Saturday, April 11, 2009
Holy Saturday
Matthew 27:35 Then they crucified Him,
Mark 15:24 And when they crucified Him,
Luke 23:33 there they crucified Him,
John 19:18 where they crucified Him,
WHAT DOES IT MEAN? -- SEPARATED FROM SIN
It means that God has separated us from our sin.
Or another way of saying it is: God hates the sinner even while loving us. But how can that be? How God can hate sinners and love us at the same time? That is an impossible contradiction, a paradox, a mystery -- yet that is what the Bible says. God's word makes it very clear that God's attitude toward the sinner is wrath and judgment. Yet Paul speaks of the depth of God's love for us "while we were still sinners." Taken literally, there is no justification for the commonly held idea that God hates the sin and not the sinner. Sin does not exist apart from the one who does it. If God hates sin He hates the one who does sin, for without the action there is no sin, and without the person there is no action. And yet here at the cross of Christ we see our actions separated from us ourselves.
As much as God cannot and will not judge the action of sin apart from the sinner, as if sin is some kind of substance that God could judge apart from the person who commits sin, nevertheless in Christ -- by some unimaginable mystery -- we are separated from our sin. These actions are no longer seen as our actions but counted as Christ's. This is not the separation of doer and deed, but rather a separation in which Christ is counted the doer of those deeds instead of us.
If you separate sin from sinner as the world does, the end result is a God who doesn't really care about sin. In fact, there are those who say that God doesn't really care about all the "small" sins we commit. But if that is true, what is Christ doing on the cross? This type of separation leaves us with a God who crucified His own Son for no apparent reason and doesn't really care about what we do. That means He doesn't really care about us. But the cross of Christ says that God -- while caring very much about sin -- nevertheless has taken those actions off of our account and credited them to Christ, separating us from our sin while maintaining a very serious view of what is after all a very serious matter.
