Today was unusual to say the least. John Stryder had a bad day. My son who is usually very jovial was miserable. It may have been because we stayed out late last night, but he still got up at the same time this morning. It may be because he’s teething. Regardless of the reason, today John Stryder was not his ordinary happy self.

Danny and I decided to put him to bed an hour earlier than normal. As I rocked him my heart broke. Even though I knew it was impossible I desperately wanted to take the misery from him. Tears came to my eyes but I refused to let them fall. I did not want my little one to be more distressed by me being upset. I rocked him and prayed for him. My heart desired to pray words of comfort. I wanted desperately for the Lord to drive away his pain, and give him quick restful sleep.

As I prayed a song that my church sings came to my mind. This song is often in my mind and one line in particular always speaks to me: “such a tiny offering compared to Calvary”. I’m sure you know this song. I always think of my son as “the tiny offering”.

This song reminds me of the offering of Isaac in Genesis 22. I honestly don’t know how Abraham did it. I’d like to think that if God told me, “Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, John Stryder, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains which I tell you.” that I would be obedient to the Lord. I’d like to think that I’d do it willingly, out of faith, out of love for our Lord. But I don’t know how quickly I’d react. I don’t know how big of an argument Danny and I would get into before I’d relent and give up my John Stryder.

God released Abraham of this after He saw Abraham’s faithfulness. However, He did not release Himself from sacrificing His only Son. When Jesus was baptized the Lord showed the love He had for His Son as a dove descended and a voice from Heaven was heard “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3: 17). The Lord continued to watch as His Son ministered to people on earth. He watched as Jesus became a popular miracle worker. He was also there when the tide began to turn and Jesus’ popularity plummeted. The Father was not deaf to the venomous whispers and loathing shouts of hatred towards His Son. When Jesus was in Gethsemane and prayed “Father if you are willing remove this cup from Me, yet not My will, but Yours be done,” God was listening. When Jesus’ prayers became so impassioned that He suffered from hematohidrosis (Luke 22:44) God was there and He could have called the whole thing off. But He continued to watch as His son was betrayed and denied by His followers (Luke 22:47-61). God was there when Herod and his soldiers treated his Son with contempt and mocked Him (Luke 23:8-12). The Father looked on as Pilate sought Jesus’ release and the crowds cried out for Jesus to be tortured instead (Luke 23:13-25). He was also there when Jesus was crucified between two criminals (Luke 23:33-49). He heard the prayers of Jesus as He hung upon the cross (Luke 23:34, Mark 15:34, Luke 23:46). It causes me physical pain to think about God’s love for us under these circumstances. I ask our Lord, “How?”.

How? For a good friend I might suffer. For my husband I might give my life. But if you asked me to give my John Stryder for people that hate me, curse my name, and abuse my friends – I’d think you were crazy. Amazingly, that’s just what our Lord did. Just read this verse: “While we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son…” (Romans 5:10a). Enemies! God gave the world His Son and for a while we looked on with interest. As long as Jesus played our game by performing miracles we were entertained. But then He started preaching, and His preaching was difficult. Sometimes His teachings even contradicted our traditions. Eventually the world tired of Him. Then the Darling of Heaven was mocked, tortured, and killed.

I look at my baby who I love and I recall Luke 11:13: “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” If I being evil want to take this pain from my son, how much more did the Lord want to relieve Jesus’ pain? And unlike me, God could have relieved His Son from pain. The story of the human race would have been very different, but at least the Lamb of God would have been spared. But God in his infinite love could not bear to be without His creation. I don’t understand the kind of love that God has for us. But I do know that His love is so powerful that He could endure Jesus’ life, torture, and death to be with us.

Though I cannot imagine what the Lord went through that day, I realize that the Lord knew what it was like to watch His only son suffer. As I put John Stryder in the bed and caressed his little head I thanked God for His lesson in theology.

This is an encore presentation of this article. To make a comment, please visit the original post by clicking here.

Below is my comment on Steve Moss’ recent post entitled Reading the Word: Week of Jan 12.

I to have been remiss in my reading of scripture as of late. I took your lead and just read Psalm 50. I am humbled by my humanity. My life seems so busy and so crowded with tasks and responsibilities. 

Yet God is above all of that. He isn’t slowed down by the routine of the day. He sits upon His throne constantly and does all of His work without fail. 

Another thing that gripped me here is that God doesn’t need our sacrifices. In Israel’s case, they didn’t need to sacrifice bulls to feed God. God said that if He was hungry, He would get His own food. The point of this passage was that the heart in which sacrifice is given is of the utmost importance. 

Are you serving to satisfy God’s needs or are you serving with a heart of thanksgiving? Does God need you to teach Sunday School? Does God need you to be a greeter? Does God need you to preach? NO!

But He calls you to do it anyway. Why? To bring Him glory. To bring you, His child, into relationship with Him and to make you a part of His grandiose plan. We are privileged to be a small part of God’s work. Our attitude should be one of thankfulness and humility.

The Bible reveals to us five areas of the overall atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ. All five areas are vital and essential, with none being greater or more important than the other. Each area of the atonement is effectual to its particular aspect of required need and each specifically accomplished that for which God intended it to accomplish. Those five areas are: Obedience, Sacrifice, Propitiation, Reconciliation, and Redemption.

Today I will discuss the second area of the overall atoning work of Christ which is sacrifice. The Scripture speak of the atoning sacrifice of Christ in a number of places. Ephesians 5:2 says, And walk in love, just as Christ also loved you and gave Himself up for us, an offering and sacrifice to God as a fragrant aroma. Hebrews 7:26-27 says, For it is fitting for us to have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens, who does not need daily, like those high priests (Old Testament Aaronic priests), to offer up sacrifices, first for his own sins and then for the sins of the people, because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself. And Hebrews 10:11-14 states, Every (Old Testament) priest stands daily ministering and offering time after time the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But He, having offered one sacrifice for sins for all time, sat down at the right hand of God.

The death of Christ as a sacrifice for sins was the fulfillment of the Scriptures. His sacrifice was the one true, real and effectual sacrifice of which all of the Old Testament sacrifices were types, shadows, pictures and symbols. The very first place sacrifice for sin was instituted by God was in the Garden of Eden. We are told in Genesis 3:27 that immediately after Adam and Eve sinned, the Lord sacrificed animals, shedding their blood, and made their skins for a covering for Adam and Eve. This covering symbolized atonement for sin.  The Hebrew word for “atonement,” which is kippur, literally means “cover.” Every sacrifice in the Old Testament was a type or a prophetic illustration of the death of Christ. The Old Testament gave many prophetic pictures of the sacrifice of Christ, such as the offering of Isaac by Abraham in Genesis 22, the different kinds of Levitical sacrifices in Leviticus 1-7, and the sacrifice for the sins of the people on Day of Atonement, which is Hebrew is Yom Kippur in Leviticus 16.

This area of Christ’s work of atonement as a sacrifice for sins accomplished the expiation of our sins, which is the removal or cleansing of the guilt of our sin. Expiation has to do with our standing before God and His law and specifically the guilt of our sin before God because we have transgressed His law. It is because we will in an age of lawlessness that people do not believe that atonement for sin is necessary. The lawlessness of the age is fundamentally related to a corrupt view of God’s nature which believes that, because “God is love,” He simply overlooks and forgives sin and does not require the just penalty of sin. The Bible teaches, however, that the justice of God requires that the violation of His Law of God be punished.  Through the sacrifice of Christ, our sin is expiated. Because of this, our guilt is cleansed and removed and we are no longer liable to be punished for our sins of transgressing God’s law.

In this regard, the nature of Christ’s sacrifice is substitutionary, which means that Christ died in our place.  The substitutionary nature of Christ’s death was made known in the sacrifices of the Old Testament. A basic understanding of the offering of sacrifices for sin was that the sacrificial offering represented the one making the sacrifice and was thereby a substitute. This was most clearly demonstrated on the Day of Atonement On this day two goats were used. One was killed by the violent death of shedding its blood. Leviticus 16:20,22 states, When he finishes atoning for the holy place and the tent of meeting and the altar, he shall offer the live goat…The goat shall bear on itself all their iniquities to a solitary land; and he shall release the goat in the wilderness. The other goat was the scapegoat. The High Priest, representing the people of God, laid his hands on the goat and confessed the sin of Israel symbolizing the transfer of sin to the substitute. The goat was then sent away into the desert symbolizing that the sin had been taken away.

There are two fundamental principles that are basic to the concept of sacrifice for atonement for sins:

(1) Justice – The just penalty for sin is death. The Bible says, The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23). By the violent death of the shedding of the blood of the substitute that was sacrificed, the just penalty of death for sin is carried out.

(2) Grace – This was demonstrated by the fact that something else could be substituted in the place of the one deserving the just penalty death. The guilt and punishment of sin were transferred to the substitute so that the guilty party could be forgiven.

Perhaps the clearest illustration of these two principles being expressed is sprinkling of the blood on the Ark of the Covenant. On the Day of Atonement, the blood of the sacrificed animal was sprinkled on the Ark of the Covenant that stood in the Holiest Place in the Tabernacle and Temple. This was where the very presence of God was manifested between the wings of the Cherubim, or the Angelic beings that guarded the glory and holiness of God. There was a large curtain that separated the very manifest presence of God from His people which represented that the sin separated God from His people. The Ark itself was a chest containing the tablets of the Ten Commandments of the Law of God. Being the covenant people of God, Israel was required to keep the Law of God. If the law was transgressed, God’s justice required that the sin be punished. The cover of the Ark was a pure gold lid over the tablets of the Law placed between the manifest presence of God above the Ark and the Law of God in the Ark. If there was no cover between God and His law, all that would be done would be the execution of the just wrath of God against sin for the transgression of His law. However, god provided that it was upon this cover that the High Priest would sprinkle the blood of the animal that was sacrificed to make atonement. The Hebrew word translated “atonement” is kopher literally means “cover.” It was the blood that made atonement and covered the sins of God’s people so that He could dwell in their midst. It was because of the transgression of God’s Law that the justice of God required atonement by a sacrifice for sins. It was because of the grace of God that provided the sacrifice for atonement so that the sins of God’s people would be covered.

It is relevant at this point to ask about how effective the Old Testament sacrifices were to take away sin and bring forgiveness of sin?  There are two important principles in this regard:

(1) The Old Testament sacrifices did not in and of themselves take away sin -   Although God instituted the Old Testament sacrifices, Hebrews 10:1-4 tells us that it was impossible for the blood of animal sacrifices to take away sin and that God had no enduring pleasure in those sacrifices as such. It says, For the Law, since it has only a shadow of the good things to come and not the very form of things, can never, by the same sacrifices which they offer continually year by year, make perfect those who draw near, Otherwise, would they not cease to be offered, because the worshippers, having once been cleansed, would no longer have had consciousness of sins? But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins year by year. For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sin. The Old Testament makes clear in many places that the sacrifices did not have power to take away sin. For example, we read in the prophets in various places that God could not stand the sacrifices of the people which were merely empty external ritual. In Isaiah 1:11- the Lord says, What are your multitude of sacrifices to Me? says the Lord. I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed cattle, and I take no pleasure in the blood of bulls, lambs or goats. When you come to appear before Me. Who requires of you this trampling of My courts? Bring your worthless offering no long. Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and Sabbath, the calling of assemblies – I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, they have become a burden to Me. I am weary of bearing them. Although it was the Lord Himself Who instituted all the sacrifices, as well as the appointed days of worship, that are mentioned here, He is not pleased with the barren exercise of them. They were not effective, in and of themselves, to take away. This is clearly stated by Paul in Romans 3:25 when, speaking about the effectiveness of the sacrifice of Christ to satisfy the justice of God, he alludes to God’s forbearance of the sins committed during the time before Christ, which includes the sins under the Old Testament sacrificial system. His justice requires that sin be punished or atoned, and although this did not actually take place during this time in history, He exercised patience with sinners until the true effectual sacrifice of Christ. Paul says, speaking of Christ, whom God displayed publicly as a propitiation in His blood through faith. This was to demonstrate His righteousness because in the forbearance of God He passed over the sins previously committed. While the Old Testament sacrifices were not effectual to take away sin, God derive a certain degree of pleasure from them. The pleasure God derived through the Old Testament sacrifices was by reason of the second principle.

      (2) It was through faith being expressed in obedience to the law of the Old Testament that the people of God looked forward to and participated in the sacrifice of Christ – The fundamental principle of salvation that was implicit in the Old Testament and made explicit in the New Testament is that salvation is by grace through faith. As Hebrews 11:6 tells us, faith is what pleases God. Faith is always expressed in obedience to God’s Word. In the Old Testament, God ordained the sacrifices to teach the people about the necessity of atonement for sin and be a prophetic picture of the one true sacrifice of Christ.  Those who were true believers expressed their faith in obedience to God’s word by their sacrifices. This faith was reckoned by God as righteousness that would come through Jesus Christ. Again, Romans 3:25 clearly states this saying that God provided propitiation His blood through faith. As the Old Testament believers presented their offerings through faith, God reckoned that they participated in the one true sacrifice of Christ and thereby took pleasure in those offerings.