Lessons for Living from the Bible in Everyday English by Dennis Magee

The essence of sin is disobedience to God. Man, by nature chooses to exercise his free will and disobey God. And so, each of us has a sin debt, that keeps accumulating every day of our lives. Left to his own, each of us is under God’s wrath. This is the human condition. In the beginning, it was God’s intention that each person would live for eternity, glorifying and enjoying Him forever. But when man fell from grace and chose to sin, the harmony between man and God was broken. God is pure and holy, and cannot look upon sin, and so our sin separates us from God. God’s law states that the wages of sin is death, both death of the body and, the second death, eternal separation from God, which is death of the soul.

Since before creation God knew that humankind would fall, and so he formulated a plan for our salvation. At the beginning He established a covenant with man, that allowed the death that a person deserved for his sin to be satisfied by the substitutionary death of an animal. This sacrificial animal had to be pure and undefiled. And so, for many hundreds of years God allowed people to offer sacrifices of sheep, goats and bulls to absolve them of their sin debt. What God really wanted was for people to change their hearts and try to live lives pleasing to Him. But the ritualistic sacrifice of animals didn’t change people’s hearts. This old covenant He intended to be temporary, and the Bible tells us that this was all preparing the way for a new and lasting covenant. And so, He sent His Son Jesus to die once, for all.

There is no way for us to be punished in a way that would absolve our sin debt, and we would forever be under God’s wrath. Our second death, separation of our soul from God, would need to be eternal, because our sin is against a God that is eternally pure and holy. And, no matter how long we suffer separation from God, it doesn’t change our sin nature. Jesus is the only being who can take away sin. He is God and came to live among us as a man. Since our sins are committed in the flesh, Jesus had to take our punishment in the flesh. But unlike us, He was pure and holy, and had no sin of His own; He is the only one who could take on our sin debt. When He died on the Cross He not only died physically, but He endured the second death, separation from God, so that we wouldn’t need to. But because He is pure, this separation didn’t need to be for eternity.

When a person asks Jesus to be his personal Savior, God allows His righteousness to be commuted to us in exchange for all of our sin debt taken on by Him. As the Bible tells us, when we accept Christ we are baptized into His death and raised with Him to new life. When Jesus died physically and endured separation from God this satisfied God’s requirement for justice; He paid the wages of sin by His death. And so, by an act of faith in receiving Jesus as Savior, we are viewed by God in the same way He views His Son. There is nothing anyone can do to earn God’s approval and forgiveness. We need to trust in the total sufficiency of Jesus’ death on the Cross to make us right with God.

We have a sin nature and will continue to struggle with sin. But when Jesus left us, He left us a helper, the Holy Spirit. The spirit helps us to live the way God wants us to and to repent as often as we fall short and sin. This Holy Spirit is the same one that raised Jesus from the dead, and we also have the promise of being raised to new life after we die because we who have accepted Jesus, have the same Holy Spirit within us.