Matt Burlew at The Journey Church:
...here’s the problem: each of us in our hearts has a little Pharaoh who says “I won’t let go of my sin.” Each of us has a little Israelite who says, I want to go back and be a slave to sin because it’s so much fun. The Israelites wanted to go back to Egypt and be slaves for pizza and beer. We want to go back to our porn, our drugs, our laziness, our wasted time, our gossip, our secrets, our greed, our mountains of fast food and our intellect that says we’re smarter than God and we know what’s good for us. We won’t be told what to do. We will argue, whine, disagree, and tell God firmly on our terms that we like being slaves, that we would rather destroy our lives. Thanks. We don’t care if he butchered and crushed his own son so we didn’t have to be slaves to the sinful stupidity that degrades and destroys us, Sin that wrecks families, marriages, communities, relationships and cultures. We’d rather kill ourselves, and kill each other than ever obey the crucified creator of everything around us. And every sin we run to commit, is a sin Christ had to die for. We pile it up on him. On the cross, Christ became a drug addict, a molester, a murderer, a pickpocket, a stalker, a porn addict, a pervert, a tax evader, lazy, a glutton, a racist, a liar. He became a pimp, a prostitute, a serial killer, a traitor, a coward, and a religious guy.
The beating to death that God took was so sin would not beat us to death. Because if you sin, you die. Thats what Romans 6:23 says “The wages of sin is death.” In Adam, all die. Our first father, Adam, sinned, and so everyone who sins, dies. Christ, the second Adam, lived a sinless life, passed the temptation test that Adam failed, yet took the punishment for sin. In this exchange, he overcame the curse of death for sin. He took our sin and gives us, who believe, his perfect life. Putting it simply, Christ is the only thing that stands between every one of us and the eternal, furious, and righteous wrath of God. For those who believe, when we die, we will stand before God and Jesus will say “He’s with me. She is with me.”
