Five Reasons Jesus Came

An Explanation

The 21st century is an exciting time to be alive. Never before has communication, travel, information, and social networking been so accessible and easy. The other day I Skyped with my sister in Boise, my friend in Kazakhstan still calls me occasionally, and I facebook chatted with a friend who is a Pastor in Tanzania. Truly, the world has changed dramatically in the last 100 years, or even the last 10!!

I love the technological innovations and the ingenuity we’ve seen in recent decades. However, I am more concerned about the state of the Church, Christianity and the Kingdom of God than all of the techie toys and innovative inventions that are thrown our way. Thus, I am grieved when I see such a potential in our generation to do something radical and amazing; and instead of living up to the potential, we squander the astounding opportunity God has granted our generation! We have the capacity to see the Kingdom of God advanced to nearly every nook and cranny of this globe, and yet some of the leading voices today in Christianity are heretically redefining the core biblical and historical truths that advanced the gospel in every other generation before us. They are doing this under the guise of concern for social justice, sensitivity to seekers and skeptics, “updating” Christianity to fit in a new world and new cultural environment. My heart is grieved by such ideas and I am saddened by how many believers and churches are embracing this twisted and “renovated truths.” Truth is timeless and God’s promises and decrees are changeless, because He is unbending and unchanging!

So, in an effort to charge into the fray, I want to spend a little time with you and just talk about my Jesus. Not some hip, metrosexual Jesus. Not a mushy, limp-wristed Jesus. Not a marketed and branded Jesus. Not a socialist or conservative Jesus.

Just a biblical Jesus...

I don’t want to be elaborate or exhaustive. Just simply and humbly submit a few of my meditations for public consumption! So, for the next five weeks I will post “Five Reasons Jesus Came.” My prayer is that your faith in the Treasure of treasures will blossom and flourish as you see a biblical glimpse of His utter sufficiency and divine love! May the God of all grace enable you to see Him clearly through these 5 reasons Jesus came! Blessings!

5 Reasons Jesus Came

1. To provide propitiation for our Sin (yes capital “S”).

For the last 50 or so years of Christianity, we’ve been taught that the basic nature of God is that He loves us. God is love. It is drilled into our young and impressionable minds and we begin to have a portrait of God that is warm, fuzzy and fluffy. Now, I am passionately in love with the fact that God is love. However, modern day teaching on the fact that God is love, seems to actually present the exact opposite of this statement, and instead state that Love is God (which is untrue). It’s as if we’ve attempted to describe the Amazon jungle from Google satellite images, rather than traveling into that profound rainforest and discover the abundance and amazing variety of life. God is not His attributes; he is free. Nothing and no one can get His arm behind His back and force Him into some decision or choice. It was not because we were so lovely, or even so sinful, that Jesus came. It was for His own glory. You see, because the false statement of “Love is God,” so permeates our modern doctrine of God, we somehow believe that we deserved and were entitled to the sacrifice Jesus gave. If “Love is God,” then God would be constrained to coddle our guilty conscience, even though it smacks of rebellious hatred toward God!

Jesus Christ came, primarily, for His own glory. The Human race had sullied, spit upon, blasphemed and made themselves enemies and haters of God. Thus, in order to satisfy a free God’s just wrath, the God-head freely provided a “propitiatory” sacrifice and appeasement to the just wrath of God. This is polar opposite of what we’re taught in modern Christianity. We’re taught that Jesus died to show just how much He loved the human race. While His love is unimaginably vast and astounding, we must not lose sight of the fact that He came to absorb the wrath of God that should rightly have fallen upon my head and yours. The Love of God, that is such a focal point of our modern theology, is not a cuddly God patting us on the back and saying in a matronly voice, “there, there, all better now.” It is a just God, pouring out all hell upon His own Son in order to spare us from the hell we not only deserved but freely chose over God.

It is imperative that we understand that Jesus didn’t come to die in order to just forgive our sins, plural. He came to satisfy the Father’s wrath upon our Sin (capital S). We weren’t going to hell because we did bad things, we were going to hell because we loved sin and chose it above God and His eternal joy! He had to punish us, or provide a perfect substitute. This perfect, wrath absorbing, justice satiating substitute is the Son of God, Jesus Christ. This is why He came. As 1 John 4:10 says, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

God’s love isn’t the coddling of our flesh and our sinful enmity with God, it is His freely giving us what we truly needed (not what we deserved: wrath, hell, damnation): a substitute for the judgement we rightly deserved. True love gives what’s best. Jesus Christ is what’s best. Therefore, God provided His Son, to provide for our true need: one who would pay the penalty of our Sin. Thus, to restate, Jesus Christ came to be a propitiation for Sin! Hallelujah!