His Death Was a Triumph

Freedom from sin would mean that He was unaffected by the penalty of death that we are under.

If He were going to die one day like the rest of us, His death on the cross would merely be premature death and not an offering for sin. The representative would have to be able to take His sinless and immortal life and freely lay it down in death.

As the Father knows Me, even so I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep. Therefore My Father loves Me, because I lay down My life that I may take it again. No one takes it from Me, but I lay it down of Myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This command I have received from My Father. John 10:15,17,18

The religious leaders were insistent that He be crucified. One would think they would have hired an assassin to quietly kill Him in far-off Galilee. Why have Him publicly crucified in Jerusalem at the Passover when to do so would bring the city to the verge of riot? Under the law, capital punishment was by stoning or strangling; but in some cases after the victim was dead he would be crucified, hung on a tree until sunset, declaring him cursed by God.

 If a man has committed a sin deserving of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance; for he who is hanged is accursed of God. Deuteronomy 21:22,23

The leaders wanted Jesus crucified so that He would be declared the cursed of God in the eyes of the people and all His claims to being Messiah invalidated. They did not know that in so doing the curse that was upon the law-breaker was being transferred from us to Him and the blessing of God that He had walked in all of His life given to us.

For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them.” Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree”), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith. Galatians 3:10,13,14

He took the sin, the insolent no of humankind that had been hurled at God throughout all of time, and accepted the death that came with it.

On the cross, the sin of the world met in Him. He experienced being made sin for us. (2 Corinthians 5:21.) The guilt of every man and woman’s sin from the beginning till the end of time met in Him. Every sin of humankind became His responsibility, all the afflictions of humankind due to sin were laid at His door and He was afflicted with our afflictions.

Who Himself bore our sins in His own body on the tree, that we, having died to sins, might live for righteousness—by whose stripes you were healed. 1 Peter 2:24

We are sinners by choice; He faced the prospect with abhorrence and was made sin against His will, taking it only because it was the will of the Father that He should do so. It was the cup He had anticipated in Gethsemane. The prophet describes Him on the cross as being submitted and passive in all that took place—it was done to Him:

 Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the Lord has laid on Him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth; He was led as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before its shearers is silent, so He opened not His mouth. He was taken from prison and from judgment, and who will declare His generation? For He was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgressions of My people He was stricken. Isaiah 53:4-8

He experienced all that is meant by Isaiah 59:2:

But your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear.

From the midst of bearing our sins and being treated as the sinner who had committed them, He cried, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?”

We can never know what this means. We are so used to sin that we do not notice it, and we have neutralized most of the shame. For the sinless Son of God, who had never known or felt sin or guilt, to be suddenly identified with all the sins of human history, knowing Himself personally responsible for them, consciously guilty and feeling the full shame of them, was a horror beyond words to describe.

He was God with us, and He had joined us in taking our humanity and becoming brother to each of us. He had lived our life and faced our temptations, but this was the heart of making the covenant: Then, in those hours of darkness, He joined us in our sin.

For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him. 2 Corinthians 5:21

Each one of us was there in the hours that spanned time. Each of us was there, each with his or her sins, condemned by the law and under the penalty of death. We brought our every act of disobedience, our myriad futile searches for meaning in our flesh as we reject the love of God; He identified with us and took them to Himself. We brought our pride that had despised others and raised us above and ahead of them; He took it and made it His own. We brought our acts of selfishness against our fellow humans, expressed in the lies, our control and manipulation of others, the lust, the pornography that has selfishly used others as impersonal objects, denying that they are made in the image of God. We brought to Him all our foul language of gossip that we delighted in, even though it destroyed others. We brought corrupt hearts seething with bitterness, malice, and hatred, that took pleasure in others’ destruction even as they corroded and destroyed us; our proud hearts that refused to forgive; our envies that smoldered within us against those more successful. We brought them to Him, and He took them as His own. Our rage and ill temper, our abuses of others—even to violent sins of rape and murder—all of the black river of the sewage of human sin against God and fellow man met in Him. Every man and woman can look at the Son of God who joined us and took our sins to Himself. With Paul, each of us can say that Jesus is ...the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me (Galatians 2:20).

The horror is multiplied when we remember that He is the Holy One and knew sin as we have never known it. We have become so used to sin and the presence of its corruption that we are hardly aware of it until it hurts us. On the cross was the first time He knew the filth and contamination of sin, knowing its pain and anguish as we have never experienced it.

It Is Finished

The cry before He died “It is finished!” (John 19:30) is not the last gasp of a defeated man. Matthew 27:50, Mark 15:37, and Luke 23:46 do not record what He said but join as one to say that He cried out with a loud voice, which was a miracle considering His sufferings and the crushing of the lungs caused by crucifixion.

The phrase “It is finished” was used in at least two ways in the days of the New Testament. In Roman warfare, the general would be positioned on a high elevation so that he could watch the battle taking place below him. From where he stood he could see when the battle had been won, while a foot soldier in the thick of the battle would not know it. When he could see that the enemy had been routed, he would shout the same phrase Jesus cried—“It is finished”—and every foot soldier would know that the battle had been won.

But the phrase has also been found written across the bottom of statements of account in ancient Greece answering to our “paid in full.” Jesus emerged from the spiritual death He died as us and shouted through the smoke of battle that the battle had been won and the sin of man had been canceled, paid in full.

He had been through the hell of bearing our sins in His body on the cross and out of that darkness had cried, “My God, My God why have You forsaken Me?” but then it was accomplished and in full, conscious fellowship with His Father He said, “Father, ‘into Your hands I commit My spirit.’ Having said this, He breathed His last” (Luke 23:46).

Crucifixion was the cruelest torture ever invented by man. It was an agonizing death that took sometimes days to accomplish, during which time the victim was slowly suffocated as his lungs were constricted as he hung on the nails. Many times the birds of prey would come and peck out the victims’ eyes as they hung helpless between life and death. Certainly it was many hours before the victim died.

We must understand that Jesus did not die by crucifixion. The Roman centurion who had witnessed hundreds of crucifixions and knew the length of time needed for death to occur was astounded when he saw that He was dead by three in the afternoon. Pilate could not believe the report.

So when the centurion, who stood opposite Him, saw that He cried out like this and breathed His last, he said, “Truly this Man was the Son of God!” Pilate marveled that He was already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him if He had been dead for some time. Mark 15:39,44

Jesus did not die at anyone’s hand. He deliberately chose to die, the willing sacrifice for sin, freely choosing to join us in our death. This is brought out in the phrase that is used to describe His death:

...And bowing His head, He gave up His spirit. John 19:30

The phrase “gave up His spirit” means to dismiss or hand over something, which is not the word that is used to describe the act of dying. He did not die by the hands of the Jews or the Romans. Crucifixion did not kill Him. He had power over His life; and choosing to die, He dismissed His spirit.

Paul consistently uses this same phrase to describe the death of the Lord Jesus:

...who loved me and gave Himself for me. Galatians 2:20

 ...Christ also has loved us and given Himself for us, an offering and a sacrifice to God.... Ephesians 5:2

 ...Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her.... Ephesians 5:25

In so doing, He deliberately joined us in our death. In Eden, the first couple were warned that to eat of the fruit would result in death: “In the day you eat you shall surely die.” They ate and heard the words “Dust you are and unto dust you shall return.” Made in the image of God with bodies never intended to die, humans now live with the horror of death, the fear of which overshadows all of life.

There is no such thing as death by natural causes! Death is the most unnatural ending to the life of the one created to be immortal. We cannot imagine the horror for God to experience the rending apart of spirit and body and to enter into human death.

But we see Jesus, who was made a little lower than the angels, for the suffering of death...that He, by the grace of God, might taste death for everyone. Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared in the same, that through death He might destroy him who had the power of death, that is, the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage. Hebrews 2:9,14,15

He not only was able to choose when He would dismiss His life but also had the power to take it again and come out of death to take us with Him into the new covenant. And so, on the third day, He rose from the dead. That made His death not a tragedy but a triumph.

The resurrection of Jesus, the representative Man, signaled the end of the age of death and the beginning of the new humankind, the new creation that is no longer subject to death but shares the very life of God, everlasting life. The stone rolling away from the tomb announced the beginning of the eternal age that knows no end.

Enoch and Elijah had cheated death, and numerous others had been resuscitated from the dead to die again later. But Jesus had freely entered into death, destroyed it, and risen out of it never to die again. In His resurrection, the reign of death was declared over and finished and every man and woman carried in Him out of its grasp.

Henceforth, the race of Adam outside of Him would be termed the “old man(kind).” All who believe upon Him and are part of the new creation founded on the new covenant would be the new man(kind) who partake of eternal life, the life of eternity, the powers of the age to come, the life of God Himself. For such believers, the end of the world has come; in His resurrection, the new creation has dawned.

The New Testament never speaks of believers dying; we “fall asleep in Jesus.” The pain of death is in those who live having lost for a short while their loved ones. For the believer, death is a “life-ing” into the presence of Jesus. Death has lost its sting and is the old servant to escort us to Jesus until his retirement at the resurrection at the Second Coming.

Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?” John 11:25,26

 For to me, to live is Christ, and to die is gain. ...to depart and be with Christ, which is far better. Philippians 1:21,23

We who are in the new creation live between the ages. A new age has begun in the midst of the death throes of the old age. At this time, the two ages exist side by side. We are partaking of everlasting life, the life of the age to come, while living alongside of the old creation that is in the process of passing away. We wait for the Second Coming of the Lord Jesus, who will consummate the new creation, and all those in it will be seen for who they really are, the sons and daughters of God. We will be delivered from the pain and sorrow of living in the world while not being of it.