gave his law passed down through Moses, the prophet, to the law, to the people.

And Moses read the law in detail.

And we can read it today.

It's in the books in the Bible of exodus, Deuteronomy, and leviticus.

It's all preserved there.

And in that law, there's all sorts of interesting commands and rules and precepts and regulations.

All of us trying to demonstrate what God is like, what he expects from his people, and how we can obey him.

So there's a whole lot of laws and precepts and rules.

And in there, you'll find some fascinating, if you bother reading it, you'll find some fascinating information on how to have good relations in the family, which we all need.

Honour your father and mother that your days may be long.

It talks about commerce, how to be fruitful in agriculture, how to have productive farms.

It speaks of hygiene and health.

Talks about how to have a healthy life, to eat healthy food, the food laws.

What I realise is when you look through human history, say at the Black Death in the 14th century, if only they had known the law of Moses, it would have saved 70 million people's lives, because they would just take their bucket of excrement and throw it out in the street, which spread the plague.

Whereas Moses said, dig a hole and bury it.

So God's law has a lot of great instruction.

There's laws for criminals and justice.

There's laws about ceremonies and festivals honoring God in that sense.

So what was the report card like for the Israelites?

Could they keep the law?

Well, it's all written down in the Bible that they didn't do a very good job.

They fluctuated.

They were often disobedient to God.

And we look at all these laws and say, well, who could even follow them?

And I think when I go to the supermarket, I don't know whether you're like me, you pick up a packet of food or a bottle or something, and you drink and you have a look at the contents and say, well, how much sugar is in this or how much fat or how much salt?

And we did this more and more.

But today we have more food laws and food regulations than the Bible has.

And when you learn to drive, the number of road rules that seem to be increasing all the time, the things we've got to learn to drive a car are incredible, much more than the law given to Moses.

But in any case, God gave this law to the nation to give them a guidelines on how they would be wholly perfect and love him.

And sometimes during history, the Israelites lost the law altogether, and a king would discover and say, what's this?

We found this in the temple.

It's the law.

We'd better be following this.

And there are a lot of instructions about feasts and regulations for life.

So one of the things in the law that I wanted to highlight, which will bring us eventually to jesus, is that in this law, there was a provision for sin.

God knew that people would sin.

And so he gave them a remedy for sin.

He said that when you sin, this is what I want you to do.

And being an agricultural farming community, he said this.

I want you to go to your flocks, choose a young lamb, as good a specimen as you can find, or a young goat, or an ox, or a bull, or a bird.

And I want you to take this animal to the Tabernacle, which became the temple when it was built in jerusalem.

And I want you to take that animal there, and it will be sacrificed.

And the purpose of this is that the animal will be a substitute for your life.

For the life of your life of sin, which represents death, the life of the animal will be substituted and given in the place of you.

It's quite a brilliant idea, that in my mind, it only could come out of the mind of God.

But the animal was a substitute, a life for a life.

So the person would take their lamb, go to the temple, where it would be slaughtered.

They would place their hand on the animal first.

And this would be a sense that they were saying, this is my animal, I'm giving it up.

It's kind of like giving up something in your home that is special to you.

But a young, unblemished lamb, for instance, was prized in the flock.

So I'm giving up this because of my sin.

And secondly, there's a sense of conferring by placing the hand on the animal, conferring the sin of the person onto the animal.

And now what happened next is a very unusual thing.

And I hope it doesn't make you feel too queasy, but the priest would take the animal and with a bowl, collect the blood of the animal.

And the priest would go around the temple, splashing the blood and sprinkling it all over the place.

On the furnishings of the temple.

Very strange process.

And I want to explain what this means, because this is very important as we start to look to jesus and his blood.

We need to examine what blood is.

I don't know whether you've ever thought about this, if there are biologists amongst us, I'll be able to give more information than I can give you quickly.

But the blood in our body is traveling around at a very rapid speed through our blood vessels.

Approximately, a blood cell could travel around our body in approximately one minute.

And the blood is taking oxygen to our body.

It's removing carbon dioxide.

It's a waste system that collects waste out of the cells of our body.

It's an immunity system.

It helps the body fight against disease and sickness.

And it is also something that helps us heal when we have a wound.

It kind of, it clots around the wound to help the healing process.

We know that when we stop the blood flow to the brain, the oxygen doesn't get to the brain, and ultimately we die.

So the blood is a life-giving force in our body.

And in the Book of leviticus, this is spelled out in one single verse, leviticus 17 verse 11, and says, for the life of a creature is in the blood.

What we've just said.

And I, that is the Lord, have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar.

It is the blood that makes an atonement for one's life.

So the life of the creature is in the blood, and the blood has been given by God to make an atonement for our lives.

What's this word atonement?

It's probably the only technical word I want to share this morning, but the word atonement is important here.

In the Hebrew language, it wasn't atonement, it was a Hebrew word.

And if you take that Hebrew word and translate it, the closest meaning in English is a covering, that the word atonement means a covering.

So that when it rains, we have an umbrella, we have a roof over our heads, we have clothes on our body as a covering for ourselves.

But in this case, the blood is given as an atonement or covering over our lives.

So in the temple, when the priest is sprinkling blood around the place, what's happening symbolically is that the person whose sin brings death to their bodies is covered over by the lifeblood of the animal.

It's covered over.

That's the atonement.

There's a blood covering, and the person is protected under the blood.

And when God looks upon that person, he doesn't see the death of the sin, but he sees the life of the animal.

We may think bloodshed means death, but in the Bible, blood symbolizes life.

The life of the creature is in the blood.

And there are a number of blood references in the Old Testament, too many to talk about this morning.

But at the time that the nation of Israel was in captivity in Egypt, there is a day known as the Passover.

And the Lord instructed the people to take a lamb, kill it, take the blood, put it on the lintel doorposts of your homes, go into your home and stay there tonight.

And the angel of death will pass over the land and kill the firstborn in every house where there is no blood on the doorpost.

So the people of Israel obediently sheltered in their homes under the blood, the atoning blood of that lamb.

And the angel of death came through, and it triggered the release of the nation of Israel from slavery in Egypt, freedom from captivity, and it was occasioned by the blood.

So this question of God is, can the blood of animals deal with the problem of our heart where we're dishonouring to God?

I think the answer is no, that our hearts can't be changed by simply slaughtering an animal.

There's a couple of verses I have here.

Hebrews 10 verse 4 says, it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Psalm 40, David wrote this in Psalm 40, Sacrifice an offering you did not desire, Lord.

Burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not require.

I desire to do your will, my God.

Your law is within my heart.

David was saying, it's not the outward observance of all these sacrificial laws that makes the difference.

It's what's going on in your heart.

So, how did the Jews do?

Well, down through the centuries, they observed this sacrificial system.

And sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't.

But I would put it to you that it wasn't the sacrifice that was going to make the difference.

But God was patient with them, and he gave them this set of laws to prove to them, they couldn't do it.

That mankind cannot save themselves.

We can't save ourselves.

So we move on to what I call a new hope.

And 1400 years after the law of God was given through Moses, jesus arrived to fulfill everything.

And that his, the intention of jesus was to bring about in us the holiness and perfection and the love of God that only jesus could bring in himself.

John the Baptist was, as you know, one of the characters in the New Testament.

And he was preaching this message of repentance.

And he was down by the river baptizing people in the Jordan.

And he said, someone's coming.

And I'm not worthy to even untie their sandals, but someone far greater than me is on the way in.

And jesus approaches and John sees him coming and declares to the people, look, the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

He correctly recognized jesus as the lamb of God, suggesting that no more would land, would animals' sacrifices be sufficient.

But here was a lamb from God in human form, jesus sent from God.

God's provision, God's lamb was provided through jesus so that what would be fulfilled through the sacrificial system would happen when jesus went to the cross.

So, it's all being tied together here.

What was demonstrated as a mere shadow of things to come in the old law was fulfilled when jesus arrived as the lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world.

And jesus was crucified on the cross, he was a substitution, just like the animal of old.

He was a life given for a life, but jesus was a perfect life.

He was the perfection of God in human form.

He was son of God, representative of God.

He was son of man, representative of man, and he came to give his life for us.

The perfect for the imperfect.

Now, I just want you to imagine for a while, I've heard this story said, and it's a great illustration.

I want you to imagine that your whole life is being video recorded.

Everything that you've thought and done and said, it's being kept for posterity on this massive computer hard drive.

And one day, it will be played back for everyone.

And we think, oh, I don't want to, I don't want that to happen.

It could be very embarrassing or humiliating.

Imagine it was all recorded there.

But what happened when jesus went to the cross is he took that video and erased it.

He took the hard drive, the recording and smashed it and destroyed it, so that no more is there a record of our sin.

No more is there a record of our disobedience to God.

It's been obliterated for all time.

It has been extinguished by the cross.

And let's read together Colossians 2, 13, actually 13 and 14.

It says, when you were dead in your sins and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made you alive with Christ.

He forgave us all our sins, having cancelled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us.

That's where he destroyed the hard drive.

So, he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross.

So our sins are nailed to the cross with jesus.

What it means is they're put to death with him.

They're no more.

They're obliterated when jesus was on the cross.

And further to this, I want to illustrate this by saying this, if you can picture jesus on a cross here, we don't really get a true picture, but it's highly likely that we have a picture of a naked man on the cross.

He'd been whipped and beaten.

And when they whipped him, it was the back and the sides and the front of him that were whipped.

So blood was pouring out of him.

And a crown of thorns was thrust on his head, so there's blood coming out of his scalp.

It says in Isaiah, there's a prophecy that the one that would come would have his beard plucked out in death.

More blood.

Nails in his hands, nails in his feet, and a spear thrust in his side.

So when jesus went to the cross, literally, there was an enormous amount of blood.

And as he was pinned there on the cross, he said, it is finished.

And what he's saying is that the old is gone and the new has come.

The old sacrifices have gone and now for one time only, once and for all, he was dying on the cross.

It is finished.

And as he took our sins upon him, past, present, and future, the things that we haven't done yet, the things that we're going to do tomorrow, the displeased God, as he took them upon himself, the sky went dark for three hours.

And his blood covered the sin, creating a perfect atonement for our lives, our death being covered up by the perfect blood of jesus.

A perfect atonement acceptable to God, jesus' sacrifice on the cross, substituting for us.

Back in Hebrews, as Kathleen read before, we'll read this again.

jesus did not enter by means of the blood of goats and calves, but he entered the most holy place once for all by his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption, purchasing us back, redemption.

The blood of goats and bull and the ashes of a heifer sprinkled on those who are ceremonially unclean, sanctify them so that they are outwardly clean.

How much more then will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit, offered himself unblemished to God, cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God.

Verse 26, but he has appeared, jesus has appeared once and for all, at the culmination of the ages, to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.

The purpose being that in jesus' holiness, perfection and his love for the Father, we would be declared holy, we would be declared perfect, and we would be able to love God and love each other as God intended.

Why did God go through all this process?

Why do we have to have all of this?

I think ultimately, we can say that God loved us enough to want to give his son for us.

And I want to leave you with John 3.16, which is a very well-known verse, which says, God, 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, shall perish, but have eternal life through jesus who was given.

It says, whoever believes in him, it takes faith, it takes belief.

People say, well, I don't know.

I don't know if I've got any faith.

I don't know if I believe.

What does that even mean?

You know, I could say, you need to trust in jesus.

Well, I don't know how to trust in jesus.

And I think the question I would ask is, do you want it?

Do you want it?

If you say, yes, I want jesus.

I want what jesus has done for my life, because when I look at myself, I realize that I haven't lived the life that's been faithful to God.

And I want that for myself.

I want it.

And I believe in the wanting of that, that's the start of the journey of faith.

And I wanted to sum up to say, jesus went to the cross for those reasons, and that's why he had to die, and shed his blood, and why we remember this at this Easter time.

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