A Layman’s Thoughts

All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.

There are several versions of an old joke that begins with the question, “What’s black and white and red all over?”. In one version the answer is, “a newspaper.” This morning I want to show you two things: first, this question need not be a joke, and second, the answer is the plan of salvation.
It is clear to thinking people everywhere that we humans need salvation.
• Some religions teach that we perfect ourselves by living better through successive lives, being reincarnated over and over until we learn and practice all that is required.
• Other religions teach that we improve ourselves in our present lives by doing good things and being good people, thus warranting a place in heaven.
• Other religions teach that we must placate an angry god and hope that we can somehow escape the wrath of that god.
• Still others teach that it is all a matter of the mind; of seeing things as they really are and not as they appear.
• One currently popular line of religious thought is that there are many ways to God and that what’s right for you may not be right for me with regard to quote “touching the infinite.”
One way or the other, people in every time and in every place have felt that life is unlikely to end at physical death and that therefore it is important that we somehow ensure our place in heaven, nirvana, Valhalla, or paradise.
So integral is this belief to the lives of most people that we see it in unexpected places such as the despicable acts committed on September 11th, 2001. Educated men were willing to die for their belief that by their acts they would go to heaven. For them heaven was a place where they would be with many virgins forever—what happens to women in that heaven, I’m not certain.
Our Christian faith however, makes other claims. First we have the rather radical belief that there is only one way to God. We see this in Scriptures such as John 14:6 where we read: “I am the Way the Truth, and the Life. No man comes to the Father but by me.” Second we hold the view that salvation comes by no merit of our own nor by anything we can do—it can’t be earned. Scriptures like Ephesians 2:8-9 make this clear. There we read: 8For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—9not by works, so that no one can boast.
It is all very clear. There is no ambiguity. It’s black-and-white.
There are those who would have us believe that this set of basic Christian beliefs is passé—valuable perhaps for our less sophisticated forefathers. They hold the position that the Judeo-Christian belief system has evolved over time and that only now, in our time, have we begun to see the truth. These people argue that the Bible is not the inspired Word of God. It is rather, they say, a collection of writings of significant value. They tell us that Jesus of Nazareth was a special man with a very special and exceptional relationship with God and that he was the greatest moral teacher of all time. While certainly the most remarkable and influential person in history, they hold, He was not God incarnate, but merely a man.
If these claims are true, the Church Catholic has been apostate, without hope and without God throughout history. If these claims are true, all who have ever died have died in their sins. If these claims are true all religious thought until today has been misguided, erroneous, and worthless.
The central question that must be faced is whether a man, even an exceptional man, is capable of providing what Jesus claimed that He provided—the Way to God; salvation.
In Genesis 3;9-13 and 21 we find:
9But the LORD God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?”
12The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13Then the LORD God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
21The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.
The immediate remedy for the first sin was covering of the sinners by the skins of animals. Adam and Eve had sewed fig leaves together. God covered them at the expense of blood. Notice too that God provided the sacrifice and the covering.
In Genesis 4:2-7 we find: “Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. 3In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the LORD. 4But Abel brought fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The LORD looked with favor on Abel and his offering, 5but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor. So Cain was very angry, and his face was downcast. 6Then the LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? 7If you do what is right, will you not be accepted?”
Abel’s offering to God was an animal sacrifice. This was acceptable to God, but Cain’s offering of fruit and vegetables was unacceptable to God. Blood was required.
Genesis 8:18-21 reads: “18So Noah came out, together with his sons and his wife and his sons’ wives. 19All the animals and all the creatures that move along the ground and all the birds—everything that moves on the earth—came out of the ark, one kind after another. 20Then Noah built an altar to the LORD and, taking some of all the clean animals and clean birds, he sacrificed burnt offerings on it. 21The LORD smelled the pleasing aroma and said in his heart: “Never again will I curse the ground because of man, even though every inclination of his heart is evil from childhood. And never again will I destroy all living creatures, as I have done.”
Noah’s blood sacrifice was a “pleasing aroma” to God. True for Abel, true for Noah, and as we see in Genesis 22:1 and 2, true for Abraham. Genesis 22 reads: 1Some time later God tested Abraham. He said to him, “Abraham!” “Here I am,” he replied. 2Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”
Isaac was to be Abraham’s legacy, fulfilling the promise of God a few chapters earlier that Abraham would be the father of many nations, yet to test Abraham God asked that he be sacrificed. The region of Moriah is the region of Golgotha. Again, God provides the sacrifice.
Let’s fast forward to Leviticus 1:1 where we find: “1The LORD called to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting. He said, 2“Speak to the Israelites and say to them: ‘When any of you brings an offering to the LORD, bring as your offering an animal from either the herd or the flock.’”
The Old Testament is filled with examples of blood sacrifice. The Levitical and Deuteronomic law set up a system of priesthood. The priests were men selected by God from the line of Aaron and from the tribe of Levi. Their job was to act as intermediaries between God and the people. They cleansed themselves through prescribed rituals and then made the offerings of the people as a covering for their sins. These offerings had to be made often and they had to be perfect as we see in Numbers 28:3-4, “This is the offering made by fire that you are to present to the LORD: two lambs a year old without defect, as a regular burnt offering each day. 4Prepare one lamb in the morning and the other at twilight,…”
The priests were also required to make special offerings for the sins people committed in ignorance. Since God is perfect and completely Holy, the mere fact that people are imperfect required such acts because by comparison to perfection, “all have sinned and fall short of the Glory of God.”
Moreover, once each year the high priest entered the Holy of Holies. This was a special place in the temple that contained the Ark of the Covenant, a representation of the presence of God. The Ark had an atonement cover, or “mercy seat”, which was the place where God promised to meet His people through their representative, or intermediary, the high priest.
Scriptures such as these set the stage for communication of a great Truth. They are the precursor to further instruction and a dim preview of a coming event. From them we learn that blood is the necessary element for the forgiveness of sin. We learn that meeting with the Holy God requires cleansing.
Now let’s fast-forward again; this time to the New Testament.
Ephesians 2:11-18 makes the work of Christ clear. There we read: “11Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth and called “uncircumcised” by those who call themselves “the circumcision” (that done in the body by the hands of men)—12remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. 13But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ.
14For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, 16and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
Hebrews 10 contains Paul’s mini-sermon to the Jews on the topic…
Hebrews 10
1The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. 2If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. 3But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, 4because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.
5Therefore, when Christ came into the world, he said:
“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,
but a body you prepared for me;
6 with burnt offerings and sin offerings
you were not pleased.
7 Then I said, ‘Here I am—it is written about me in the scroll—
I have come to do your will, O God.’ “
8First he said, “Sacrifices and offerings, burnt offerings and sin offerings you did not desire, nor were you pleased with them” (although the law required them to be made). 9Then he said, “Here I am, I have come to do your will.” He sets aside the first to establish the second. 10And by that will, we have been made holy through the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.
11Day after day every priest stands and performs his religious duties; again and again he offers the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. 12But when this priest had offered for all time one sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God. 13Since that time he waits for his enemies to be made his footstool, 14because by one sacrifice he has made perfect forever those who are being made holy.
15The Holy Spirit also testifies to us about this. First he says:
16 “This is the covenant I will make with them
after that time, says the Lord.
I will put my laws in their hearts,
and I will write them on their minds.”
17Then he adds:
“Their sins and lawless acts
I will remember no more.”
18And where these have been forgiven, there is no longer any sacrifice for sin.
19Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus, 20by a new and living way opened for us through the curtain, that is, his body, 21and since we have a great priest over the house of God, 22let us draw near to God with a sincere heart in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience and having our bodies washed with pure water. 23Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.
If Jesus was only a man, however exceptional and good, He could not provide the kind of sacrifice required to atone for our sins. It is impossible for God to accept what is less than perfect. We cannot attain perfection on our own. Therefore God cannot accept us without our being made perfect by some other means. This creates a serious dilemma because God created mankind as the necessary expression of His perfect Love.
Scripture tells us not merely that God loves, but that He is love. If God loves and in fact is love, He necessarily loves perfectly—infinitely. Perfect love requires an object. To be said to have love, one must love someone or something. How could it be possible to love nothing?
Now imagine loving someone who does not love you in return. Can you imagine something greater? Certainly—and consequently this kind of love would be imperfect and therefore incompatible with God. The more perfect love you can imagine is loving someone who loves you in return. This is obviously better!
In this way we see that for God to be perfectly or infinitely loving, He would need to express that love, but not in the way that a child might love a Teddy Bear—with love that is not returned. Perfect love would need to be expressed to someone with the capacity to love in return. First John 4:12 points us in this direction, “No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”
Someone might argue that God could then simply have created beings who love Him by their nature; beings who love Him because they are created for that purpose; who must love Him. This line of thought would be flawed however, because again we can imagine something better, or more perfect, than loving someone who is forced to love us in return. Loving someone who loves us in return because they choose to love us of their own free will would be immeasurably better.
For this reason, God created us with freedom of will, as free moral agents. Within our temporal existence, we are free to love God, or not.
And so we see that God desires a relationship with us, but for that to be possible the impossible must happen; we must be made perfect; righteous. Only a perfect sacrifice can accomplish this impossible task.
We are left with one remaining problem. What happened to all the people who died before Christ came? If they are left out of this plan, our position is little better than the idea that our faith has evolved over time and that only now are we beginning to see the truth of the matter. One thing we have to remember is that God is eternal. This does not so much mean that He was before the world and will continue after it as it means that He is outside time altogether. This is a concept we cannot really grasp, but one mechanism some find helpful is to think that for God, every time is present simultaneously. Christ’s sacrifice was “once for all” as we see in several passages including our earlier reading in Hebrews 9:12b, “he entered the Most Holy Place once for all by his own blood, having obtained eternal redemption.”
These ideas and the many Scriptures that expand on them lead us inexorably to the knowledge that Jesus, while fully human, was also fully God. Only a perfect sacrifice could provide the required payment for our sins, and only a perfect Jesus could be such a sacrifice. Don’t let those who would deconstruct the Bible and treat it as a merely-historical document sidetrack you with their “fine-sounding arguments.” Put your faith in Jesus Christ, the author and finisher of your faith and hold fast to the truths you were taught.
The plan of salvation is black and white and red all over. Jesus is God. Don’t let anybody tell you different.