Once Adam and Eve sinned, death came upon the world. Thankfully, God’s love is so abundantly great for his creation that he always had a plan. And this was to send his son to die on the cross for our sins.
Jesus is 100% human and 100% God. This principle is essential. It would not have been possible for God to save us if, in some way, He was not one of us.
Once sin entered the earth, there was a separation between man and God, and death entered the world. There was no death before the Fall. Sin creates the separation between God and man (Adam and Eve both had to leave the Garden of Eden), but death creates the spiritual separation between humankind and God. This spiritual separation is what we know as Heaven and Hell. Hell is the absence of God.
God is Holy and righteous. He can have nothing to do with sin. That’s who He is. However, if God is love, that means it pains Him to separate from us. That also means He is willing to do whatever it takes (within His holiness and righteousness) to reconcile us back to Him.
“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake, we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things, we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8: 35-39
God was able to reconcile His children back to Him through Jesus without minimizing His character or integrity. Jesus is the complete physical embodiment of God. 100% spiritual and 100% physical.
When Jesus died, he died as 100% God and 100% man. When Jesus resurrected, He didn’t just resurrect as a spirit. He came back with a new body.
Jesus resurrected with his new body and ascended into Heaven. In the same way, when we die, we also will have new bodies that escape the hands of death. Sin traps us within our physical bodies, meaning we lack the power to raise our bodies from the ground. However, Jesus conquered death, and through His power, we may conquer death and live with Him in Heaven.
100% Spirit and 0% Jesus would have done nothing for us. Jesus had to resurrect physically to break the separation that sin and death had caused between man. Jesus lived a perfect life so that we don’t have to be perfect. A sinless life means He had no sin.
Jesus entirely died, not just for one day, not two, but three full days. God paid the price that Death wanted, and through Jesus, Death no longer had a hold on Jesus or us.
Jesus dying for the whole world with his blood allowed us to get back under his protection. But take note, just as Adam needed to abide in God to survive, we still need to use Jesus (God) as our source to live and thrive. The difference is that now when we sin, we are protected by the death of Jesus. We can continuously and consistently choose Him without the fear of messing up. And God knows we will mess up, but because of Jesus, he can now still have this beautiful harmonious and perfect relationship with us through Jesus.
God created a beautiful plan because, for those who don’t want anything to do with Jesus, God won’t force them to be in a relationship with Him, but He will still die for them.
The NLT version of 2 Corinthians 5 1-10 explains why this needed to happen.
“For we know that when this earthly tent we live in is taken down (that is when we die and leave this physical body), we will have a house in Heaven, an eternal body made for us by God himself and not by human hands. We grow weary in our present bodies, and we long to put on our heavenly bodies like new clothing. For we will put on heavenly bodies; we will not be spirits without bodies. While we live in these earthly bodies, we groan and sigh, but it’s not that we want to die and get rid of these bodies that clothe us. Instead, we want to put on our new bodies so that these dying bodies will be swallowed up by life. God himself has prepared us for this, and as a guarantee, he has given us his Holy Spirit.
So we are always confident, even though we know that as long as we live me these bodies, we are not at home with the Lord, for we live by believing and not by seeing. Yes, we are fully confident, and we would rather be away from these earthly bodies, for then we will be at home with the Lord. So whether we are here in this body or away from this body, our goal is to please him, for we must all stand before First to be judged. We will each receive whatever we deserve for the good or evil we have done in this earthly body.”
This passage is sobering. But it explains that ultimately, Jesus’s sacrifice was to save us both physically and spiritually. Spiritually, we can be with God and have new bodies in Heaven. These bodies may be similar to the human form that God displayed in the Garden of Eden or the body that Jesus used to come back from the grave.
So Jesus’s physical death as a spiritual God led to the spiritual impact that we see in the first churches in Acts to people today, giving their lives to God.
Sources
Boundless. “Boundless Biology.” Lumen, courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-biology/chapter/human-pregnancy-and-birth/#targetText=Labor%20and%20Birth,after%20the%20last%20menstrual%20period).
Elert, Glenn. “Speed of a Sperm Cell.” Speed of a Sperm Cell – The Physics Factbook, hypertextbook.com/facts/2000/EugeneKogan.shtml.
Books that inspired this blog