Football can be a really dangerous sport. You know there are times when an athlete gets a bad injury, a concussion and now they’re injured for life. They’ve got brain damage. But, what happens is it awakens the whole sport and they realize, okay, we need a lot more player safety. So, even though one person suffered it’s for the good of everyone.
I saw one time in a school young people were all driving their cars to school and one got in a terrible accident and they got killed because they didn’t have a seatbelt on. And it started this safety movement where all the kids started wearing seatbelts. So, even though the one kid died, it was a terrible loss, it brought safety for everybody else.
What if in God’s plan, instead of an athlete getting a concussion, or a young person dying in a car accident, what if in God’s plan one person could suffer and everybody else could go free? Everybody else could learn a big life-changing lesson from it. What if one person’s death caused millions of people to turn around and live differently? What if one person dying could mean salvation and forgiveness and new life for millions of people? You say, “It would be worth it, but who could do something like that?” “Who could give their life for something like that?”
Think of this. What if there was one person, so perfect, so good, never did anything wrong. Loved God, loved people, so pure and God looked down on the world and He saw how bad we were. All the sexual scandal, sexual harassment, all the lust, all the uncleanness, all the greed. All the junk that’s in our hearts that turn us away from God. And cause us to do things that we know are wrong. God looks down at the world and He says, “You all are going to have to pay.” “You’re all going to have to die.” “I can’t receive any of you into my family because you are just too bad.”
And what if this One who is perfect, who never did anything wrong, who was so pure, who was just totally unblemished, what if He said to God, “Father, I will die in their place. Because I don’t owe you anything. I’ll pay for what everybody did. So that you can forgive them.” You say, “That would be too good to be true.” Well, it happened my friends. This is what is written in our New Covenant scriptures. This is how God loved the world that He gave His only Son, His perfect Son named Jesus, Yeshua. He died so we could live as the prophet Isaiah said, “We’ve all gone astray, everyone is turned to his own way, but the Lord laid on Him the sin of all of us.”
