“According to the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

A little something different this week seeing as how we are just a few days from the single most significant day in the life of the church. This Sunday morning (at least in the Western church) we will celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the grave. This one event is the pivot on which the whole of human history swings. There is literally no more significant event in all of recorded history than this one. In order to get us ready for the day when it arrives, let’s do just a bit of thinking about how and why things had to go the way they did in order for the way to a right relationship with God to be made open to us. We’ll start this morning with a bit of context about how to get right with God in the first place.

From the standpoint of a secular worldview, the Christian doctrine of atonement seems horrible. If you are a secular person reading this, you are probably nodding your head along in agreement at the moment. If you are a Christian reading that, you’re probably scratching your head in confusion. How could something so good seem horrible to anyone? The simplest answer to that question is that they aren’t looking at the world through the same lens as you. For you, the atonement for sins provided by Jesus on the cross and through the resurrection is wonderfully encouraging news. But it is that wonderfully encouraging news because a few other things are already in place in your heart and mind when you come to it.

When the writer of Hebrews was talking about how and why Jesus and the new covenant are greater than Moses and the old covenant, he spends some time exploring why Jesus’ sacrifice was better than the sacrifices prescribed in the law. One of the things he said then was this: without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness. Well, why should that be the case?

In order to understand that, we have to back up a bit. All Christian doctrine starts out of the place that God exists. If you don’t accept that point, then you really aren’t going to be able to make positive sense out of anything else that follows. It’ll all seem like so much nonsense to you. You can attack and debate it all you want, but properly understanding it will elude you. It’s kind of like if you don’t accept that 2+2=4, you aren’t going to be able to do multiplication, let alone calculus. You’ve got the wrong frame of reference for making sense out of it.

There are plenty of reasons to accept the proposition that God exists, but those are beyond the scope of this post, so we’ll just assume on it for the moment. So, this God exists, and after spending who knows how much time as we measure it as a perfectly contented and loving community of three, He decided that He wanted to share His love with more than just Himself. So, He began creating a world in which He would make a particular creature who bore His image such that He could be in a relationship with these creatures that was rooted in His deep and abiding love. How exactly this creation process unfolded is a conversation for another time. For now, that He did is what matters.

When you make something, you own that thing. It belongs to you. It belongs to you until you voluntarily transfer ownership to someone else. If someone were to take it from you before then, they would have to give it back to you before they could be right with you again. Absent that, there would be no justice for the offense and that wouldn’t be good or right. Well, God made the world and everything in it. Because of that, it belongs to Him. All of it. Including you and me. This means it is right and proper for us to do what He says. After all, He owns us. We belong to Him. And in the beginning, this order of creation was honored and everything was good.

Then sin entered the picture. When we sinned, there were a whole lot of different things going on, but one of the most fundamental things that happened in that moment was that we took control of our lives away from God and declared us to be our own. We declared ourselves to be autonomous from our Creator. Now, from the standpoint of how the world as God created it actually worked, this was nonsense. Of course we didn’t belong to ourselves. We didn’t make ourselves. God made us. We could no more become autonomous by personal declaration than the wooden bulldozer I once made is going to come to life one day and start driving around the backyard filling in the holes my kids occasionally dig for fun. But we bought into the lie that we could be more like God if we became our own authorities, so we took our lives and declared them our own.

Well, in that moment, we weren’t right with God anymore. We had taken something that belonged to Him, namely our lives, and declared it to be ours without any justification to support our efforts beyond our own desires. The only way for us to be made right with God again, was to give those lives back. This presented us – and Him – with a problem. You see, He made us to be in a relationship with Him. Yet if we were to give our lives fully back to God, we weren’t going to have them anymore. When you don’t have life, what do you have? Death. What this means is that the just consequence of sin was (and is) death. Death comes as a result of sin because when we declare autonomy over our own lives we separate ourselves from the God of life. There is no life apart from Him. Like a flower detached from its root, while we may look good for a while, death is our only possible end. It comes, though, when we reconcile with God on our own terms because then our lives are transferred to Him to pay our debt and then we don’t have them anymore. And, you can’t have a relationship with someone who is dead. Because they’re dead.

What this means is that the first time a person sins, death is the consequence of that sin. After that point, we are living with death. God would be fully within His rights as our creator, as the party chiefly offended by our sin, to deliver us over to that death in the moment of our sin. This takes us back to the first part of the problem I mentioned a second ago. He made us to be in a relationship with Him. Just because we sin doesn’t mean He is ready to throw in the towel on that intention of our design. Yet because He is holy and righteous, sin cannot exist in His presence. And besides, we separated ourselves from Him. We rejected His presence. If we are going to be able to have a relationship with Him – a real relationship, mind you, not some forced state of affairs in which we aren’t really free – we have to atone for that rejection and the separation we caused. That atonement can only come when we give back either the thing we took (our lives) or something that the chiefly offended party (that is, God) has declared to be of equal value.

That last part matters a lot. God, in His wisdom and graciousness, knew that we couldn’t give our own lives back and still have the relationship with Him we were designed in the beginning to have and which is the state of affairs that will bring us the most abundance in life. So, He declared that another life could be substituted for ours and He would overlook our sins. This substitute life was going to have to be perfect to meet with the standards of His holiness, but He would indeed accept such a substitute, allowing us to be in a relationship with Him. Well, animals can’t sin because they aren’t moral agents. Thus in His graciousness with us, God allowed us to dedicate (that is, sacrifice) an animal to Him to atone for our sin. The animal’s blood was spilled instead of our own.

While this system worked to allow us to live in a right relationship with God, it wasn’t a long term solution to the problem of sin. For starters, it resulted in the death of a lot of animals which was not a good thing in and of itself. More importantly, though, an animal life and a human life don’t have the same value. So, while God was willing to accept it as a substitute for a time, it was never a total substitute. The only perfect substitute for a human life would be another human life. Yet for a human sacrifice to be acceptable, it would have to be without sin. Otherwise, the person could only atone for his own sin, not the sin of someone else.

This is where Jesus enters the picture. Jesus came and lived a perfect, sinless life. Because of this, for the first time in human history, there was a human life that could be dedicated to God as a substitute for another person. But God is far more gracious than limiting Jesus’ impact to a one-for-one exchange. He declared that Jesus’ life would be acceptable to redeem every human life that had been or would be lived for the whole of human history. By His voluntary, sacrificial death, Jesus gave up His life as a substitution for ours. All of ours. Because He loved us that much. In this way, and speaking symbolically now, His shed blood paid the price for our sins. By His shed willingly shed blood, we are forgiven. God accepted His actions on our behalf – a life returned to atone for the life we took – and declared us right with Him. This is not our righteousness, though, but Christ’s righteousness extended to us by grace through faith.

As we prepare for Easter, give some attention to this powerful truth today. Spend some time reflecting on the weight of your own sin, on the burden of being separated from God. Offer to God a prayer of thanks that He was so committed to being able to be in a right relationship with you that He was willing for His own Son to die to see that become a possibility. He is a God worth your devotion.