The Sacrifice of God

I feel incompetent to address this subject. Whenever I ponder it, I am left with a sense that I cannot fully comprehend it. So how am I to write on something I don’t understand? Yet the desire to do so hasn’t gone away, so I’m going to try and write as much as I do understand. But please know the limitations of what is here.

I don’t know if you, as the reader, believe in God or not. But even if you don’t, for a moment as a pure thought exercise, please assume He does exist. Please also assume He is a creative God who is good and is the very essence of love. He is also holy – there is no sin in Him. Let’s define sin as anything that is contrary to His essential nature. Holiness, then, could be defined as that which is pure to His essential nature. This God, then, creates a world which He designs to be perfect. It is beautiful and it is good as characterized by God Himself.

Hopefully you’re still me. I will get to the sacrifice of God, but in order to understand the sacrifice, you need to catch a glimpse of what was sacrificed.

Other premises are needed. God is all powerful. There is nothing He wills to do that He cannot accomplish. Also, in regards to His love, it is a sacrificial love that desires to be given away. It finds joy in giving itself away. So God creates humankind, in His image. (This is speculation on my part – I have no idea why God created us. The Bible does say we were created in His image.) The very love which perhaps gave Him the desire to create us also demanded He give us free will.

I wrote about free will in another post and I won’t regurgitate that here. But essentially He gave us the freedom to choose to accept Him (and all that He is) or to reject Him (by choosing what is not of His essence). The problem (for us, not Him) is if we choose what is not of His essence, we become separate from Him because His holiness cannot tolerate that which is contrary to His nature. And all of humankind chose sin. Why? I think it’s because while we were created in the image of God, we are not God. So we are a reflection of a remarkable being but not Him. We have pride instead of humility. We have love without selflessness. We have desire without purity. We don’t understand our fallenness from the standard of who and what God is. We don’t get how very far from God we are.

So what is God to do? How does an all powerful, loving God fix this? Please stop for a moment and consider what you would do. Eliminate the freedom we have to choose? Destroy your creation and start again? Clarify the standards by which they needed to live in a system of laws? God’s love gives us the freedom and so He didn’t do that. He did destroy humankind and start almost all over again (think Noah and the Flood). And He did clarify the standards by which He wanted us to live (think 10 Commandments). Yet He knew even as He did these things that it would not work. So what then was left? A sacrifice.

God established a system of sacrifice that if adhered to, would pay a penalty for the unholiness (or sin), as it were. The purpose of this sacrifice, I believe (speculate) was to establish repentance in our hearts. It was a way of teaching us to regret our sinful thoughts and actions (aside from the negative consequences they bring) which would somehow, in some way, bridge the separation created between us and God. The sacrifice was to be a blood sacrifice. Blood because it represents death. The penalty of sin is death. But killing ourselves when we’ve all sinned just doesn’t make sense. So God allowed a substitutionary sacrifice. At first, this was in the form of animals. Yet it did not satisfy God and was only representative of a different, higher substitutionary sacrifice.

Psalm 51:16-17 NIV “You do not delight in sacrifice, or I would bring it; you do not take pleasure in burnt offerings. My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise.”

Isaiah 1:11-17 NKJV v.11a “The multitude of your sacrifices—what are they to me?” says the Lord” and vv.16-17, “Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow.”

Hosea 6:6 NIV “For I desire mercy, not sacrifice, and acknowledgment of God rather than burnt offerings.”

1 Samuel 15:22 NIV “But Samuel replied: “Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obeying the LORD? To obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed is better than the fat of rams.”

So what did God do? He made Himself the sacrifice. The almighty, holy, pure, righteous God full of goodness and love and mercy and humility took the penalty upon Himself to satisfy His own holiness. This was and is and forever will be, Eternal Grace.

But…how is God to pay a penalty of death? God, as God, cannot die. He is not human, that He could pay a substitutionary blood sacrifice for us. God, being God, did not let this stop Him. He sent His Son, Jesus Christ, who was in His very nature God to take on the form of a human being and become the divine substitutionary sacrifice.

Philippians 2:6 ESV “[Jesus Christ] who, though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped”

Hebrews 10:4-10 NKJV “For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins. Therefore, when He [Jesus Christ] came into the world, He said: “Sacrifice and offering You did not desire, But a body You have prepared for Me. In burnt offerings and sacrifices for sin You had no pleasure. Then I said, ‘Behold, I have come—In the volume of the book it is written of Me—To do Your will, O God.’” Previously saying, “Sacrifice and offering, burnt offerings, and offerings for sin You did not desire, nor had pleasure in them” (which are offered according to the law), then He said, “Behold, I have come to do Your will, O God.” He takes away the first that He may establish the second. By that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all.”

Many times in the Old Testament, the Messiah was prophesied. The Son of God was referred to.

Proverbs 30:3-4 NKJV “I neither learned wisdom nor have knowledge of the Holy One. Who has ascended into heaven, or descended? Who has gathered the wind in His fists? Who has bound the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is His name, and what is His Son’s name, If you know?”

Isaiah 9:6 NIV “For to us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

Psalm 2:7 NIV “I will proclaim the LORD’s decree: He said to me, “You are my Son; today I have become your Father.”

Isaiah 7:14 NKJV “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a Son, and shall call His name Immanuel [which means, God with us].”

So Jesus Christ came, as the Son of God with the very nature of God, to earth in the form of a man. He lived a holy, sinless life and in His death, which He chose obediently, He became the sacrifice for my sins and the sins of all who choose to believe in Him. He dreaded the price He would have to pay, crying out to God, “not My will, but Yours be done,” as He prayed the night before. And He cried out on the cross, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” He endured all that was contrary to His holy nature for our sake, letting His earthly body be put to death so the blood sacrifice would be met. Just consider for a moment what it would be like to be in the very nature God, being One with Him and then to have that severed completely, being made sin – the thing contrary and separate to God Himself – to then have the wrath of God poured out for that sin; to live your entire life sinless, to put all of your effort and reason for existence on earth to avoid sin but then to be made sin in order to endure a punishment you did not deserve, all for love’s sake and the will of God the Father. What He must have suffered in His Spirit…I don’t think it’s within our human capacity to ever grasp the suffering He endured. I’m not sure we can fully grasp the extent of sacrificial love that brought this to be, either.

There is a catch: you must believe. Believe that Jesus Christ came as the Son of God in the very nature of God (being One with the Father) and as a pure and holy sacrifice willingly chose to redeem us through His substitutionary sacrifice for our sins. And through this belief – this faith which is a gift from God – we can enter into fellowship with God and experience His love and peace.

As often as the sacrifice of God is thought of as a single event – through the death of Jesus Christ on the cross – I tend to think the sacrifice God makes for us is ongoing (at least from our perspective, perhaps not from His eternal, timeless one). So if you’ll stay with me for one more paragraph, I’ll explain.

Though we’re brought back into the fellowship of God, we’re still in a sinful world with the human tendency to sin. While Christ conquered sin and death for us once for all, we still have not yet been freed from our human condition. That will happen for us (who are saved, who are the children of God, who believe) once we die. God foresaw this and again, as always, provided us with help in the form of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is also in the very nature and essence of God, One with Him. And He was sent to dwell within those who believe. Huh? Once again I come to a Biblical concept I don’t think I will ever comprehend. It is beyond my capacity to grasp. I am still in my human body. I still sin and live in this sinful world. How can a holy and pure, righteous Being dwell within me? I ponder (speculate) that He must be enduring an ongoing sacrifice to do this. Every time I do sin, it must be abhorrent to Him. Yet He does not leave me. He remains faithful. Despite the pain and unspeakable revulsion He must feel for the sin, He loves me. And He promises to stay with me and be my strength and see me through to the end of this sinful world. I am convinced that this kind of love, this kind of sacrifice I will never find elsewhere on this earth. It is a divine, sacrificial love that I am given forever.

Romans 7:24-25 NKJV “O wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? I thank God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, with the mind I myself serve the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin.”

Hebrews 4:14-16 NKJV “Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”