What a great day Easter is! It’s a very big deal, the greatest day for Christians. Today we proclaim and celebrate that Jesus of Nazareth – who was crucified, died and was buried – has been raised to life by the power of God, that he is declared with power to be the Son of God, and that he lives today as our risen Saviour and reigning King.
It is impossible to overestimate the significance of the resurrection. The Bible says that if Christ has not been raised then our faith is futile, we are still in our sins, and we are the most pitiful of all people. In fact, the whole Bible, and the whole faith system we call ‘Christianity’ revolves around the twin events of this weekend: the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. And Christians have always believed and taught that these events are of central importance not just to Christianity as a whole, but to your life and mine specifically. That Jesus died and rose again is the single greatest reality in my life.
Perhaps the most succinct expression of the significance of Good Friday and Easter is found in the New Testament book of Romans, chapter 4:25. There it says of Jesus, who was delivered up for our sins and was raised for our justification.
In that statement, the word ‘justification’ warrants a little exploration, because it has been such a vital word in our Christian story over the years. ‘Justification by faith’ was the spiritual truth that catalyzed the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century – which transformed the face of Europe and the Church, and the heritage of all Protestant churches – Lutheran, United, Reformed, Alliance, Presbyterian, Baptist – their heritage is rooted in that recovered doctrine.
‘Justification by faith’ is the central idea of Biblical Christianity, the overarching theme of the whole Bible. The Bible itself ties it directly to the death and resurrection of Jesus.
The Bible begins with the declaration that In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Everything that exists, exists because God brought it into being. God is the creative genius behind flowers and galaxies, mountains and snowflakes, fish, trees and humanity. He is the Creator, and therefore he is the Lord of all that is. His Lordship implies two things. It implies power (that is, he can rule. He has the ability to govern the universe, because he made all.) And Lordship implies authority (that is, he has the right to rule. He made everything and can do what he wants with it. The universe and everything in it belongs to him.) So God the Creator is Lord, with supreme power and authority.
Sounds threatening until we recognize that God is good. He created mankind to be recipients of his love, and to love him in return. Creation reveals a God who appreciates beauty, who values order but also creativity and freedom, who invented pleasure and joy, who inspires awe and wonder, instilled values like nurture in animals and in us. And God has not just the ‘soft’ qualities of goodness, but also its ‘hard’ qualities, like justice, concern for right and wrong, loving discipline.
God culminated his creative activity by creating man and woman. Adam and Eve were unique in all creation. God formed man – Adam – and breathed into him the spirit of life. Something came from God and entered Adam and Adam became a living being. From Adam’s rib, God formed Eve, so they are of the same substance, made of the same stuff. And God said of Adam and Eve that they were created in God’s own image. Not that they were little gods, but they had an affinity with God that nothing else in all creation did. They were not just physical but spiritual beings. They shared some of God’s attributes: reason, emotion, will, creativity, love of beauty, sense of justice and rightness, and so on. They also had the ability to know God relationally and intimately, to love and enjoy him, and to receive and appreciate his love for them.
Love is choice, and God provided them an opportunity to choose to love him: he gave them complete freedom in the Garden of Eden, but set apart one tree and said, You may eat from any tree in the garden but this one. But then Adam and Eve fell. They chose to mistrust God and trust the serpent, and so disobeyed God by eating the forbidden fruit.
This mistrust and consequent disobedience we call ‘sin’.
When Adam and Eve first sinned, it had two effects: first, it fractured their relationship with God. It separated them from him. There was a wall between them, a wall they had erected. Secondly, it put them in a position of guilt. They had committed an offense against the Lord of the universe, and stood guilty.
Sin, by its nature infects, and what we see in the history of Adam and Eve and their descendants bears witness to the cancerous spread of sin. Once rooted, it takes over, to the point where no person, and no facet of life and human nature remains untainted. So the greatest philanthropist may have issues with pride. The closest loving relationships show streaks of anger or selfishness. A certain level of dishonesty, gossip, lust, or temper shows up in all of us more regularly than we care to admit.
We see this in the Biblical story, the downward spiral of Adam and Eve’s descendants so that by the time of Noah, humanity as a whole embraced sin and lived thoroughly in opposition to God and goodness. And even though God judged mankind with a great Flood, and started over with Noah, sin, like cancer, has a way of coming back: Noah gets drunk, his son mocks him, and before long the whole cycle has begun again.
Humanity, to a man, is gripped by sin, willingly enslaved to it, guilty in it, and cut off from God because of it.
Centuries later, God has created a nation, descendants of a man, Abraham. This nation, Israel, becomes God’s own personal community, as it were. They will be the means by which God will effect a change in the sinful condition of the world. Through Moses God gives to them his Law. Not just his ‘laws’ or commandments, but his Law, his laying on the line how things really are. Like the Law of Gravity: it’s not as if you jump off a building you’ll be punished by falling to the ground. If you jump, you will fall. That’s the Law. So with God’s Law. Integrity, worship of God, honour and care toward other people are just right. Murder and envy and ignoring God are a violation of the order of things. God’s Law is not something outside himself, that he created. It is the expression of his person and character. One writer has said, “God is allergic to sin.” It’s not like he could tolerate it but chooses not to, but to punish it instead. No. Sin is repulsive to God’s very nature and therefore to the order of things as he created it. God abhors sin like nature abhors a vacuum.
And to Israel, God says, via his Law: “This is what it looks like to be what I created you to be”, and he says, Worship only me… Honour your parents… Set aside a Sabbath day, a day for rest and worship… Don’t lust, or steal, or kill, or lie, or covet. The Ten Commandments. (And Jesus later, by the way, said, “Even if you don’t act these things out, the very desire in your heart to do some of these things violates God’s perfection.”)
Israel looked at these commandments and said enthusiastically, “Okay! We promise!”
And the rest of the Old Testament relates their systematic rebellion against the promise. So its not just the godless pagans who live sinfully. Even when God steps in, reveals himself again, outlines exactly how to live rightly, establishes a relationship with a community he calls ‘God’s chosen people’, even then they cannot do it. Such is sin.
It enslaves entirely. It makes people heap guilt on themselves. It builds higher and thicker the dividing wall between us and God. And all people have sinned. Some more than others. Some ‘big’ sins, some ‘smaller’ sins… but those are artificial categories. No matter at what point or how many times you break the stick, the stick is broken. And even a single sin means God’s character has been violated. All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, the Bible reminds us. We’ve all turned away from God. Sin has become our default position. And even when something inside us desires to be ‘a good person’, we find we’re always facing some form of selfishness or anger or those other things I mentioned earlier. They are just present in us, no matter how much we wish they were not. They are.
And therefore we are guilty before a perfect God. And we are separated from him.
God sent his Son to earth: Jesus, eternal, divine. We call that event the ‘Incarnation’, which means that in Christ, divinity took on flesh, became a real human being. He was tempted in every way, like us, but he – alone of all who ever lived – he alone always chose God’s values over his own temptations. He lived sinlessly, lived the life we all are created to live but cannot.
And he died as a substitutionary sacrifice for us: his sinless life he gave for sinful man. his life of infinite worth he gave as payment for the infinite debt of our sin. He took our guilt upon himself and bore the punishment we deserved. The Bible says, The wages of sin is death. Jesus, sinless, was put to death. As he hung on the cross, bearing our sin, God turned away, and Jesus experienced the alienation from God that sin brings.
The Bible says, God made him who had no sin, to be sin for us, that in him, we might become the righteousness of God. It also says, He was wounded for our sins, and the punishment that brings us peace was put on him.
Jesus, the Son of God, died for our sins, and your sins.
Then, on the third day, the day we celebrate today, Jesus was raised again to life. And his resurrection is the confirmation and vindication of Jesus’ life and ministry and sacrificial death for our sins. The Bible says that Jesus was declared with power to be the Son of God by his resurrection from the dead. Jesus in his life had spoken and acted as if he were himself divine: raising the dead, calming storms… if people worshipped him, he accepted it. . . he claimed both the ability and authority to forgive sin. . . he claimed to have existed before Abraham. . . he said he would one day come in glory and judge the whole earth and determine the eternal destiny of every person. . . he took the divine name ‘I AM’, and applied it to himself. . . he referred to Isaiah’s vision of God and said that Isaiah had seen him.
And if Jesus had been crucified and that had been the end of it, it would have been impossible to know whether or not to take him seriously. But, God raised Jesus from the dead, and by so doing God put his stamp of affirmation on Jesus, vindicating him, and by his resurrection from the dead we know that what Jesus said was right, and that his demonstrations of divine power were the real thing. So it is by his resurrection from the dead that we know that Jesus is the Son of God. Therefore we know that his death for our sins was sufficient to effect our forgiveness.
Back to the idea of ‘justification’. Justification is a legal term, and it means to gain right standing as far as the Law is concerned. One of the ways the Bible talks about sin is that sin is a transgression of the Law of God. Not just breaking the rules of God, but violating his character and violating the order of things as they really are. So to worship God only, to not steal, murder or lie are not just rules, but worship of God and exercising goodness to one another is really and truly right and good.
When we sin, in any one of the thousand and one ways in which we do sin – gossip, petty pride, lust, murder, addiction, adultery – when we sin, we transgress the Law of God’s goodness and commit an offense against him. Our condition then is one of objective guilt, just like breaking a criminal or civil law makes us objectively guilty in the sight of the Law. Guilt means punishment and/or restitution is necessary to restore our right standing, to justify us in the eyes of the Law. So it is necessary to pay the fine, or do jail time, or be executed, depending on the nature of the offense and the Law of the land.
The necessary punishment or restitution for offenses against God is death, and separation from him. Not because he’s excessively severe. But as his perfection is infinite, a sin, however ‘small’ it might seem to us, constitutes an infinite offense. Therefore our guilt is infinite, and the punishment and restitution necessary for our justification is also infinite. We owe God an infinite debt: our separation from him, merited by our sin, should rightly be total and eternal.
You see the problem: how can we justify ourselves? How can we possibly maneuver ourselves back into a position of right standing? We don’t have the resources. We can’t do enough good deeds, we can’t be religious enough, even our own death cannot be sufficient unless it be somehow an eternal death.
That’s why Jesus’ death is such infinitely good news for us. By his sinless life and by his identity as the divine Son of God, his death was sufficient to erase the infinite debt of our sins. His life of infinite worth, laid down on our behalf at his crucifixion, means that our own eternal death is no longer required of us. He died in our place.
Our sins are dealt with and now we can have right standing with God, not on the basis of what we have done, but on the basis of what Jesus has done for us. And God, in sheer grace, not only forgives our sin, he actually takes the moral perfection of Christ – the Bible calls that ‘righteousness’ – God takes Jesus’ righteousness and imputes it to us. He credits it to our account, as it were. Not that we are now righteous or perfect. We’re not. I still sin. But God considers or reckons us righteous, and deals with us on that basis.
Of course, if we reject or choose to ignore Jesus, then we are still on the hook for our own sins, and punishment and restitution is still required. God won’t just ignore our sin. He would not be good or just if he did. But he has provided a way for us to be made right with him, and that is by Jesus. All we do is accept that gift and respond accordingly, through what the Bible calls faith: believing that Jesus death was for your sins, and ordering your life under God’s Lordship. We don’t serve God in order to get right with him. No, our justification is purely and entirely a work of God’s grace. Forgiveness is not earned. But we respond to him in gratitude, and our living under his Lordship is a response of love.
Justification by faith means that we throw ourselves on the mercy of God, by believing and gratefully receiving the death of Jesus on our behalf, for our sins. And by virtue of that – and only that – do we have right standing with God.
This image may be helpful: there is a certificate of debt for each of us. Our name is on top, and our sins are written on that certificate. On the bottom, on the ‘total debt owing’ line, is the word ‘infinite’. Method of payment: death and eternal separation from God. We each have one. But for those who have accepted Jesus’ death for us, by faith, in bold red capital letters there is stamped across our certificate: PAID IN FULL. And there is a column added with the heading ‘credit’, and in that column is written: ‘Christ’s perfect righteousness’.
And when at the end of days everyone stands before the throne of God and are called to account, you will either have a certificate of debt, balance owing: death and separation from God, or account paid in full, to enter life and intimacy with God.
By his resurrection from the dead, we know our faith in Jesus is grounded. By his resurrection the credit on our account is guaranteed. By his resurrection we know that his death is sufficient for our sins.
He was delivered over to death for our sins, and was raised to life for our justification. That’s what this weekend is all about. It’s not just a couple extra days off work. On Friday, the Son of God was crucified because of your sins and mine. I should have been crucified. The nails and the cross and the forsakenness from God were what my sins and yours had earned. But in love for us God gave his Son. In love for us Jesus willingly gave his life for our sins. That’s why we can look on the darkest day in history and call it ‘Good Friday’. because on that day God did for us what we could not do for ourselves: pay our sin debt.
On Easter, Jesus was raised to life, and we know that what he did on the cross was sufficient. He is the Son of God, a living Saviour. He dealt with our sins once and for all. Nothing now remains to be done. We owe nothing.
Many of you can testify this morning that because of Jesus Christ, you know your sins are forgiven, and you stand justified before God. I testify to that same thing. As we sang earlier today: in Christ alone my hope is found. When I stand before God on the coming day of judgement when all sin will be called to account, I do not fear. God will not see me as guilty, but as righteous. He will reckon me perfect. Not because I have not sinned, but because by his grace, through my faith in his Son Jesus he has justified me.
Romans 5:1, the very next verse of 4:25, says, Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.
In Christ, God looks at us and does not see our sin. He sees Christ’s righteousness and declares us innocent on that basis. Debt paid. And it is because Jesus died for us, and rose again.
Easter is the best day.
Some of you today have not by faith received Jesus as Saviour. You have not accepted his death for your sins. You, then, bear the weight of your sins against God and are responsible to pay the infinite debt. And God in justice will require that of you. Yet in his mercy and love, he gave his son for you. Receive him today. Confess your sins. Confess your need to be saved from the penalty of sin. And be restored to right standing with God.
Some of you have acknowledged Jesus, but don’t realize that Jesus’ death is enough. You think you still have to fill up what is lacking by being religious, or being good. Your goodness does not, cannot make you right with God. It is the death and resurrection of Jesus only that justifies. Relax! Trust fully in him! Living rightly in loving response to God’s grace is a joy, where trying to live good enough to maintain God’s goodwill becomes only a burden. Surrender the need to measure up. Rest in the knowledge that in Christ, God sees you as good enough.
For those of you who have put your faith in Jesus, you know your sins are forgiven. Let your heart overflow with worship. You have been saved by the grace of the God who loves you too much to let you go.
Yes, Easter is a great day.
Amen.