This is the best news in the world: God invites humanity into relationship with Him. However, as God makes covenants with people, it creates a serious tension. After all, isn’t it impossible for a holy God to stay connected to sinful people? At this point in the biblical storyline some important questions develop. Will God need to lower His standards? (Could He lower His standards even if He wanted to?) Will God’s people be able to live sinless lives so they can enjoy God’s presence?Of course, the answer to these questions is no. God would never and could never lower His standards or diminish His holiness. And since the fall, human beings are incapable of living sinless lives and enjoying God’s presence on the basis of their own moral purity. So if God is going to bind Himself to human beings, something has to be done about the sin that inevitably enters the lives of the people of God.God’s solution for the problem of sin is sacrifice.Most Christians today understand that when Jesus died, He was serving as a sacrifice on our behalf. What many don’t understand, however, is the major role that sacrifice played in the Old Testament. Most Christians today understand that Jesus’s death on the cross paid for our sins and allowed us to have a relationship with God. But we rarely consider that Jesus’s death was the culmination of a larger story of sin and sacrifice that develops throughout the Old Testament. Only when we understand the Old Testament sacrifices can we see how the Old and New Testaments dovetail perfectly into one amazing story. Jesus didn’t decide on a whim that the problem of sin could be solved by dying on a cross; the Old Testament sacrificial system demanded a sacrifice for sin, and Jesus offered Himself as the ultimate sacrifice on our behalf. - mobile multiply
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 05:50:54 +0000
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