What's the Point of Jesus

Roman’s 6:23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

I watched this YouTube video called “What’s the Point of Jesus,” the host says that Jesus “did not come to die, He came to love and share love.” Earlier Bart Campolo says sarcastically that “God wants to forgive you, but He can’t forgive you unless He kills somebody?”

Now I understand that people really want there to be another way to heaven other than through Jesus Christ. I understand compassion for mankind, and wanting to be reunited with everyone in the afterlife. But all our wanting to write the rules of eternity is not going to rewrite them. All of our definitions of love are going to fall short of God’s. So let me take the opportunity to share with you the point of Jesus.

It does begin with love, and the fact is that God is love. And this loving God created man in His image. That image being the ability to love. However, love requires something else. It requires a precursor, namely free will. You see, it is impossible to love unless it is done by choice. Love by any other mechanism is not love at all. Without free will praise is just music, adoration is merely words. And so having created man with free will so that he could love God, God had to give man something to choose from. He told man; do not choose the Tree of Knowledge. The world was good, and still men chose the one thing that was evil in the world.

As a result sin entered not only Adam & Eve, it entered mankind. And the wages of sin is death. If sin is committed, if the will of God is violated there must be the punishment death. It was God’s love that caused Him to offered the first sacrifice. God killed a lamb as a replacement to killing man. And the blood atoned for the sin.

For centuries man sinned and for centuries animal sacrifices were offered for that sin. Why is that so hard to understand? Why shouldn’t the sin have consequences? Why shouldn’t our choices that are contrary to God’s love offend Him?

And so throughout the times of the Old Testament sacrifices are offered. But they are not there simply for atonement. They were prophetic to what God had planned in the ultimate sacrifice. In fact all of the Old Testament was a prophetic announcement of what was to come. God sent His Son to the earth to be the final sacrifice. Not only to be a perfect sacrifice of blood atoning for past sin, but so perfect that it atones for future sin as well. No future death or sacrifice of the blood of bull or lamb can ever compare to the blood of the Son of God.

God did send His Son Jesus to the earth to be killed. Jesus said it in John 15:13, “Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.” God sending Christ to die was the greatest act of love ever. Christ obeying God to the point of death was the second greatest act of love ever.

So to Bart Campolo who said, “Your God must really suck if He has to kill somebody… It just doesn’t make sense to me” I say, then you have no understanding of love.

“The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law.” (1 Corinthians 15:56)

Christ as a man was subject to the law. As man He carried in His body the sentence of death that original sin placed on Him. As a sinless man death had no right to hold Him. To Death and to Satan they saw Christ death as a victory. They looked at Him as human. His descent into Hell however was short lived because being sinless Death had no power to hold Him, and God knowing Jesus as His Son raised Him from the dead, and provided a sacrifice of blood for all of time, for all who would believe. John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”

Jesus came to die, and the Father sent Him here to be killed as the ultimate act of love so that you and I could experience “the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and death.” He did not say to be free from sin, or to be free to sin... only free from the law, the final consequences of it.

The choice is yours… to believe or not. -- One must first recognize love in order to love in return.