A Bible Christian Is One Who Has Seriously Considered The One Divine Remedy For Sin:
In the Bible we are told again and again that Almighty God has taken the initiative in doing something for man the sinner. The verses some of us learned in our infancy underscore divine initiative in providing a remedy for sinful man: ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son . . .’; ‘Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent us Son to be the propitiation for our sins’; ‘But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us. . .’ [John 3.16; 1 John 4:10; Eph 2.4]. You see, the unique feature of the Christian faith is that it not a kind of religious self-help where you patch yourself up with the aid of God.
Just as surely as it is a unique tenet of the Christian faith that Christ is a Savior for sinners, so it is also a unique tenet of the Christian faith that all of our true help comes down from above and meets us where we are. We cannot pull ourselves up by our own boot-strings. God in mercy breaks in upon the human situation and does something which we could never do for ourselves. Now when we turn to the Scriptures we find that that divine remedy has at least three simple but profoundly wonderful focal points:
We cannot pull ourselves up by our own boot-strings. God in mercy breaks in upon the human situation and does something which we could never do for ourselves.
(a) First of all, that divine remedy is bound up in a Person. Anyone who begins to take seriously the divine remedy for human sin will notice in the Scriptures that the remedy is not in a set of ideas, as though it were just another philosophy, nor is it found in an institution, it is bound up in a Person. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son’. ‘Thou shalt call his name Jesus for he shall save. . .’ He, himself, said, ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no man comes to the Father but by me’ [John 14.6]. That one divine remedy is bound up in a Person and that Person is none other than our Lord Jesus Christ – the eternal Word who became man, uniting to his Godhead a true human nature.
Here is God’s provision for man with his bad record and his bad heart, a Savior who is both God and man, the two natures joined in the one Person for ever. And your personal problem of sin, and mine, if it is ever to be remedied in a biblical way will be remedied only as we have personal dealings with that Person. Such is the unique strand of the Christian faith – the sinner in all his need united to the Savior in all the plenitude of his grace, the sinner in his naked need and the Savior in his almighty power, brought directly together in the Gospel. That is the glory of the Gospel!
(b) It is centered in the cross upon which that Person died. A cross that leads to an empty tomb, yes! And a cross preceded by a life of perfect obedience, yes! And when we turn to the Scriptures we find that the divine remedy in a unique way is centered in the cross of Jesus Christ. When he is formally announced by John the Baptist, John points to him and says, ‘Behold the Lamb of God who is bearing away the sin of the world’ [John 1.29].
Jesus himself said, ‘I did not come to be ministered unto, but to minister and to give my life a ransom for many’ [Matt 20.28], and true preaching of the Gospel is so much centered in the cross that Paul says it is the word, or the message of the cross. The preaching of the cross is ‘to them who are perishing foolishness, but unto us who are being saved it is the power of God’ [1 Cor 1.18], and this same apostle went on to say that when he came to Corinth – that bastion of intellectualism and pagan Greek philosophy with its set patterns of rhetorical expertise – ‘I came amongst you determined to know nothing save Jesus Christ and him as crucified’ [1 Cor 2.2].
You see, God’s gracious remedy for sin is not only bound up in a Person, it is centered in the cross of that Person – not the cross as an abstract idea, nor as a religious symbol, but the cross in terms of what God declares it to mean. The cross was the place where God heaped upon his Son, by imputation, the sins of his people. On that cross there was substitutionary curse-bearing. In the language of Galatians 3.13, ‘God made him to be a curse for us’; ‘God made him to be sin for us’ [2 Cor 5.2] – the one who knew no sin. It is not the cross as some nebulous, indefinable symbol of self-giving love, it is the cross as the monumental display of how God can be just and still pardon guilty sinners; the cross where God, having imputed the sins of his people to Christ, pronounces judgment upon his Son as the representative of his people.
There on the cross God pours out the vials of his wrath, unmixed with mercy, until his Son cries out, ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? why have you forsaken me?’ [Ps 22.1; Matt 27.46]. There in the visible world at Calvary, God, as it were, was demonstrating what was happening in the invisible spiritual world. He shrouds the heavens in total darkness to let all mankind know that he is plunging his Son into the outer darkness of the hell which your sins and my sins deserved. Jesus hangs on the cross in the place of an undefended guilty criminal; he is in the posture of one for whom society has but one option, ‘Away with him’, ‘Crucify him’, ‘Hand him over to death’, and God does not intervene. There in the theatre of what men can see, God is demonstrating what he is doing in the realm where we cannot see. He is treating his Son as a criminal, he is causing him to feel in the depths of his own soul all of the fury of the wrath that should have been vented upon us.
(c) A remedy that is adequate for and offered to all without discrimination. Before we have any felt consciousness of our sin, about the easiest thing in the world is to think that God can forgive sinners. But when you and I begin to have any idea at all of what sin is — we, little worms of the dust, we creatures whose very life and breath is held in the hands of the God in whom ‘we live and move and have our being’ [Acts 17.28] — when we begin, I say, to take seriously that we have dared to defy Almighty God who holds our breath in his hands, the God who, when angels rebelled against him, did not wait to show mercy but consigned them to everlasting chains of darkness with no way of mercy ever planned or revealed to them, then our thoughts are changed.
Once we take seriously the truth that it is this holy God who sees the effusions of the foul, corrupt human hearts which are yours and mine, then we say, ‘O God, how can you be anything other than just; and if you give me what my sins deserve, there is nothing for me but wrath and judgment! How can you forgive me and still be just? How can you be a righteous God and do anything other than consign me to everlasting punishment with those angels that rebelled’. When you begin to take your sin seriously, forgiveness becomes the most knotty problem with which your mind has ever wrestled. It is then that we need to know that God has provided in a Person, and that Person crucified, a remedy that is adequate for and offered to all without discrimination. When God begins to make us feel the reality of our sin, if there were any conditions placed on the availability of Christ we would say, ‘Surely I don’t meet the conditions, surely I don’t qualify’, but the wonder of God’s provision is that it comes in these unfettered terms: ‘Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; he who has no money, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Wherefore do you labor for that which does not satisfy’ [Isa 55.1 -2]. ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Him that comes unto me I will in no wise cast out’ [Matt 11.28; John 6.37].
Oh, the beauty of the unfettered offers of mercy in Jesus Christ! We do not need to have God step out of heaven and tell us that we, by name, are warranted to come; we have the unfettered offers of mercy in the words of his own Son, ‘Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest’.