Jesus Christ.
That’s not an exclamation. He is a person. A real, living, 100% human being.
And also 100% God – the God who created all that is.
A person who lived and still lives a quality and perfection of life that I cannot. Every day I have actions, words, choices, attitudes, and motives that are lies about the character of God of whom I’m an ‘image-bearer’. I’ve stacked a mountain of such sins in my years…and continue to add to it.
There is a good, right, and perfectly just wrath against such from the One whose glory I’ve dirtied. The One of whom my life as an image-bearer has lied about. The God Who Is – is perfectly just and that means no sweeping all this under the rug; just “forgive and forget”. That is exactly the kind of god I would fashion in my own mind, but it is not the One Who Is. A simple “forgive and forget” would belittle the glory of His holiness. It would tarnish His justice; declare Him an unjust judge unworthy of His position. Glory belittling. This cannot be.
Therefore I, and every man, have a penalty to pay for our willful rebellion – as image-bearers the lies and slander we tell of God’s character with every thought/motive/word/action of ours that are against His perfect character and law. We as His creatures do not show forth the full worth and glory of the One whose image we bear. There is a debt to pay for this.
I’m bankrupt.
All I have to offer is…another day of the same. Even my good works on my best days are tainted with sinful motives – always a little self-exaltation and self-righteousness mixed in with the best of my deeds. I can produce nothing of pure righteousness; I taint it all with sin thus producing only ‘filthy rags’.
Therefore, if help doesn’t come from without then there is no help. Hell is my destination and that is right and just because I would receive there what I have spent a life deserving and earning. God remains gloriously and perfectly just – his perfection of justice and righteousness would be glorified in the wrath poured out against my lifetime of willing lies as an image bearer.
Yet – there was a day we call the first Christmas.
A couple of thousand years ago, on one speck of dust in the universe, in a little nowhere town, just a dot on the globe in a tiny nation, a baby was born. One of the estimated 100 billion that have inhabited this speck. Why was this one of any note out of 100 billion?
This one was God incarnate.
There was a first Christmas because The God Who Is has other perfectly glorious attributes to display to all of His creation, namely mercy and grace. As Ephesians 1 states, it’s all “to the praise of the glory of His grace”. The glory of His grace will be praised yet must be done without harm to the glory of His justice and righteousness.
So God the Son added a fully human nature to his fully divine nature and took on flesh in a virgin’s womb as that Christmas baby. As Hebrews 2 puts it “since therefore the children share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things”. God took on humanity, as a curled-up baby in a borrowed womb, as incredulous as that sounds, so that he would be fully identified with us as our representative, a second Adam.
He lived here, as a man, where fully every second of every day of his entire life he had perfectly pure and righteous thoughts, motives, choices, words, and actions. Every…single…one. A perfectly righteous life. He was and is the real and perfect image-bearer of God. Where I fail, He wildly succeeds. He perfectly fulfilled God’s law, perfectly reflected his character. God the Father could declare of Him, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” because finally there was a real, true man on the earth – as he created man to be. A true image-bearer. His own Son, in flesh.
And then he willingly faced death on a cross, willingly laid down His perfectly lived life – the Creator at the hands of his creature. But it wasn’t just a horrible physical death of crucifixion. I say this with a measure of trepidation, but there’s nothing special about dying on a cross. The historian Josephus tells us Rome crucified 3,000 Jews in one year alone. He documents a Roman legate, Varus, who in 4 B.C. went into Judea and Galilee and crucified 2,000 Jews. Jesus was one of three on that singular hill; the two others suffering the same punishing death as thieves. These other two men, and thousands more, ‘died on a cross’ as well; dying on a cross isn’t particularly meaningful. It was cruel, but common.
What made this one a history-dividing event to this day was not the what, but the Who. This was that Christmas baby. With no sin of his own, while hanging on that cross he was a propitiation, a wrath ‘absorber’, a wrath ‘satisfier’. All of the sin of all of his people, imputed to him, counted as his – let that sink in – and the just wrath of God against all that sin was meted out on Him in full. “It was the will of the Lord to crush him” (Is 53:10).
His cry of ‘it is finished!’ means vastly more than “I’m breathing my last”. It means, and gloriously so,
“Till on that cross, as Jesus died, the wrath of God was satisfied.”
Satisfied.
Gone.
But to what end? To be that external help we must have. To enable a bankrupt someone like me to be justified even and especially in the sight of a perfectly holy, just, “consuming fire” God. Someone so unjust, so unrighteous can NOT just be simply declared righteous. That would be unjust and unrighteous on His part and it may not, it cannot, be. God is love, but He is too good, too righteous, too just to simply ignore my sin. His love erases not his other perfections.
As Paul put it so succinctly in Romans 3, we “are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith. This was to show God’s righteousness, because in his divine forbearance he had passed over former sins. It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.”
So the cross, apart from justifying and saving me – gloriously way above and beyond that – the cross justified God and his righteousness. Far from being an unjust judge, a glory belittling judge who simply forgives and forgets, just sweeps my sin under the rug – no, the cross was to vindicate God’s righteousness for the fact that every man is not in hell right now. The cross is God upholding the glory of God. And for us, those who repent and place their faith in Christ, the full penalty, the wrath against us as sinners, was paid at that cry of ‘it is finished’. So that He might be both just and justifier.
But that’s not the end.
Paying my penalty gets me to zero. It doesn’t give me the perfect righteousness required. We must understand the minimum requirement to draw near to a consuming fire God is perfection (Heb 7:11). I’m still at a loss; I still need external help. It was almost four decades ago, but I imagine that at the moment of my repentance and faith, that moment in time of my justification, I probably sinned again within the hour, certainly within the day. The penalty of that and all subsequent sin was already paid, but the issue is still there – the required perfection eludes us completely. Sitting at zero debt for sin doesn’t mean I’m now perfectly righteous. We still fall short. Even God’s own perfect law makes nothing perfect; it only reveals the remaining imperfection.
But again, there was that first Christmas. Ever wonder why Jesus didn’t just show up as a 30-something adult, go to the cross, resurrect on the third day and go back to heaven, a month or two start to finish? WHY a baby in a womb? Because as a real and true representative, Jesus entered the world and lived the full human experience literally from the womb to the tomb – as the second and true Adam. Before He faced a cross, he lived a 30 plus year life as a true, real human. He lived that actual righteous perfection required of every man every second of every day as a man. Listen as He does this in verses like John 5:19, 30:
“So Jesus said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise”
“I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me.”
As Romans 5:18-19 states:
“Therefore, as one trespass led to condemnation for all men, so one act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all men. For as by the one man’s disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man’s obedience the many will be made righteous.”
As my sin was imputed – counted – as his and he was treated accordingly, suffering my deserved wrath; in the same way his perfect righteousness and obedience is imputed – counted – as mine and I am treated accordingly.
We do not “get” this enough. It is amazing. It is absolutely undeserved. We live every day “anti-deserving” this. It’s called grace. It is the root of real worship.
This also means that as I read of Jesus in the gospels, as I see him perfectly fulfilling the law, obeying perfectly, always and only doing the will of the Father – THAT is my righteousness. It is not my tainted deeds here. It’s His perfect life then. It is actual, it happened, it was lived out on this dusty speck, it is recorded history. It’s real. It’s a righteousness that was actually performed.
And it’s mine.
Freely given to image bearers who could not be more undeserving – for the praise of the glory of His grace.
Oh God, what a salvation. What a gospel. The Why of Christmas.