Our Beliefs : Sermons : Sermon Archive - 2005 : March 25, 2005

We See Jesus Taking Our Place

Good Friday

Imagine a world without death. That's what believers in Jesus are experiencing right now because through faith in Jesus they have died and gone to heaven. But to get there, they still had to die physically. We will also die physically. But God never intended that for us. He made Adam and Eve without sin, and so without the consequence of sin -- death. They couldn't have died when they were perfect. Really? What would have happened if they fell off a cliff? I don't know, but they wouldn't have died because they weren't sinners. Now we can't even fathom that -- a world without death is so far beyond us that is seems unreal, impossible. Tonight, on Good Friday, we see how it became a reality for us. To open up that world without death that was closed to us, Jesus -- God -- had to take our place, had to die our death. Tonight as we look at the remarkable shadows of the Old Testament that help us to see Jesus and what he would do for us, we are happy that God isn't an animal rights activist. He used innocent animals to show how our death would be transferred to our Savior when he suffered our death on the cross.

If you walked into the tabernacle in Old Testament times, you would have walked into a narrow hallway only 30 feet long and 15 feet wide. At the end of that room was a large curtain that blocked off the 15x15 foot room behind it called the Most Holy Place. Only once a year, on the festival called Yom Kippur, which means Day of Atonement, could the High Priest go behind the curtain. If he did it at any other time, he would die because that was where God showed himself to his people. That's also why the High Priest had to bring the coals from the altar and pour incense on the coals which would fill the Most Holy Place with smoke. The picture was that the holy God wouldn't be able to directly see a sinful human being. If he could, that sinner would die.

He would also die if he didn't bring the proper sacrifices. First of all, he had to offer a sacrifice for his own sin. God had him slaughter a bull, burn it on the altar, and take some of its blood and sprinkle the blood on the atonement cover and in front of the Ark. That bull had nothing to do with his sin. He sprinkled that blood before God to show that the blood of the innocent bull, ceremonially speaking, had paid for his sin. Once that was done, the high priest had to slaughter a second sin offering, this time a goat. The blood of the goat was also sprinkled before the presence of God to make atonement for the Most Holy Place and the entire tabernacle itself because God's sinful people were constantly touching things in the tabernacle and making them unclean. So God was showing that every last bit of guilt from sin was paid for symbolically by the blood of the innocent sacrifices.

God did all this to teach his people just how serious their sin really was, and it says the same thing to us. Like God's Old Testament people, we are sinners. Our sins stain everything that we do, everything that we touch, everything that we are. If God treated us justly, there's only one thing that could happen: we would die and go to hell. But God, humanly speaking, did the most unfair thing in history. He did something that no human court would ever allow. He let a completely innocent person step up and take our punishment for us. Can you imagine that happening in America? After the jury convicts a murderer, can you imagine any judge letting his lawyer volunteer to be executed for him and letting the murderer go free? That's what God did. He transferred our guilt to Jesus. Then he rained all his anger and hatred of sin and sinners down on his beloved Son. He didn't hold anything back. He piled all the hell of every sinner who has ever lived on top of him. Then he killed him. When he was done, our sin was paid for. When he was done, Jesus' blood -- God's blood -- had washed our guilt away. God no longer had anything to be angry with us about. He did all that because he loves us. And all of us who put our faith in Christ receive that forgiveness and will live with him in joy forever.

The Day of Atonement pictured our forgiveness in another way also. The Bible calls it the "scapegoat." We see Jesus in the scapegoat. We see Jesus taking our place. He carried our sins. The high priest brought two goats and then cast lots over them. We already talked about the one that was sacrificed. But the one that lived was brought to the sanctuary where the high priest laid his hands on its head. He then confessed all the sins that God's people were guilty of. This part really strikes me. Can you imagine if I made a public confession of all the sins that I think our congregation is guilty of? There would be plenty of people ashamed of that, including me. It would be like hooking up a machine to each of us that could show us all our sins, even our secret sins. We wouldn't like that. After this public confession of sin, a man led the goat out into the wilderness and let it go far enough away that it would never find its way back. It would die. The picture here is beautiful. God piled all the sins of his people onto the scapegoat. That goat took all the sins so far away that they could never get back to his people. Of course, that's Jesus! Isaiah prophesied that "the Lord laid on him the iniquity of us all," (Isaiah 53:6) and David wrote, "As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us." (Psalm 103:12) That's what Christ did! God took away our sin. We aren't guilty in his book anymore.

Think of the sins you've committed. Think especially about the ones that are weighing you down, giving your heart and conscience no peace. Then look at this great Day of Atonement which tells us what happened on Good Friday. God sacrificed his Son to pay for all our sins. He has removed them from us so completely that God can't charge us with sin anymore because Jesus already took our sins away from us. They are gone forever! Rejoice that tonight on Good Friday we see Jesus taking our place and giving us forgiveness. Amen.