from our Lay Leader
How do we understand God’s plan in sending Jesus Christ into the world? Was Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross God’s only purpose, a transaction—Jesus paying a ransom to save us from the penalty due us for our sins? Did Jesus purchase our eternal salvation? Paying the price in full so we would have eternal salvation?
One understanding of transaction is “a communicative action or activity involving two parties or things that reciprocally affect or influence each other.”1
So many of us have viewed Jesus’s death on the cross as God transacting for our sake. With whom was He transacting? The devil, us, Himself? God is the Creator of everything. He has no one to transact with.
Another definition of the word “transact” is “to carry to completion.”2 This is a process, to move something along until it is completed. We think of transacting as a business deal, like buying a house. Buying a house requires a number of steps that have to be carried out: a survey, a title search, qualification for a mortgage loan, an inspection, and all of this must be completed before you have purchased the home.
Was Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross a transaction?
Indeed, the Father was communicating His love for us by sending his Son into the world to redeem us. But our cruel treatment and brutal execution of Jesus revealed to us how sinful we are. It showed us that we were willing to murder God so that we could continue to live as our own god. Except something happened in the cruel crucifixion of Jesus. The hidden aspect of this communicative action was to reveal how debased we were, how far we had sunk from who God created us to be. It was the nadir of the human existence.
“But up from the pit He [we] arose,” as the hymn says. We saw in the crucifixion of Jesus that we hadn’t just killed a man, but we also were trying to kill off our God. But in that attempted execution of God, we saw something: we were killing ourselves. We thought we were liberating ourselves, but instead we were sending ourselves forever to the bottom of a inescapable pit.
God wasn’t transacting for us, He was transforming us, through Jesus. In the killing of Jesus, we saw that God would give everything for us, including Himself. He was modeling His love in a way no one had ever conceived of His love. In Jesus’s willingness to die without making a defense, without violence by His disciples, without calling forth legions of angels, by wholly and completely surrendering Himself into the hands of sneering and hateful men, Jews and Romans, priests and kings, God demonstrated the divine depth of love like we had never understood. And it became the unforgettable example and future model of what Jesus taught His disciples and all of us: to deny yourself and to be ready and willing to lay down your life for a friend (Luke 9:23, John 15:13).
Jesus’s dying was not a divine transaction we might have thought it to be: Jesus’s death was not a divine “Get Out of Jail Free” card given to us by God. We have sought out and memorized those verses of the Bible that seem to guarantee us an easy way to heaven. Just say these words, just believe these things and you are guaranteed to join Jesus in heaven. Many of us have understood evangelism to be trying to get people to believe and to say the right words, believing ourselves that this was “the way” that Jesus was speaking about in John 14:6. But Jesus told his disciples that the gate to heaven was narrow and the road hard, and there are few who take it.
Remember Jesus’ very first words of his ministry: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” (Matthew 3:2). Meaning: change your mind, turn away from your sinful way of living. Instead, live for me, live like me.
And in His crucifixion, He showed us that living like Him also meant being willing to die like Him. To give our lives in love of Him, in love of our brothers and sisters, and even in love for our enemies. That is the transformative work of our God. But Jesus’s death on the cross yields nothing if you will not allow yourself to be transformed. God’s work is incomplete without your own work, without your willingness to give up everything you are for Him. Your salvation, like Jesus’s sacrifice, will cost you everything you can give.
- “transaction,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transaction. Accessed 1/10/2022.
- “transact,” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/transact. Accessed 1/10/2022.