04/05/2025
The Personal Dimension of Jesus Christ’s Sacrifice
God, the Almighty Sovereign ruler of Heaven and our physical universe, is far greater than we can even imagine. It is virtually impossible for our finite human minds to do anything but to underestimate God and His power and majesty. His known divine attributes of omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, infinity, eternity, holiness, love, mercy, and justice are only a hint of His awesome being. What God has revealed to us in His word, however, is sufficient and is all we need to know about Him. It is with this revealed knowledge that we have, and with the aid God gives us through His Spirit, a limited ability to understand it. This should now allow us to hopefully begin to appreciate a little more what Jesus Christ has done for us, His people, on the cross.
Concerning God’s omnipresence, a good starting point is His eternal nature. Having no beginning, on ending, no boundaries, the prophet Isaiah writes ‘For thus says the high and lofty One that inhabits eternity, whose name is Holy’ (Isaiah 57:15a). This is saying God lives in eternity - but what does that mean? Eternity is infinite, and so is God; therefore God exists in eternity infinitely. To simplify, this means that God exists in the eternal ‘now’ - existing in all points of eternity at the same time. It is therefore logical to deduct that only God can actually exist in eternity in its purest state because He is the only infinite being. When God decided to create finite beings, like the angles and human beings, He had to create a habitation that would allow finite beings to exist with their limited consciousness. God therefore first created a realm of existence for the angles that was a subset of eternity. This new realm would be finite in nature and would have a new element called time to accommodate it’s creatures, since only God can exist in the eternal now. Events then happened in this new realm (which is called Heaven) in a chronological fashion so the angles were aware that their ‘now’ was moving into the past, and the future was yet to come - something entirely foreign to God. When God created the physical universe, it was yet another subset of both Heaven and eternity. Matter, energy and time (time that is tied to our universe – not necessarily synchronized with time in Heaven) began in an instant and thus a perfect environment was created for mankind.
Since God exists in all of eternity, that means He still exists in what we know as the past, and also exists just as certainly in the future. Eternity touches every point in time, so God still exists in our past, our now, and in our future and equally so. Mankind is trapped in time - we can not visit the past or the future (not yet anyway), but this is not true with God. God does not have to travel through time - He is already there in all points of time past and future. It is with this understanding we begin to see from the Bible that God has intimate knowledge of all things in our universe. We have such verses as Ephesians 1:4 - ‘According as he hath chosen us in him before the foundation of the world’ - which proves God knew everyone who would ever exist before He even created the world. We also have Revelation 13:8 - ‘And all that dwell upon the earth shall worship him, whose names are not written in the Book of Life of the Lamb, slain from the foundation of the world.’ which proves God’s love for us by decreeing salvation before the world began - and again before any of us existed. It is truly a great God who can know everyone in the entire world, in all time, at the same time.
Now concerning God’s Omniscience, coupled with omnipresence, God is in control over everything in the universe. God’s power then allows Him to be sovereign in a personal sense. Not only can God be everywhere at the same time, He can be at every given point with focused attention. When Christians pray, they do not have to be concerned that because a million other Christians are trying to pray at the same time, God has to put your prayer in a spiritual queue that He will get to eventually. Neither do we have to worry that when we pray, God might be distracted by others trying to get His attention. God is not a respecter of persons - we are all equally sinners before God. God is just as interested in your prayer as He is to any other person regardless of how ‘notable’ or ‘religious’ they might appear before men. God is able to give each person His undivided attention, not just when we pray, but all the time. God is able to meet with countless of His children simultaneously and personally - as He is infinite in both power and ability. It is as if, when we pray, God enters the room with us, closes the door behind Him to remove distractions, and listens intimately to what we have to say. Because of this infinite attribute, God took a personal interest in His people from the very beginning. God wrote the Book of Life at the beginning of the world and immediately took a personal interest in each and every one in it. In short, our salvation began with God - Who is our salvation.
Concerning responsibility, we know (or should know) that what we are responsible for, we are accountable for (or should be). Even with a casual reading of the Bible, one will come away with a sense we are responsible for obeying God. Adam and Eve were given the responsibility to refrain from eating from the Tree of Knowledge. We see how their irresponsibility resulted in dire consequences and an accounting of what they did. A question from this episode of history becomes - how responsible are we to reverse our fallen state and to turn back to God and serve Him? The answer is that we are totally responsible - but the real question is, are we able to execute our responsibility? The Bible says we are born spiritually dead, that is, completely dead to our desire for God. Romans 3:11 says ‘“None is righteous, no, not one; no one understands; no one seeks for God.”. Therefore, anything that leads to salvation must come from another source. The Bible says God is our salvation, and it says this because God has unilaterally took the responsibility for our salvation upon Himself. God took responsibility to write our names in the Book of Life before creation, and He took unilateral responsibility when He became the incarnate sacrificial lamb. The undeniable conclusion to these actions by God is that because God did it, it is therefore perfect and unalterable.
Concerning the cross, Jesus Christ was 100% human when He was nailed to it. Jesus had emptied Himself of His divine attributes in order that, except for His sinlessness, He would be exactly like us physically. This physical limitation meant He was subject to pain and death, and He ultimately did die. Jesus Christ is also 100% God, being eternal and unchanging, maintained his divinity in full and thus creating for us humans a classic paradox. Therefore, it was God Himself suffering on the cross - the same God who knows intimately everyone who exists in all time. Although Jesus’ human mind was limited, His divine mind was not. While Jesus was dying on the cross, He could see each and every one of us, our entire lives, the complete inventory of our sins. Jesus was able to take our specific sins and nail them to His cross and die for them - not sins in general. This was going to be the only time He was going to offer Himself for us - it was the only opportunity He had to save us - it was now or never. In that hour of suffering, Jesus did save us and declared ‘it is finished’. That is why we were literally saved almost two thousand years ago if we are Christians, the assurance we have that it was indeed us that He died for is that we have been given faith to believe it.
Concerning spiritual versus physical salvation, the decrees of God, although an accomplished fact in His mind, must transpire in the physical realm in order to take effect. God foresaw each of us before the world began, but we did not actually exist until we were conceived and born into this world. The sacrifice of God to save us was again an accomplished fact before the world began, but it did not take effect until it was accomplished in this physical world in time and space. Similarly, our personal salvation, although being already done for us, does not manifest itself until God bestows it on us in real time. As the scripture in Romans said earlier - no one is seeking God - so God has to be the one that changes that attitude. The miracle of re-birth, the raising from the dead spiritually, is something that only God can do and is entirely necessary to free us from ourselves. Once the heart is regenerated, we can then understand spiritual things because God’s Spirit becomes active within us causing our will to become truly free. God then gives us the faith to believe Him, to believe His Word, and it is this same faith in His Word that saves us. When we embrace the salvation God has provided for us, we then experience the end results of God’s love and plan for us, and have the assurance that we will be with Him in Glory - after all, God already sees us there with Him, so as we say, it is a done deal.
The question for you today is; two thousand years ago, as Christ is dying for your sins and sees you personally, willing to apply His precious Blood to cover all your sins, every one in your entire life, and sees you as if you are the only person He is on that cross to save; do you accept His offer? There will never be another sacrifice made for you, ever. If Christ leaves out a single sin here, you are doomed, as one sin will damn us. The Bible says Christ’s sacrifice is perfect, so it left nothing out to secure our salvation – nothing. If God saves us, we are saved indeed. So, again, has God given you the faith necessary to believe His Son paid in full the debt you owe Him – the faith necessary to believe the Blood of Jesus Christ paid for ALL your sins, so that now ‘there is no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus’ (Romans 8:1)?
