Jesus Died for You
Easter is almost here. You can tell because the seasonal aisle at the store is full of plastic eggs, Easter baskets and candy, chocolate bunnies, stuffed bunnies, and all the things that tell you that the important holiday that celebrates the Easter Bunny bringing candy-filled plastic eggs and pastel-colored hard-boiled eggs has arrived. But is that what really makes this day significant? Sure, it’s fun to decorate the eggs and give Easter baskets to kids, but is there a deeper purpose for Easter?
You probably already know the answer to that. Beyond the Easter eggs and chocolate bunnies, the true focus of this day is Jesus. Specifically, it is something that Jesus did. Even more specifically, it is something that Jesus did for you. What exactly is it that He did? He died for you!
Easter is really about that. It’s about “celebrating” the death and resurrection of Jesus. (Next week, I want to focus on the significance of His resurrection, but this week I am focusing on the significance of His death.) Now, I use that word “celebrate” carefully, because it is not a celebration of the beating, torture, and death of someone who was viewed as antagonistic to societal and cultural norms. Rather, it is a celebration of what that death accomplished.
You see, Jesus – the Son of God and one of the persons in the Holy Trinity, and therefore fully divine – took on human form, born as a baby in a manger in Bethlehem, and lived about 33 years as a human being, a living person like you and me. However, because of His divinity, He was able to live sinlessly even though He faced temptations just as we do. Because He lived a sinless life, He was, therefore, qualified to pay the penalty that our sin deserved, that we are unable to pay. The result was that the crucifixion of this perfect person satisfied the debt we owe, enabling you and me to be reconciled to God.
Our sin separates us from God, because God is perfect and we are not, so our sin disqualifies us from spending eternity with God in heaven. Our imperfection means we cannot go to a perfect heaven to dwell in the presence of a Holy God without something being done to resolve that issue. (My dad once said, if you find a perfect church, don’t join it because you’ll mess it up.) The wonderful thing is that something was done. Jesus, perfect Jesus, died on the cross to be the sacrifice that pays for all of our sin. His death paid for our sin, so that God would se.e us through His substitutionary act, seeing us as perfect through Jesus so that eternity with God became possible. To say it simply, Jesus died for you so that you could live with God.
