Today’s reading: Jeremiah 22; Matthew 26
Jesus loves you. He loves you so much that he willingly went to the cross to die in your place to make a way for you to have a relationship with Him.
There is so much happening in Matthew 26; Jesus’ anointing, the Last Supper, Judas’ betrayal, Jesus’ prayer in the garden, His arrest, His trial before Caiaphas, and Peter’s denial. It’s a lot, and it’s all so important, but there was one line that really stood out to me as I was reading it this morning. When the crowd shows up with Judas to arrest Jesus, Peter lashes out with a sword to try to protect Jesus, and He says to him, “Do you think that I cannot appeal to my Father, and he will at once send me more than twelve legions of angels?”
None of this had to happen…
Just reading Jesus’ prayer in the garden, we see Him asking God if there is another way. He is willing to go through with it, but as He gets closer to the moment, He asks if there is another way. He was not excited to be arrested, beaten, stripped naked, flogged, crowned with thorns, hung on a cross, and to have the wrath of God, for sins He did not commit, poured out upon Him, but He was willing to go through it.
Jesus had the choice. From the moment the crowds came to arrest Him, and all the way through to the cross, He could have tapped out; He could have decided it wasn’t worth it and asked the Father for those legions of angels, and no force, human or demonic, could have held Him.
But Jesus counted it worth it for us. Jesus went to the cross to conquer sin and death and to bring us into eternal life. He does not need us, but He wants us, enough that He was willing to pay the extreme price to make a way for us to be restored in our relationship with Him.
Jesus took the wrath of God, that we deserve, on Himself. “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.”
Nobody forced Jesus to do this, and nobody overpowered Jesus to hang Him on that cross, but out of His great love for us, Jesus put Himself there. He could have stopped it at any time, but He loved us enough to see it through.
And now, forgiveness for sins and eternity with the Lord can be had by faith in Christ. As Paul says in Romans 3, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith."
Our salvation is not a matter of our own goodness or righteousness before the Lord because if it were, it would be impossible; all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. No, our salvation is by faith, by trusting that it is only through and by the death of Jesus that I am forgiven and restored in relationship to God. This is what it is to be a Christian; not that we are good and holy and righteous, but that Jesus is all of that on our behalf, and by faith, we have entered into His righteousness and been adopted into God's family as brothers and sisters of Christ.
All of this because Jesus chose to continue on, to go through all that He did, for us.
Thank you, Jesus!
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