Many years ago, my family had a large plastic container that was filled with coins, but three dollars’ worth of dimes were kept separate from the rest, because they were old dimes from back when the U.S. used real silver for the coins. One day, as I was holding those dimes and considering how much they might be worth, it suddenly struck me that I was literally holding 30 pieces of silver. Though my coins were smaller than those of the first century, it was still moving to reflect on how someone once saw the life of Jesus Christ as worth not much more than what I was holding in my hand.
And then I wondered: Do I ever make that kind of miscalculation? Do I ever undervalue the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ?
As the Passover approaches, this is an especially appropriate topic on which to meditate. Do we appreciate the true value of Christ’s sacrifice? Doing so requires an understanding of what it achieved, why it was necessary, and what it required of Him.
The Uncrossable Gulf
When God created humanity, He did so for a remarkable hope—a hope that should be a profound motivation for each of us. The Apostle John wrote, “Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed on us, that we should be called children of God! Therefore the world does not know us, because it did not know Him” (1 John 3:1).
It’s easy to fail to appreciate the full meaning of that scripture. Even if we have a sense that, being created in His image, we reflect Him in some way, that is not the same as grasping what it means to actually be God.
John continues, “Beloved, now we are children of God; and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when He is revealed, we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (v. 2). A child in the womb is your child—but the child in the womb hasn’t seen its destiny yet. It’s in darkness, and it doesn’t know its purpose until it’s born and gets to see Mom and Dad, see—in a way—its destiny. In the same way, we will not truly see and grasp the fullness of our destiny until we are born at the resurrection, meeting Christ in the clouds and finally fully reflecting Him in glory.
“And everyone who has this hope in Him purifies himself, just as He is pure” (v. 3). Do we comprehend that God’s purpose is to make us like Him? The more that hope is woven into us, the more it will motivate us to purify ourselves. It is a vision greater than any other. God created humanity with the possibility to become like Him and enjoy the life and existence He and Jesus Christ enjoy—part of Their Family forever. It’s a remarkable hope, but how do we act upon that hope? As we approach the Passover season, we should meditate on the fact that, in our own ways, we all too often neglect that hope with our own choices, repeating the mistake of Adam and Eve and saying, by our actions, God, not Your will, but my will be done.
The Apostle Paul wrote that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). Between the place where God intends us to be and the place where our actions and choices take us, there is a gulf of unimaginable proportions. Even if we never sinned again for the rest of our lives, we would still be only broken sinners who eventually stopped. We fall so far short of the glory of God.
Paul wrote to the Ephesians that there was a time when they “were without Christ… having no hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:11–12). Without Christ, there literally is no hope.
But he also wrote that “now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (v. 13). Christ’s sacrifice enabled a bridging of the chasm between us and God, a bridging that before had not been imaginable. Yet it is hard to completely grasp just how wide that chasm is because we don’t fully understand what is on the other side—what it truly means to be God.
Christ paid the full penalty for sin, one aspect of which is separation from our Creator: “Behold, the Lord’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; nor His ear heavy, that it cannot hear. But your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear” (Isaiah 59:1–2).
Why is that? Why do our sins separate us? Because God is holy. He is pure, righteous, and perfect. He told ancient Israel, “I am the Lord your God. You shall therefore consecrate yourselves, and you shall be holy; for I am holy” (Leviticus 11:44). No one will live with God forever who isn’t holy. The prophet Habakkuk says of God, “You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness” (Habakkuk 1:13).
It is so easy to make excuses for “small sins” in our lives—justifying to ourselves that one unkind word we said in the heat of our emotions, or the one tiny falsehood we said because we felt embarrassed or trapped. Yet passages such as these reveal just how foreign any sin is to the character and nature of God—and how foreign sin is to everything our Father is seeking to form within us so that He can share His eternal existence with us.
Reflecting on the pure and righteous holiness of God helps us to comprehend the vast chasm between us and Him that even one “small sin” would create—let alone the enormous constellation of sins that most all of us accumulate over the course of our lives. That sin puts all of us on the opposite side of a great chasm from God, because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23).
That gulf cannot be bridged by our actions. It requires Christ’s sacrifice. But when we understand the immensity of that gulf, we begin to appreciate just what it meant for Christ to be sacrificed. Christ’s sacrifice makes it possible to bridge that gap so God can work in our lives, so He can have His fingers knuckle-deep into our character, our personality, and help us make the changes He wants us to make. As Passover draws near, we should meditate on how He built a bridge for us across an otherwise uncrossable gulf— through His sacrifice.
The Magnitude of the Act
We can think of a miracle as an instance when the laws of nature are suspended, overruled, or superseded by the God of nature. A miracle is something that could not happen without an act of God, because it does not make sense according to natural law—it points to something beyond the natural. And the Bible contains a plethora of astonishing miracles.
One miracle would be the creation itself—that God created everything! That was a supernatural act! Not a single law of nature can explain creation without a Creator. And consider the parting of the Red Sea—imagine what it would be like to be an Israelite wandering across its bed with walls of water on both sides of you! Would you have dared to touch one of these walls of water? As there were little boys among the people of Israel, I suspect the walls were touched.
We can enjoy imagining what it was like to experience that miracle. But there is an even greater miracle, and it’s rooted in the very identity of God Himself. If you’ve attended services with the Living Church of God for very long, you’ve noticed that many ministers say “the Eternal” when they’re reading the Bible and come to the capitalized “Lord” in the Old Testament—which is how most Bibles indicate the YHVH that represents God’s name. We don’t substitute “Lord” with “Eternal” on the Tomorrow’s World telecast or in our magazines, because that would confuse people, but among brethren we tend to say, “the Eternal,” because that is one way to communicate the meaning of God’s name, a meaning that describes both the One who became God the Father and the One who became Jesus Christ.
Before He was the Son of God, the Word—the Logos—interacted with Moses. When Moses asked what His name was, He said, “I AM WHO I AM.” His existence defines what existence is. He is the Ever-Living One, whose life defines what living is. All of our lives, even put together, are barely a breath compared to the reality of what life is for God. God so represents existence and life that He can truthfully say, My name is I AM. We are all temporary. Only God is truly permanent.
Perhaps, then, the greatest miracle in the Bible is that this Being—the Eternal, the Ever-Living One—died. If a miracle is the suspension of what is natural, has there ever been a more unnatural circumstance in all of human history?
We read that, as Christ was hanging on the stake, “from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land” (Matthew 27:45)—that is, from noon to about 3:00 pm. It’s not natural for darkness to be all over the land for three hours during the brightest time of the day. “And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?’ that is, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” (v. 46). Jesus was forsaken by God—and it was completely unnatural that the Two who define what it is to be God, the God Family, would be separated.
“And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice, and yielded up His spirit” (v. 50). We know from John 19:34 that, at that time, a spear was rammed into His side and He was murdered.
Then, behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth quaked, and the rocks were split, and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised; and coming out of the graves after His resurrection, they went into the holy city and appeared to many. So when the centurion and those with him, who were guarding Jesus, saw the earthquake and the things that had happened, they feared greatly, saying, “Truly this was the Son of God” (Matthew 27:51–54).
Even the Gentiles, to whom Jesus had not preached, saw how nature itself responded to the death of this Man, and they gave testimony that “this was the Son of God!” It was as if nature itself convulsed at what it was forced to endure—the most unnatural act it had ever witnessed—the death of its own Creator.
The Ever-Living One had to die so that our sins could be forgiven. What a momentous occurrence in the history of creation. And what a perspective it should give us concerning the price required to remove our sins.
The Choice to Be Human
A third reason to appreciate Christ’s sacrifice is that He chose to make it of His own free will. Just as we have the power to choose in our own lives, so did He. Everything Jesus did, He did voluntarily.
In Philippians 2, we are admonished by the Apostle Paul to be of the same mind as Christ (v. 5). But more than that, he highlights just what aspect of Christ’s mind he is thinking of. The English Standard Version renders it more clearly than the New King James, saying that Jesus, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men” (vv. 6–7). That is, as the Word who was “with God” and “was God” (John 1:1), He did not count that as something to which He needed to desperately cling. Rather, He was willing to give it up—to “empty Himself” of His divine privileges and glory and become mere flesh and blood, like you and I are, vulnerable to pain, suffering, and death.
And what was His approach in this life—as a human just like us? We read of His comment to His Father in the Garden of Gethsemane, before His arrest: “Not My will, but Yours, be done” (Luke 22:42). Yet this was not a one-time decision at the end of His life. It was a characteristic of His entire life, every moment of every day, for thirty-three-and-a-half years.
Because of that lifetime of choices, “we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God…. We do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:14–16).
Of course, this doesn’t mean that Jesus was tempted in all the particular details of every possible variety of human sin throughout time. For instance, He didn’t have to be tempted to use ChatGPT to cheat on His homework to fully feel the temptation to lie. He didn’t have to be tempted to look at Internet pornography to fully feel the temptation to lust. The point is that, throughout His human life, He was tempted to break every one of the Ten Commandments, like we are. But because He made the continual choice to tell God, “Not My will, but Yours,” we can have confidence that no matter the sin we bring before Him, He can say, I know what it feels like to be tempted by such sins—and I can help.
Knowing this, we see that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ was far more than just His final torture and execution. He sacrificed continually for more than three decades. He emptied Himself of His divine privileges so He could live like we do, so we could have confidence in what He has done—and in what He can do in us.
The Choice to Die
And we must remember that Christ was not obligated to sacrifice Himself. He made that choice willingly—He was not forced against His will. We read, “As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep” (John 10:15). He actively chose to lay down His life as He did.
When the authorities were coming to arrest Christ and Peter tried to physically defend Him, “Jesus said to him, ‘Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword. Or do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels?’” (Matthew 26:52–53).
The number of soldiers in a legion has varied, but a Roman legion in the first century had about 5,000 troops. If at any point Jesus had decided that mankind wasn’t worth it, more than 60,000 angels would have appeared in the sky to intervene. I imagine Jerusalem would have become a crater.
But Jesus never chose to do that. He actively chose, moment by moment, to embrace everything He was enduring—including penalties that would have been ours. We have earned death (Romans 6:23), so Jesus Christ experienced death. He paid that penalty, as well as the penalty of physical suffering—which our sins cause not just for us, but for others as well. So, Jesus Christ allowed His body, which deserved no punishment whatsoever, to be ravaged until even His very muscles and bones were exposed. As lash after lash after lash after lash came, there was surely a point when 60,000 angels would have been a tempting option. Yet, with each strike, Christ simply waited for the next. He chose to allow that.
Ultimately, He allowed Himself to experience even separation from God, as noted earlier: “At the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?’ which is translated, ‘My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?’” (Mark 15:34). There on the stake, He quoted from Psalm 22, repeating words He had inspired many centuries before, knowing in advance what He would suffer. (For more on this, read this issue’s Editorial, “The Lamb of God and the Good Shepherd,” by Mr. Gerald Weston.)
One of the greatest lessons of Christ’s sacrifice is that He endured separation from the Father so that we will never have to. The assurance that God will never abandon us is grounded in Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, as He paid that penalty. Despite all our imperfections, we will never have to know a separation from God—because of the price Jesus Christ voluntarily paid on that Passover.
Forgiven and Changed
And, of course, one of the greatest blessings that results from Jesus Christ’s sacrifice is utter and complete forgiveness of the sins we have committed. His ancestor David wrote, “Bless the Lord, O my soul; and all that is within me, bless His holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits: who forgives all your iniquities, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from destruction, who crowns you with lovingkindness and tender mercies, who satisfies your mouth with good things, so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (Psalm 103:1–5). Take the time to think about those words this season. The King of all there is, the Ruler of all existence, has forgiven your sins, saving from destruction and, further, crowning you with lovingkindness and tender mercies.
He has not dealt with us according to our sins, nor punished us according to our iniquities. For as the heavens are high above the earth, so great is His mercy toward those who fear Him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us. As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust (vv. 10–14).
If you ever wonder whether you’re at the limits of God’s mercy, imagine how far the heavens are from the earth—and given the heavens include the realm of the planets and stars, that distance is unfathomable. If we doubt the ability or willingness of God to forgive us, it means that we don’t fully comprehend the fullness of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice. It’s not that your old sins are simply distant from you; they’re not on your life’s radar screen anymore. The price paid for you was the life of your Creator—the greatest price that could possibly be paid. If that price has been paid to free someone from sin, then he is free indeed.
To be sure, there is such a thing as the unpardonable sin, but if you’re capable of repenting—truly feeling sorrow, seeking to change your life and turn toward God—you have not committed that sin, since those who commit that sin simply will not choose to repent (Hebrews 6:4–6). There is no sin so terrible that, should we choose to drop to our knees before God and say, I do not want this anymore, I want You and the life You hold out to me, somehow God won’t find His Son’s sacrifice sufficient for that. It is sufficient, so we have access to forgiveness.
Christ Himself revealed the willingness of His Father to forgive: “Then Peter came to Him and said, ‘Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven’” (Matthew 18:21–22). This was not permission to withhold forgiveness when “sin #491” is reached. This was Christ’s way of saying, You should be an endless well of forgiveness, because that’s what My Father and I are. Does God expect more of us than He is willing to do, Himself? Do we ever think He has run out of forgiveness toward us? He has not.
Through His gift of the Holy Spirit, we have access to God’s divine nature. We read that “His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue, by which have been given to us exceedingly great and precious promises, that through these you may be partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:3–4). There is nothing God is holding back from us. The price that was willingly paid gives you access to everything.
Christ’s sacrifice opens a door. God is able, at baptism, with Jesus’ life given on our behalf, to take some of His very own nature and place it within us. No vessel of man’s devising is pure enough to contain any portion of the divine nature—yet that sacrifice made on our behalf has made us among the most precious vessels in existence, such that God can say, I will put My nature there.
We are told that “we love Him because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19). There’s a reason the very first Festival must be Passover—without it, the rest can’t happen. May all of us, this Passover season, grow to appreciate even more fully the sacrifice of Jesus Christ.