True Victim

We have gathered here to commemorate the death of the Lord Jesus Christ, the propitiatory sacrifice of the true Victim. We have so much to learn about what He did for us in this that we could spend the rest of lives just trying to figure out how to scratch the surface.

We sometimes drift into thinking that Jesus died as a victim on behalf of all the victims throughout history. But this is one of the notions that He came to crucify. He was the true victim, and He was the only one. He did not die as victim on behalf of all victims. He died as the true victim so that we could be liberated from our perpetual tendency to play victim. Because He died for false victims, knowing what He did, He stepped into the place of the true victim, and He triumphed over that death from within.

There are only two kinds of justification. The first is the kind that God offers us in the cross of Jesus Christ. The second is the kind we offer to ourselves, in our own name. On the one hand, we have excuses, reasons, duties, strivings, exertions, explanations, and shifting. On the other, we have the blood of Jesus Christ. Put another way, we have true justification and we have false justification. True justification is the result of the innocent dying for the guilty. False justification is the result of the guilty pretending that the problem is elsewhere.

You have come to this Table because you have been sealed with the mark of baptism, with obligates you with the most solemn of vows, to look to Christ alone as the only real victim in the history of the world. And so we have come, and so we do.