With Passover and Easter coming up next week I thought I would use this week’s blogs to reflection on the single most significant event in post-Garden, human history – the death and resurrection of the Son of God.

As I look at Easter I wonder if it really had to be that way. Did Jesus really have to suffer for my sins? Couldn’t God have just swept them all away with an executive order and given Jesus a pass on his Passion? We could argue the point but the Father’s intentionality about the death of his only begotten tells me that there was no other way. Remember that Jesus asked the same question in the Garden of Gethsemane. The resounding silence of the Father answered the question.

His intentionality predates Adam’s sin. John tells us in his vision, “All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the book of life belonging to the Lamb that was slain from the creation of the world” (Rev.13:8). The idea that in the mind of God Jesus was slain from the beginning of time tells us that, in his foreknowledge, God knew the path that man would take and the cost of redeeming his fallen creation even before he formed Adam. I find it remarkable that Elohim (Father, Son, and Spirit) was willing to pay that indescribable price in order to have a portion of his creation choose to spend eternity with him. That seems to be an almost obsessive love on the part of our Heavenly Father.

From the beginning of time, the cross would be the solution where God’s holiness and love would intersect. His holiness demanded that sin be dealt with rather than excused or ignored. Love desperately looked for a way to redeem the relationship between God and condemned man. Jesus willingly went to the cross to satisfy both the holiness of God and the love of God. Sin would be dealt with justly. Love would be triumphant.

The intentionality of God in his love was demonstrated from the very beginning. Immediately after the sin of Adam and Eve, God declared that the offspring of Eve (Jesus) would be in conflict with the serpent Satan and that the conflict would culminate with Jesus being bruised but the serpent would be crushed (Gen.3:15). Immediately after declaring that first Messianic prophecy, we are told that God covered Adam and Eve’s nakedness and shame with animal skins. At the outset, God sacrificed the innocent to cover the consequences of sin in man. From that moment on, sacrifices of innocent animals pointed to the sacrifice of the Lamb of God on the cross.   Sin condemned man as he ate from a tree in the Garden of Eden and man was set free from that condemnation as the Son of God hung on a tree (the cross) thousands of years later.

As God downloaded the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai, a whole system of sacrifices was codified. Each sin offering pointed to the reality that sin deserved death, but that God would allow an innocent to take our place on the altar of judgment.   Paul declared that the “wages of sin is death” (Rom.6:23). Sin earns death and death, in the spiritual sense, is separation from God. On that Passover Eve two thousand years ago, did Jesus simply die a physical death or did he also endure everything that would be experienced by those who die in sin? For a moment, on that dark Friday did Jesus experience the absolute desolation of the lost: fear, shame, guilt, unbearable loneliness, absolute darkness, and even torment so that we would never have to experience any of that? I’m not certain but I know that, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2Cor.5:21).

I also know that this death, this sacrifice was not accidental, unplanned, or a last ditch effort to salvage men who had unexpectedly rejected Jesus. It was an intentional offering of himself on our behalf that had rested in the mind of God while the blue prints of this earth were still being drawn up. It is the intentionality of God’s unrelenting love. Passover and Easter are without question God’s lavish expression of his love for a fallen race.

But God demonstrates His own love toward us,

in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. (Rom.5:8)