Atonement

Good morning and happy Friday!

I am actually writing this on a Thursday night to post it for Friday morning...the reason why is because my family and I are feeling a little bit under the weather and so we are going to try and rest up tomorrow so we can finish some more projects this weekend.  :)

Since I didn't post last Friday, I wanted to post about my devotions for this Friday. I try not to miss a day of blogging, but life happens and I have to attend to my family.

There are two questions I want to cover today which I have learned about while doing my devotions.

The first question is: Was it necessary for Christ to die?

The second question is: What really happened in the atonement? (Part of the title for my post).

So, was it necessary for Christ to die for us? Well, in short, Christ did not need to save us or anyone at all. When I wrote my post about angels a few weeks ago, I posted that we read in 2 Peter 2:4, "For if God did not spare the angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and comitted them to chains of gloomy darkenss to be kept until judgment" then the atonement was not necessary. However, because God has justice and love for us, he sent his Son to carry the burden for our sins. Romans 3 talks about the righteousness of God through faith and verse 26 of this chapter reads, "It was to show his righteousness at the present time, so that he might be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus." So if we were to be saved from our sins, we needed Christ to come and pay the ransom for our sins. Christ was obedient to the Father and suffered in our place.

Grudem also talks about two kinds of obedience: active and passive. Active obedience is "Christ having to live a life of perfect obedience to God in order to earn righteousness for us. He had to obey the law for his whole life on our behalf so that the positive merits of his perfect obedience would be counted for us." If this is active obedience then Grudem describes passive obedience as "Christ's suffering and dying for our sins." So why was it important that Christ live a life full of perfect obedience to the Father? Well, think about it. If we didn't need him to live a long and perfect life for us to follow, then he could have died at an earlier age instead of dying for us as a 33 year old man. Christ went through temptations just as we do on earth. He lived a sinless life and was made perfect. What a wonderful Lord we worship!

Before I close, I want to leave you with a paragraph taken from the last part of this chapter on the Atonement.

"Christ in his death experienced the same things believers in this present age experience when they die: His dead body remained on earth and was buried (as ours will be), but his spirit (or soul) passed immediately into the presence of God in heaven (just as ours will). Then on the first Easter morning, Christ's spirit was reunited with his body and he was raised from the dead- just as Christians who have died will (when Christ returns) be reunited to their bodies and raised in their perfect resurrection bodies to new life. Furthermore, these texts indicate that Christ in his death on the cross completely satisfied the demands of God's righteous judgment of sin and fully bore the wrath of God against that sin; there was no need for Christ to suffer further after his death on the cross."

Thanks for stopping by!