Saturday 4 April 2015

Death Died

The wages of sin is death.  The opposite of Death is Life.  What is Life?  God breathed His breath into Man and Man became a living being.  So, Life is the breath of God.  This is the Life that Man had in the Garden of Eden.  This Life would Die in Man when Man broke relationship with God.  This is exactly what happened when Man ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.  Man Died. 

The serpent told Man that they would not Die if they ate the fruit.  This was a lie and Man still believes the lie since Man thinks that physical life is Life and physical death is Death.  Now we can understand why Man runs after saving physical life.  Whereas, whoever saves this life will lose it but whoever loses this life for Jesus and the gospel will save it.  The truth is - the purpose for physical life is to lose it for Jesus and the gospel - This is Man’s only hope. 

Now, Man is Dead.  How serious is Death?  What is Death?  There are three perspectives of Death.  The first is Man is now eternally separated from God.  Death has finality to it.  Man and God relationship is eternally broken. 

In the court room of heaven, Satan is the prosecutor and he has been able to get his evil aim executed over us.  Satan, who tempted us to sin and thus caused our Death, stands diabolically gleaming over us, the accused, with this verdict written over us – DEAD. 

The second perspective of Death is that we are Dead in our sins.  Sin has a Death grip over us.  Even if we desire to do good we are not able to, since Sin working in us causes us to further sin.  We are captives to Sin and we are Dead in our sins.  Nothing we can do can set us free from the Death of Sin working powerfully in us. 

The third perspective of Death is that there is a second Death, which is the lake of fire.  Anyone not found written in the Book of Life was cast into the lake of fire.  All of these three perspectives give us the understanding of the seriousness of Death. 

On the cross, Jesus became Sin for us.  He had no experiential knowledge of sin but He became Sin.  Each of us has different experiences of sin but none of us can claim to know Sin in its totality.  I'm a graduate in Agriculture but I can never claim that I personify Agriculture.  Agriculture is a vast subject.  Similarly with sin but Jesus became SIN for us.  The entire length, breadth, height and depth of SIN were placed on Him and He became the personification of Sin. 

This is when the relationship with the Father snapped and Jesus could only call God and say, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  JESUS DIED.  Very often we look at the physical death of Jesus on the cross and we say Jesus died.  Jesus surely died physically just as every Man born on earth dies but Jesus Died our Death

Let’s go back to the court room of heaven.  Remember, we left Satan standing over us, with a wicked glee, saying, “You are Dead”.  Now walks in our advocate, Jesus, presenting His Death on our behalf to the God the righteous judge, saying, “DEATH DIED, since I Died Man’s Death once and for all”  There is an incredible silence in the court room.  Then comes the resounding over-ruling from the Judge, for all of heaven and earth to hear, ‘Man’s Death Cancelled, Declared Righteous’.  Satan defeated. 

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