Jesus is not just the central character in the New Testament. In Luke 24 is the account of Jesus appearing to two disciples on the road to Emmaus just after the resurrection. Verse 27 says, “Beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.” Jesus Christ is the central character of the entire Bible. God’s covenant promises all point to Jesus, and He is the fulfillment of those promises.
One of the greatest promises in the Bible is God’s forgiveness and righteousness, but just how is this possible? How do we receive these things that we clearly don’t deserve?
A question we hear so often is, “How can a loving God send anyone to hell?” As I’ve mentioned before, this is actually the wrong question. What we should be asking is this: “How can God keep His promiseto save sinners without compromising His holiness or His love?” The answer to this, of course, is the cross of Christ, but in order to understand just how this works, we need to go back into the Old Testament once more and the Abrahamic Covenant.
In Genesis 12, God promises Abraham (or Abram, as he was still known then) that He would make Abraham’s name great, and that all nations would be blessed through him. As we saw last time, there is a theological term called God’s common grace, by which all people, regardless of whether they believe in God or not, are recipients of His grace every day of their lives, but our theme for today is what is known as God’s special or saving grace, which is promised all the way back in Genesis 3, and God begins to reveal just how that promise becomes a reality in chapter 15 in the Abrahamic Covenant.
Here we see God taking the initiative. In this formal covenant making ceremony, it’s important to see that God is the one who makes the promise, He is the one who underwrites the terms of the covenant, and of course, He fulfills the terms of the covenant in Jesus’ death and resurrection.
All Abraham does is believe. The Abrahamic Covenant is not a joint or bilateral agreement between God and Abraham. They’re not sitting down at the bargaining table, negotiating the terms of the agreement. Instead, this is a unilateral act performed by God.
The story of the Bible is God’s sovereign grace, and Abraham’s and our response, is to merely believe God’s promises by faith, and this is really what the Gospel is all about.
In Genesis we have what to us may seem a rather strange ritual, as God instructed Abraham to bring a heifer, a goat, a ram, a turtle dove and a pigeon. The larger animals were slaughtered and cut in two, and the birds were strangled to death.
This is what was known as a blood oath, as God walked between the animal halves calling down a blood curse on Himself if He were to break the terms of the covenant.
Now this may seem more than a little bizarre to us today, but we need to have some understanding of just what a blood oath was, and how it worked. In Abraham’s day, this was all quite normal when a covenant was made and sealed. When two kings made a treaty or a covenant with each other, as part of the ceremony, animals would be killed and cut in two or strangled.
In fact, in the original Hebrew, the Old Testament word for covenant is “berith,” which means “to cut.”
Then the lesser of the two parties or the two kings, who was referred to as a vassal, and was considered the servant of the other king, would walk between the slaughtered animals, as if to say, “If I break this covenant and if I don’t do everything I’m promising to do, may God make me just like these dead animals.” So the ritual that Abraham witnessed was quite normal to him, but there was one remarkable difference in this case.
Abraham was the vassal, not God. He was the lesser of the two parties. Abraham was the one who should have been making the blood oath, but instead it was God who fulfilled this role. By walking alone through these severed animals, God makes a blood oath, and He invokes death upon Himself if he fails to fulfil His promise to Abraham. He makes a unilateral, not a joint covenant of promise, and then He seals it with an oath.
Another crucial detail in all of this is found in verse 12. What was Abraham doing while God was making the blood oath? He was sleeping. God put him into a deep sleep. This shows us the unilateral, one-sided nature of this covenant.
Fast forward to Calvary. We have broken God’s law through our disobedience and rebellion against God. Our sin has caused an eternal separation between us and God, and so what does He do? On the cross He invokes and carries out the terms of the blood oath He made with Abraham. He calls down curses on Himself in Christ, as Jesus died on our behalf because of our failure to obey the law.
At Calvary God makes good on the promise He made in Genesis 15. Here again we see the importance of Jesus being fully God and fully man at the same time. Anyone who teaches that Jesus surrendered His deity, His “Godness” and that He lived and died only as a man is not only a heretic, but they have also missed the entire point of the Cross. If Jesus was not fully human, He could not be our Saviour. A human being had to pay the price for human sin. However, at the same time, God had promised in Genesis 15 that He would pay the price if the terms of the Abrahamic Covenant were broken. Sin has done that, and as Jesus is fully God, He, in bearing our sins on the cross as God, has fulfilled the terms of the Abrahamic Covenant. Jesus paid the price and bore the curse as fully man and fully God. On the cross, all the requirements to gain our salvation are met.
Jesus had the curses brought upon Himself on the cross, even though He was perfectly obedient and had no sin of His own. This is the great exchange which took place on the cross. He exchanged our sin for His righteousness, so that we can have His righteosness credited or imputed to us.
This exchange is what lies at the very heart of the Gospel. The theologian Michael Horton wrote, “God declares unrighteous people to be righteous even while they are still unrighteous in themselves because they are now in union with Christ.”
In this great exchange, Jesus has taken our sin on Himself and credited His righteousness to our account at the same time. He took the wrath that our sin deserved and gave us the new life that His perfect obedience earned.
If you have been following our series on the book of Romans, you might remember the rather stark picture that Paul presents in chapter 3. He quotes from the Old Testament in verses 10 to 18 as he writes, “None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God. All have turned aside; together they have become worthless; no one does good, not even one. Their throat is an open grave; they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known. There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
This is why we need a Saviour. We simply have to come to an understanding of how far short we have fallen of the glory of God, and it this failure, this sin, which will keep us separated from Him for all eternity, unless, by faith, we receive the righteousness we need to be in His presence, and the only righteousness which will do, is the righteousness of Jesus Christ.
Without Him we have no escape from the wrath of God. Read the Bible. God has told us plainly what the consequences of sin are: eternal damnation in a very real place called hell. The last 5 verses of Revelation 20 contain these dreadful words for those who refuse to repent and who continue to reject Christ. “Then I saw a great white throne and Him who was seated on it. From His presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.”
Those who oppose Jesus Christ and who reject the Gospel message will be under His judgment forever, but those who put their faith in Him, will be His forever. The next 5 verses in the Bible provide the stark contrast between the lost and the saved: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be His people, and God Himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.’ And He who was seated on the throne said, ‘Behold, I am making all things new.’ Also He said, ‘Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.’” (Revelation 21:1-5)
Through His sacrificial death, Jesus paid the price of our sin. Remember, because God is holy and just, He cannot and He will not just look the other way and pretend our sin doesn’t matter. His holy and just nature demands a payment. If you reject the cross and do not believe that Christ died for your sins and was raised for your justification, you will pay the price of that rejection for eternity.
Through His righteous life, Jesus exchanged the righteousness we could never earn for our sin. Jesus is the only one who has earned righteousness through obedience to the law, and He earned it perfectly, and it is this perfect righteousness which is imputed to us by faith. And as He does that, He bears our sin on Himself as He pays the death penalty we deserve.
2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.”
This is what the Gospel is all about. Jesus has exchanged His riches for our poverty. God’s great plan of salvation is that in Christ, the second person of the Trinity, God Himself took on the curse and punishment we deserve for our disobedience. As we put our faith in Jesus Christ, He takes our sins with Him to the cross and the punishment we deserve is poured out on Him, while at the same time He gives us His own righteousness. This is what it means to be a recipient of God’s special, saving grace. It means that you are saved from what you deserve, and you are blessed in ways which eternity itself will not be long enough to fully comprehend.
Just before we close, I want to go back to the story of Abraham, and Genesis chapter 15.
Why was Abraham put into a deep sleep? Why would God do this when Abraham is supposed to be making a contract?
It is because Abraham was not required to promise anything. All he had to do was believe. Verse 6 says, “he believed the Lord, and He counted it to him as righteousness.”
At Calvary the same thing happened. God sent His Son to the cross, and on that cross, Jesus bore the penalty of your sin. You weren’t even there to sign on the dotted line, binding yourself to your terms of the covenant of grace, because there aren’t any terms for you to bind yourself to. All you have to do is believe, and the amazing thing is that even the faith you have to believe is a gift from God!
Just as Abraham was put into a deep sleep, completely unaware of what was going on, so we too receive the benefits of God’s grace, even though we were completely unaware of our sin and our need for a Saviour. Before receiving grace we are dead in our sins and transgressions - in a deep, spiritual sleep, which is best described as dead. And so we give thanks to God for His Gospel which saves, redeems and resurrects us from our spiritual sleep - our spiritual death.
Romans 5:8 says, “God shows His love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
Abraham couldn’t promise anything, and neither can we.
Jesus goes to the cross, because there is nothing we can do to escape the death sentence which hangs over us. All it takes is faith to believe Him, and that what He did on the cross for you will save you. As Paul said to the Philippian jailer in Acts 16:31, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”
In the final part of this series next week, we will look at how the great exchange which took place on the cross makes us children of God and how this was always part of God’s promise to His people.