The Last Human Sacrifice

We are told in Scripture, in numerous places, that the death of Jesus was a death for sin. It is therefore not possible to meditate responsibly on the crucifixion of Jesus without reckoning with the fact and reality of sin. If Jesus was a dragon-slayer in His passion, and He was, then we must understand that sin was the dragon.

“For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Cor. 15:3).

“Who gave himself for our sins, that he might deliver us from this present evil world, according to the will of God and our Father” (Gal. 1:4).

“And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).

“Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:10).

The blood that was shed on the cross was blood for sin. Without the shedding of blood there is no remission of sin (Heb. 9:22). Christ is a propitiation through faith in His blood (Rom. 3:25), resulting in remission of all our past sins. And Jesus, when He established the ritual of the Lord’s Supper, declared the wine to be His blood of the new covenant, which He shed for many for the remission of sins.

We adorn our steeples with crosses. We use the cruciform shape in architecture. We have fashioned Christian jewelry for our women and have made exquisite silver and gold crosses for them. This is all as it should be, but let us never forget why it is as it should be. The Christian faith is a religion based squarely on the absolute necessity of human sacrifice. It is the ultimate human sacrifice that we are commemorating here, and as such it was the sacrifice that put an end to all the futile and vain attempts at human sacrifice, not to mention poor substitutes for human sacrifice, reckoned up in bulls, and sheep and goats.

Whenever we are confronted by yet another outrage, the kind where men take the blood of other men, doing so in senseless and barbaric ways, we often try to console and encourage ourselves by saying something like never again. We need to put a stop to this. Stop the carnage. We need not do this. But apart from Christ, we must do this, we must stay with our repetitive bloodlusts. God is the only sovereign God, and consequently He is the only one who has the authority to say never again. And in the crucifixion of Jesus, outside Jerusalem two thousand years ago, He did in fact say it. Never again.

So we know from Scripture that sin is a momentous thing. It is no trifle. As the hymn rightly puts it . . .

Ye who think of sin but lightly,

Nor suppose the evil great,

Here may view its nature rightly,

Here its guilt may estimate.

Now there are two things we may take away from a thoughtful meditation on these things. The first is the reality of wrath and the second is the reality of personal relationship.

I have been using a word the New Testament refers to a number of times, and that word is propitiation. Propitiation means the averting or turning aside of wrath. In order for propitiation to be real, it must turn aside a real and very personal wrath. God was very angry with the human race because of our great rebellion against Him. Because the entire human race was under His wrath, we could do nothing about our dilemma. So in accordance with the good counsel of His will, He devised a way to fully satisfy that wrath and at the same time to save us. God sent us a savior, and He did this by coming down to us Himself. Jesus was born among us so that He could be a true human being with the capacity to truly represent a truly guilty humanity before God.

So when the time was fulfilled, when that moment of moments came, God solemnly asked if the human race had a champion yet who could represent us in this moment that called for ultimate justice. The answer came that we did have such a one, and so Jesus walked to the front of His entire chosen race. And it was there He took the hammer blow that all those standing behind Him deserved, and the word that describes that blow is propitiation. We can call it propitiation because the wrath of God is spent. Why are we forgiven? Because the penalty has been executed, and the old man died when Jesus did.

I said earlier that the second reality we must understand is the fact of relationship. To the extent we still recognize sin at all, our tendency and temptation is to treat it as some kind of an abstraction. We just let the rules float out there, detached from personal relationship. We believe that we are instructed, for some reason, to avoid actions x, y, and z, and not to avoid them is called a sin. But, we think, the sins just exist there by themselves, on a piece of paper, or carved into tablets of stone.

However, all sins are actually an insult to relationship. If it were possible to be really, truly, and completely alone, it would not be possible to sin. All sin is aimed at someone. This makes us uncomfortable, and so we pretend to be alone for some of our favorite sins, but it is only that—a pretense.

Now one of the great evangelical truisms is that true Christianity consists of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. It has been said often enough that in the mouths of many it has become a cliché. But don’t be thrown off by this. One of the few things that truisms have in their favor is the fact that they are true. Everything about this is personal.

Sin is aimed at someone. Wrath is aimed at someone. Forgiveness is aimed at someone. So wrath is personal. Reconciliation is personal. Forgiveness is personal. Remission of sin is personal. Christ has died. Enter into joy.

Here is the death of carnal pride,

Christ the Son of God has died.

Blood and water from His side.

So welcome now the spotless bride.