“Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” John 1:29
It was Passover for the Jews. As the lambs are being slaughtered, Jesus, too, is killed by the Romans and the religious accusers.
Did Jesus die to appease God’s need for justice? Was God’s forgiveness the result of Jesus’ sacrifice?
There has been a prevailing belief among Western evangelicals that because God is holy, He cannot abide with sinners. The human race is guilty by design, and He must punish the guilty because of His holiness. Because God is also loving, He sent His Son to take our place and suffer the punishment we deserved. As Jesus took His final breath, His cry of “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” was interpreted as God’s inability to look at sin- God and sin cannot co-exist, and Jesus was no longer worthy to call God “Father.” God poured out His wrath for sinners on His Son. And so, the Father forsook His Son. That punishment that Jesus endured satisfied God’s justice.
2 Corinthians 5:18-19 says, “God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.” “While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:8.) Throughout John’s study, we have seen how the people are the ones who stepped into darkness; they chose to run; they chose alienation; they chose the inferior. Their view of God was skewed and distorted by sin and self-effort. God is love, and He has never changed.
We changed.
If Jesus’ death on the cross satisfied the Father’s wrath toward the guilty and caused Him to change his mind toward us, then it was God who needed saving. Jesus was the image of God, the very expression of the Father. Jesus showed us what the Father was like. John told us this was so numerous times in His writings. Jesus was holy and loving, displayed by the very life He lived. The Father was not holier than the Son, so how could the Son eat with sinners if the Father could not co-exist with them? Jesus was God incarnate, One with the Spirit and Father, so what Jesus did, He did as God. He didn’t have a problem being in the presence of sinners.
Jesus came to seek and save that which was lost. We were the ones who were lost- we were lost because we ran from the relationship with Elohim and lost sight of His love. Jesus entered into our deception and changed our minds about the Father. He introduced us to the Holy Spirit and promised that He would never leave or forsake us! The Fall of mankind set into motion a plan to redeem mankind from the vortex that plunged the kosmos into darkness, and He pulled it back to the beginning- into Eden.
Jesus’ death bore witness to God’s nature, which was revealed to Moses when he asked to see God’s glory. He is “merciful, gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.” ( To visit iniquity means to step into failure with the intent to change it. When God stepped into Sarah’s barrenness, He changed her barrenness to fruitfulness.)
Jesus revealed God’s nature as Forgiver. He stepped into our iniquity and changed it. His sacrificial death did not satisfy God’s wrath; it satisfied the Law’s wrath, which God was obligated to uphold.
Jesus’ cry, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46, Mark ), was not a cry of abandonment but one of victory. In the Jewish culture, for a Rabbi to quote a line of scripture was to quote the whole passage, like a line to a song we might sing today. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, which begins, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” it ends with this, “All the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations will bow down before him, future generations will be told about the Lord. They will proclaim his righteousness, declaring to a people yet unborn: He has done it!”
The psalmist goes from a cry of lament into depths of despair- He rehearses the faith of His fathers, weeps over his unfaithfulness compared to them, and then cries out for deliverance. Just when the Psalm gets darker, it turns to praise and then a cry of victory, from a cry of agony to praise for God’s intervention and ultimate glory.
In quoting this Psalm, Jesus identified with the psalmist's agony but declared the Triune God's victory! The cross declares that the Father NEVER forsook His Son; He did not hide His face or turn His back on Him. Jesus was not the Lamb of God who satisfied God’s need for justice. He was the Lamb of God slain by the hands of angry men to convince the world that we were so loved. He willingly laid down his life to reveal His love and to lavish His forgiveness on us.
The following Psalm after Psalm 22 is Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want… Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil, for you are with me…I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”
The cross was a victory cry that the Son, the Father, and Spirit had done it! What Had they done? They had bridged the great divide of abandonment and undid the chaos Adam allowed to enter into the kosmos.
The following Psalm is King David’s prophetic glimpse into Heaven’s triumphal shout as the King of Kings triumphed over the cross:
“Lift up your heads, you gates; be lifted up, you ancient door, that the King of glory may come in. Who is this King of Glory? The Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up your heads, you gates; lift them up, you ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in. Who is he, this King of glory? The Lord Almighty-he is the King of glory!” Psalm 24 7-10
“Who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.” Hebrews 12:1-2
He has done it!
