By Mark Grace, CCCNZ Ambassador
Ko te aroha tenei, ehara i te mea ko tatou kua aroha ki te Atua, engari ko ia kua aroha ki a tatou, a tonoa mai ana e ia tana Tama hei whakamarie mo o tatou hara.
O le alofa lava lenei, e le ona ua tatou alofa i le Atua, a ua alofa mai o ia ia te i tatou, ua na auina mai foi lona Alo o le togiola mo a tatou agasala.
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
1 John 4:10
In the Old Testament, God lovingly provided a way to avert his anger against the people’s sin. He provides a system of sacrificial offerings.
Imagine you’re one of God's people. You’ve sinned, and God’s anger against your sin will need to be appeased. You can no longer live in the presence of a holy God. You deserve to die because you sinned against a perfect God.
In accordance with God’s loving provision, you would then almost always offer an animal sacrifice. You go to the temple and the priest places your animal offering on the altar.
The animal is your substitute. It’s killed in recognition of the fact that the penalty for your sin is death. The animal died for your sin instead of you. It died your death, in your place.
Throughout the Old Testament God provided a temporary substitute. But now, at the cross, it’s different.
In his love, God presents a total and complete substitute for us: his son Jesus. He came to deal with your sin and God’s wrath toward it “once and for all”. Because he is both fully God and fully human, Jesus is uniquely qualified to represent both God and humanity. He can mediate between us. In fact, he is the only one who can.
As our substitute on the cross, Jesus takes the full force of God’s anger against our sin. It is God himself in holy love who undertakes to do the satisfying.
It is God himself, in the person of the Son, who stands in our place and dies for the satisfaction of God’s anger against our sin.
At the cross, God gave himself to save us.
This never gets old for me. I’m more amazed at the depth and breadth of God’s grace to me through Jesus at 52 than I was at 22.
