That Christ died for our sins

With the exception of Romans, Paul wrote all of his general epistles to churches that he had established in various towns--Corinth, Phillipi, Galatia, Thesalonica, etc. When you read these letters, you have to read them with that in mind. Paul isn't writing these letters to introduce these churches to Christianity. They've already been taught the basics of Christianity. What he is doing is answering questions that have since come up, addressing issues that have come up, or reminding the churches of what they were previously taught. All of these letters are written against a background that his audience is already familiar with.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul wants to remind them of the gospel he preached to them when he first organized their church. This is the central message of Christianity. It's the kerygma (i.e. proclaimation) of the gospel in a nutshell. He says:

Now I make known to you, brothers, the gospel which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain. For I handed down to you as of first importance what I also received. . .

That Christ died for our sins, according to the Scriptures, and
That he was buried, and
That he was was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and
That he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

That first line, "That Christ died for our sins," codifies a mountain of theological content. I want to unpack some, but not all of it, in this post.

First, the term, "Christ," comes from the Greek word, christos, meaning "annointed," or "one who is annointed." It's equivalent to the Hebrew for messiah, and to make a long story short, it's a way of saying that Jesus is the promised king of Israel who was prophecied by Isaiah, Jeremiah, and other Old Testament prophets to usher in God's kingdom on earth.

Second, "Christ died," is a reference to the crucifixion. Most of us these days do not recognize what a startling claim that is because we have 2000 years of Christian history to get used to the idea. But as Paul said earlier in the same letter, "Christ crucified" was a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to gentiles (1 Corinthians 1:23). It's a stumbling block to Jews because the messiah was the person who was supposed to usher in an era of peace and prosperity in Israel, and to free the Jews from foreign oppression, not to die at the hands of the oppressors in apparent failure. In the case of every other messianic movement in the first century, the death of the messianic candidate ended the movement immediately because it proved that the person wasn't really the messiah. The claim that "The Romans crucified Israel's eschatological king," would have sounded like complete nonense to a Jew who looked forward to the messianic age. "Christ died" would have sounded like a contradiction in terms. That is why it was a stumbling block to Jews. Yet the Christians, many of whom were Jews (and originally, all were Jews), proclaimed this fact right in the core of their message. A lot can be said about that, but I want to go on to the next part.

Third, the mountain of theological content I alluded to earlier is embedded in the phrase, "for our sins." Sin is an offense or wrong committed against another person. In this context, it's a violation of God's standard of moral goodness. Essentially, to sin is to violate the moral law. James put it this way: "Anyone who knows the good they ought to do and doesn't do it sins" (James 4:17). John put it this way: "Everyone who practices sin also practices lawlessness, and sin is lawlessness" (1 John 3:4). If you know the good you should do, but you don't do it, or if you know the bad you should avoid, but you do it anyway, you have sinned. Sin and immorality are essentially the same thing.

Just as violating the civil law incurs a penalty, violating the moral law also incurs a penalty. Both the Old and New Testaments make reference to a time at the end of the age when God will judge mankind for their sins. It is said that he will pour out his wrath against sin at this time. It is hard to say what will literally happen since the Bible often resorts to metaphor to describe it, but it is sometimes contrasted with eternal life. For example, Daniel and Matthew put it like this:

Many of those who sleep in the dust of the ground will awake, these to everlasting life, but others to disgrace and everlasting contempt. ~ Daniel 12:2

These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life. ~ Matthew 25:46

Since everybody does sin, we are all subject to the wrath of God. To say that Jesus died for our sins means that the punishment we had coming to us was poured out on him. He is our substitute. Our sins were imputed to him on the cross. He paid the penalty for our sins.

At the same time, Jesus' righteousness is imputed to those of us who have put their trust in him as our savior. When we stand before God on judgment day, we will stand before him clothed in the righteousness of Christ because we cannot stand before God on our own merits. We would be destroyed if we did. It is in this way that Jesus saves his people. The righteousness we have because of what Jesus did on the cross is what opens the door to eternal life for those who believe in him. What it boils down to is that our faith in Christ is counted by God as righteousness. By shedding his blood on the cross, Jesus made peace between us and God. We no longer stand condemned, and we are no longer under the wrath of God because of our sins. We are saved.

As I was writing this, it occurred to me that I could pepper the whole thing with scriptural references and discuss each one, but if I did so, this would end up being a book-long discussion. In fact, volumes have been written on this subject. Christians don't even agree on all the details. There are different theories of atonement--the question of how exactly Jesus' death on the cross accomplished salvation for sinners. I did list some of the scriptural references in my post on Christian universalism if you want to check that out.

This post probably raises the question of why "Christ crucified" isn't a stumbling block to Christians. After all, the messiah has allegedly come, yet the world is still a mess. The age of peace and prosperity hasn't come. How can Jesus be the messiah if he was killed by the very people the messiah should have prevailed against--Israel's occupiers, the Romans?

While the Old Testament tells us that the coming of the messiah would be accompanied by the fulfillment of all the lofty promises God made to Israel, Jesus' death on the cross explains how it would happen. As I explained in "Judaism vs Christianity," sin is the reason the Jews were exiled instead of living peacefully in the land God promised them forever through Abraham. Sin was the reason the Temple was destroyed and Israel lost its king along with their sovereignty. Yet God promised to restore all of these things. Only by dealing permanently with sin can these promises be guaranteed forever. Without a final solution to sin--a once for all sacrifice that does not need to be repeated--there cannot be a permanent era of peace and prosperity because there would be no reason for why sin wouldn't result in history repeating itself. What Jesus accomplished on the cross was the final solution to the problem of sin which makes the fulfillment of God's promises possible (see Hebrews 10 for more on this). The crucifixion of Christ is the mechanism by which Christ is able to usher in the kingdom of God on earth along with the fulfillment of God's promises for eternal life, eternal peace, and eternal prosperity.

Today is Good Friday--the day we Christians recognize Jesus' death on the cross. I was inspired by that and a post I read this morning by Wintery Knight to write this post.