Suffering the Birth-pains of a New Life.

Why did Jesus die?  It’s a pretty old question.  It’s been threshed out no end of times.  Yet every time one thinks of the gospel, or opens the Book, it looks out earnestly into his face.  And nothing is better worth while than to have another serious prayerful go at it.  The whole nub of the gospel is here.  It clears the ground greatly not to have any theory about Jesus’ death, but simply to try thoughtfully to gather up all the statements and group them, regardless of where it may lead, or how it may knock out previous ideas.

It can be said at once that His dying was not God’s own plan.  It was a plan conceived somewhere else, and yielded to by God.  God had a plan of atonement by which men who were willing could be saved from sin and its effects.  That plan is given in the old Hebrew code.  To the tabernacle, or temple, under prescribed regulations, a man could bring some live animal which he owned.  The man brought that which was his own.  It represented him.  Through his labor the beast or bird was his.  He had transferred some of his life and strength into it.  He identified himself with it further by close touch at the time of its being offered.  He offered up its life.  In his act he acknowledged that his own life was forfeited.  In continuing to live he acknowledged the continued life as belonging to God.  He was to live as belonging to another.  He made, in effect, the statement made long after by Paul:  “I am offering up my life on this altar for my sin; nevertheless I am living:  yet the life I live is no longer mine, but another’s.  Mine has been taken away by sin.”  There was no malice or evil feeling in the man’s act, but only penitence, and an earnest, noble purpose.

The act revealed the man’s inner spirit.  It acknowledged his sin, that life is forfeited by sin, his desire to have the sin difficulty straightened out, and to be at one again with God.  He expressed his hatred of sin and his earnest desire to be free of it.  I am not saying at all that this was true of every Hebrew coming with his sacrifice.  I may not say it of all who approach God to day through Jesus.  But clearly enough, all of this is in the old Hebrew plan devised by God.  It was the new choice that brought the man back to God, even as the first choice had separated him from God.  And the explicit statement made over and over is this, “and it shall make atonement.”

Clearly Jesus’ dying does not in any way fit into the old Hebrew form of sacrifice, nor into the spirit of the man who caused the death of the sacrifice, though in spirit, in requirement it far more than fills it out.  The Old Testament scheme is Jewish.  The manner of Jesus’ death is not Jewish, but Roman.  As a priest He was not of the Jewish order, but of an order non-Jewish and antedating the other by hundreds of years.  In no feature does He fit into the old custom.  But every truth taught by the old is brilliantly exemplified and embodied in Him.