Truly & Perfectly Human – Part 2 - Paid in Full

Romans 6:23 “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

Pastor Sproul continues that Christ’s sinlessness is vindicated most powerfully in His resurrection. The penalty of sin, biblically speaking, is death. But, it was impossible for death to hold Him. Acts 2:24 “Whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it.” Why? Since Jesus was guilty of no personal sin, death had no rightful claim over Him. He bore our sin and guilt, and that is why He died; but once our debt of sin was cancelled, there was nothing left to keep Him buried. In John 19:30 from the Cross Jesus said, “tetelestai”, when is a accounting term which means that a debt has been paid in full - It is finished! And Jesus gave up His spirit, laying down His life to pay for ours. When we confess the sinlessness of Jesus Christ, we are not confessing merely that Jesus is a good man, nor a very good man, nor the best man who has ever lived. We are confessing  that Jesus is the perfect man; the only man able to be the (propitiation) sacrifice that satisfied the requirements of the law and acceptable to God.

C.S. Lewis wrote in his book titled “Mere Christianity”: “I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”

 Only a bad man would claim to be perfect if he was not perfect. To be equal with the Creator Father, to be sent from God, to be the Savior of the world. He is either the perfect man or He’s not a good man. Christ, who is God incarnate, is full God and Fully man. Jesus Christ is not only truly human, He is perfectly human.

1 John 4:10 “In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

In Christ, Brian