What provision has been made to reverse human death? Only one, and only the Scriptures reveal it. A breathtakingly glorious passage, 2 Corinthians 5, tells us, “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.” And that “Christ, who knew no sin, was made to be seen on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” And Romans 6 reminds us, “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
These are now present realities, and their truths comprise what is commonly known throughout Christendom as the “Gospel” or the “good news.” The good news is preceded by the bad news, which is we are all sinful beings, self-willed and self-serving, rightly alienated by our sin from the utterly holy and righteous God. The good news is, despite our sin, God deeply loved us and sent his only son to pay the penalty for our sin by dying in our place – the innocent for the guilty, thus balancing the scales of divine justice. Only Jesus Christ, the sinless Son of God, possessed the credentials for doing this. There was none other good enough, as the hymn writer put it. Prior to the actual death of Christ, this desperately needed redemption for an entire human race was nothing but a promise.
But it was God’s promise, and that ensured its ultimate fulfillment. The promise surfaced in Genesis 3 almost immediately following the first sin committed by our first parents. They were assured that the offspring of the woman, Eve, would provide the singular remedy for the spiritual and physical malady of sin. This offspring of the woman would be none other than Jesus, the Christ, directly from God, thus possessing deity, but born of a woman, thus possessing humanity. It was this One, the God man, representing both parties, God and man, that would triumphantly reconcile the two factions together again, thus establishing peace and joy through forgiveness. Eve was not told the fulfillment of that promise would consume 4000 years of human history until that earth-shaking event would transpire in a lowly animal feeding trough in the obscure village of Bethlehem. From there, Christ would make his way to Jerusalem 30 years later, where on Calvary he would be made sin on our behalf. This was God’s one and only remedy for the human condition of sin.
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