COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! Magazine |
Last Friday evening as we began our weekly Former Adventist Fellowship Bible study, Richard said something I have been pondering ever since: “God is so just that He paid for all our sins.”
In one sentence he captured the enormity of our redemption. Our sin is not merely wrong deeds we accumulate over the span of our lives; it is literally the death humanity inherited from Adam, the sin of unbelief against God. We cannot be redeemed by our own physical death because we ourselves are spiritually dead by nature. We can’t simply live out our lives, die and be buried, and hope that God would be able to resurrect us because we paid the price of our sin. Spiritually dead people cannot pay any further for their sin. We are BORN dead, and we are unable to atone for ourselves. We are by nature in that helpless, hopeless zone—unable to do anything more than to live out our puny physical lives before our bodies die—experiencing the natural consequence of our spiritual death.
I am realizing what a difficult thing it is for people who’ve been Adventist to think about the meaning of God’s declaration that the wages of sin is death. As one former Adventist said last Friday in our Bible study, “I used to think that ‘death’ was when a person was lying in their casket.’”
Yet we are by nature dead in sin, children of wrath (Ephesians 2:1–3).
Taught Wrong
As Adventists we were taught wrong definitions. We learned that life was physical; our bodies breathe, and we live. Our bodies cease to breathe, and we die. All that comprises US ceases to exist when we expire that last breath.
Yet Scripture teaches us that human death is not defined by ceasing to breath and exist. Our physical death is the separation of our bodies and our immaterial spirits, the part of us that can know and worship God—the part of us that survives the body.
The essence of the wages of sin is that we are cut off from God’s life. Adam and Eve had full access to Yahweh before they sinned, but when they acted on their unbelief that God’s word could be believed even if they didn’t fully understand, they lost their spiritual connection to God. They hid from God and blamed everyone but themselves for their sin.
It is that death—that literal but immaterial spiritual separation from God—that is our natural state.
It is that death—that literal but immaterial spiritual separation from God—that is our natural state. We are born dead, even though our bodies breathe and move. Our true need is not to become more and more obedient to moral laws but to be made alive. We need to pass from death to life!
The reason hell is eternal is that our sin is not simply wrong deeds. Rather, it is unbelief—an offense against our eternal, sovereign God. Sin can’t be fixed by personal loss of life; our lives are condemned and dead by nature. Sin can only be atoned by a perfect, spiritually alive sacrifice that is sufficient to pay for humans’ transgression.
It’s striking to me that in the parable of the prodigal son, the prodigal knows that his sin is not primarily against his father. Here are Jesus’ words:
“I will rise up and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired men.’ So he rose up and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’ But the father said to his slaves, ‘Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet, and bring the fattened calf, slaughter it, and let us eat and celebrate, for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found.’’And they began to celebrate.”—Luke 15:18–24 LSB
I had not noticed before very recently that the son leads with confessing that his sin was against heaven. Secondarily, he had sinned “before” his father. He knew (as the Lord Jesus stated) that his sin was not just disrespect and self-indulgence and using his father for his own purposes. He knew that his sin was against God—against all that defined heaven—and that sin against our eternal God was the essence of his situation. That sin against God also hurt his father. He sinned “before “ his father—but the essence of his offense was against heaven, against God Himself.
That sin is the sin into which we all are born. That is the sin we inherit by nature because Adam disbelieved and disobeyed.
A sin of that magnitude can only be atoned by the One we sinned against. Our puny physical deaths are not sufficient to pay for our sin. Our puny regret cannot redeem our sin against our holy, eternal God.
God’s Justice
So again I am pondering Richard’s words: “God is so just that He paid for all our sin.” No naturally dead human could pay for even a single sin because we do not have life to lay down. We are born without spiritual life—we are born dead.
Our cringing regret cannot fix our guilt. Our only hope is to throw ourselves on God’s mercy and acknowledge that He has done what no mere man could do. He sent God the Son into this dead-in-sin world in the mortal flesh of dead-in-sin humans. Yet God the Son, his true nature veiled from human eyes, was never dead in sin. He was spiritually alive from the moment of His miraculous conception.
The Lord Jesus lived the life of a living man in a dying body, and because He was spiritually alive, He was sinless. Even more, He was also fully God, and the fulness of deity with all its attributes lived in Him bodily (Colossians 2:9).
Only God, incarnated in human flesh, could atone for human sin, and only our eternal God could redeem us from our sin against God. We see exactly what He did in 2 Corinthians 5:18–21:
Now all [these] things are from God, who reconciled us to Himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation, namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not counting their transgressions against them, and He has committed to us the word of reconciliation. So then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as God is pleading through us. We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. He made Him who knew no sin [to be] sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.—2 Corinthians 5:18–21 LSB
Our sin is bigger than we are. We sinned against our holy, eternal God—against the Source of our existence! There is no redemption for a transgression against the Source of our life—except for our Maker to identify with us and to give His own original, absolute Life as a substitute for ours.
As Jesus hung on the cross, He became sin for us, taking our sinful identity in Himself and enduring God’s wrath against our fatal flaw—our natural spiritual death—satisfying God’s demand that sin’s wages are death.
Jesus died the only death that could satisfy God because He was the only LIVING human who could offer that life—and because as the Source of our existence and the Source of life, He could exchange our natural death for His eternal life. Sin cannot be excused. God can’t sweep it away because He’s “nice”. It is a law of the universe that sin yields death.
Only God could pay the penalty He exacted from the human race.
Only God could pay the penalty He exacted from the human race. Only God could become one of us and take our sin so He could restore us to life.
When we see and believe what God did by sending His Son in our likeness to take our sin and to mediate His own life to our account, He makes us new. He gives us the gift sharing this gospel as His word of reconciliation to the world.
We who were Adventists need to understand that our spirits—our essence, our identities—are by nature dead in sin, and there is no possible way out of that that eternal death sentence. But God! He is JUST, and He atoned for our sin by paying His own price: death.
Only the death of the Lord Jesus opens the door of salvation to us. Only our trust and belief in His finished work of atonement and His shattering our curse grants us eternal life.
God’s justice paid for our sin—and He opened a new and living way to Himself through the body of His crucified Son.
Our only proper response is to believe and to thank Him for rescuing us from our sin against Him. When we believe, we become part of a heavenly celebration that we who were dead have begun to live, and we who were lost have been found (Luke 15:32). †
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