Continuing Pastor Kyle's message: The third truth is that Salvation requires sacrifice on God’s part and on mine. There is no kind, gentle, happy and forgiving God of the New Testament, and an angry, aggressive, punishing God of the Old Testament. In reality, it’s the same God throughout the whole Bible who has the attributes of love and mercy towards His people and plans to use them for His glory. It is the same God that set up the parameters of what relationship with Him is supposed to look like. So, when God set His Law up, he wasn’t setting us up to be condemned, but to outline how our relationship with Him was to be maintained. When relationship with God became broken, the Word of God reveals what God’s people needed to do to be reconciled and the right relationship restored.
The breaking of our relationship with God is called “sin”. To be in “right” standing with God, from an eternal perspective, to offset sin, a sacrifice is required because God is holy, just and cannot be in the presence of sin. Romans 6:23a “For the wages of sin is death.” Sin has a ultimate cost; our eternal damnation in Hell or the substitutionary sacrifice of innocent blood shed to atone for or forgive it. The slaying of a lamb without blemish showed the Jewish people the cost of their sin and the heart-breaking pain God’s felt in the separation, being no longer in an intimate relationship with His people as He wanted to be.
Romans 6:23b “but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
God set up the sacrificial system, where an innocent lamb was sacrificed as a substitute for the Israelite’s sins. At the Cross, God sent His one and only Son to be our once-and-for-all sacrifice to forgive us of all of our sins. Jesus Christ took what was set up in Exodus by God and foreshadowed in all of the Old Testament to fulfill the requirement as the sinless, spotless Lamb of God. Each year, the Israelites paid the substitutionary price for their sins, but what Jesus did was to pay the debt off in full. Jesus’ first recorded words in the Bible were: “I must be about my Father’s business.” Jesus’ final word’s from the Cross were: “It is finished”. At the Cross, Jesus finished His Father’s business in the Plan of Salvation by paying the debt of sin (the sins of the world) in full.
1 Peter 1:14-19 “As obedient children, not conforming yourselves to the former lusts, as in your ignorance; but as He who called you is holy, you also be holy in all your conduct, because it is written, “Be holy, for I am holy.” And if you call on the Father, who without partiality judges according to each one’s work, conduct yourselves throughout the time of your stay here in fear; knowing that you were not redeemed with corruptible things, like silver or gold, from your aimless conduct received by tradition from your fathers, but with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot.”
The entire identity of the Israelite people was as the people of God, brought out of slavery in Egypt and spare by the blood of a spotless lamb. Our entire identity as Followers of the Lord Jesus Christ is as the redeemed people of God who have been saved by the blood of “The Lamb of God”, who takes our sin upon Himself and transfers His sinless righteousness upon us. A sacrifice has always been required for salvation. Jesus Christ did His part of the Cross, and we have been rescued by the blood of the Lamb. By the Son of God’s finished work of redemption, the gift of God, we have a new identity as a royal priesthood. Our part is to repent of sin and accept Jesus as our Savior and Lord, being holy, worshipping and obeying Him for the rest of our lives.
Let's conclude Pastor Kyle's message on the building blocks of God in the next post. In Christ, Brian
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