There is a whole lot more to the death of Christ than any of us give God credit for. We begin seeing Jesus as the payment for the debt we racked up by sinning. But when we realize that there is still this criminal called Sin inside us, we get a little frantic and go to the authorities – the Self-Help movement. ‘We will help you help yourself’ they say. You read the books, you listen to the speakers, and you modify your behaviour accordingly. But Sin knows when to tone it down. It’s not dumb. It’s actually grinning from ear to ear because the very things you are now doing are in its territory. Trying to make yourself better is a slap in the face to God, because the cross emphatically says that God’s way is resurrection, not renovation. You make lemonade out of lemons, but not if they’re rotten.
So, we’re ready now to look a little closer at the Cross of Christ. How did Jesus do it? How did he beat Sin? I had a leak in my attic, and I didn’t know where to put the bucket, because the drip kept moving down the truss beam. A guy told me that all I had to do was create a “stop-gap” so that the drop would have to fall there. It meant cutting a little spot out of the wood. It was great – I made the drops go in my bucket. They had no choice. They had been stop-gapped. Jesus is the stop-gap where sin is concerned. With a forest-fire, one of the first things done is to create a firebreak. Guys with chainsaws go and cut a whack of trees down so that by the time the fire gets there, there is nothing for it to feed on. Jesus is our firebreak. He stopped sin on the cross.
How on Earth did he do that? Ask and you shall receive. Why did the stop-gap work in my attic? It came to an empty spot. By cutting a piece out of the wood, I stopped the drip from traveling any further. What about a firebreak? Once again, fire needs fuel. By removing the trees, the fire gets nothing more to eat up. Our forest fire is forced to go on a diet. So, in a similar way, Jesus is an empty spot. There is something about us that is missing from Christ. Sin plods along from parent to child, parent to child - Until Jesus. No sin there. Not-a-one. He was born without a sinful nature. Sin is like this raging fire that has consumed everything in it’s path until it comes to this place where all it needs is a single tree to jump to the next part of the forest. But that tree has been felled already. In that light, don’t you find it interesting that Jesus was hung on a cross – on a tree?
The Cross is our firebreak. Sin got to the cross, but went no further. Just as fire will lick at the empty air searching for something dry to bite onto, sin approached the Lord Jesus and found nothing to feed on. The Bible says, “He was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.” He never gave in to a single temptation. Sin tried, and failed. The Devil tried tempting him in the desert, but Jesus quoted Deuteronomy to him and handed him his hat. Due to the fact that Jesus is missing sin, it has no choice but to stop at Him. But Sin still had to be directed His way. If it got around him somehow, we would still be in trouble.
The full brunt of sin was directed at Jesus. This raging fire was aimed right at him. Who aimed it? Well, who didn’t. The Jews, Rome, and Greeks all conspired against him. That means religious folks, government types, and the intelligentsia all got together and agreed that this perfect human being must die. But that’s not all. The Devil was involved too. Satan entered Judas, we are told, and had a hand in handing Jesus over to the Jewish officers. The Devil had wanted Jesus dead ever since he heard the promise in the Garden about the seed of the woman who would crush his head. It’s quite a group collected here so far, isn’t it? But there’s more. Not only did Jews, Rome, Greeks, and Satan want Jesus to die, but one more as well. Believe it or not, God the Father did too.
The Cross was not an accident. It was not something that the Lord turned around. He didn’t make the best of a bad situation. He’s the one that planned it along. We were thinking just a second ago about that promise in the Garden that got the Devil antsy. Well, part of that promise was that the heel of that promised one would be bruised. Then we read in Isaiah that “it pleased the Lord to bruise him.” Paul, explaining the cross to the Corinthians, said “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” God was involved – more than just involved – in the Cross. He was the mastermind behind it. He knew it was our only hope. He knew that sin needed to be confronted and dealt with, and the cross was the only way to do it. Why do you think it got dark for three hours when Jesus was up there? It was his father’s shadow.
So, sin was aimed at Christ by everybody – God the Father included. To be our firebreak, it had to be. If sin got around the cross, then we can still be burned by it. But it didn’t. It came to a head at Calvary. How? Well, everything else was already consumed wasn’t it? Sin had already licked up the dry tinder of all life on this earth. The ground is even cursed by sin. Sin infected all of life because of Adam’s disobedience. Born-again believers in Jesus did not exist yet. The firebreak was made so that future Christians could escape. But, with Jesus, sin saw an opportunity to get at something not yet scorched. That’s the way fire is. It has no prejudice – no bias. Anything not cooked, will be. It can burn cinder-blocks. But the fire of sin met its match with Christ. More than its match. It got fooled, actually. Sin thought it could consume Christ, because he let it at him. But Jesus was that fourth man in the fiery furnace way back in Daniel’s day. His presence there made the other three fire-proof as well. But fire doesn’t know something is fireproof until it experiments on it.
Sin was tricked by the Cross. It came at Christ with the heat of the sun behind it, but didn’t realize what Jesus was up to. When fire gets to a popsicle stick, it doesn’t waste a whole lot of time on it. When it gets to a 2,000 year old Sequoia tree named General Sherman (the largest in the world), it has quite the work out on its hands. It took all of the resources of sin to attack Christ. He let it. A verse we looked at earlier says, “He made him who knew no sin to be sin for us.” Christ was made sin on the cross. That doesn’t mean that he sinned, but he was set ablaze by it, taking it all on himself like fire on a tree. What sin didn’t know, is that it would exhaust itself on him. And then it would be snuffed out.
Jesus died. He took sin upon himself, exhausted its resources and then yielded up his spirit to God. He willingly laid down his life, just as you would extinguish a candle. The incredible thing, is that the story doesn’t end there. He rose from the dead. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is life from the ashes of the Cross. Jesus snuffed out sin with his death, but was lit once again by God the Father when he rose that Sunday morning – right around the time General Sherman was a sapling. Christ, our firebreak, stopped the path of sin, but then offered something in its place. He offered himself. He took the fire of sin from us with his death, and with his resurrection he gives his own sinless life to be our life. The same life that wasted sin, is in you and I. It all stems from his resurrection. Our life with Christ began back when the mouth of the tomb yawned and the sun shone in there. We are all older than we know. That means you and I, and the General, go way back.
When Moses saw the Lord, it was in the form of a burning bush. But it was unlike any other fire Moses had ever seen. The bush was not consumed. It was still green. That fire did not reduce the plant to ash, but instead revealed Christ to us. God is a consuming fire, we are told. Isaiah says, “The strong shall be as tinder, And the work of it as a spark; Both will burn together, And no one shall quench them.” Humans are dry tinder, whose own works set themselves on fire. But not Christ. He became a man. He never stopped being God. The fire of his divinity and the green life of his humanity came together, and this is what we see in that burning bush. Jesus is a fire of another kind. The fire of sin only brought death, but the fire of Christ is a light that brings warmth with no fear of harm. We have the fire of Christ in us by faith in the living tree who was felled for us.
I hope this metaphor has been helpful. It’s just one side of the cross, but a crucial one to see. I hope it helps to answer the question of how Jesus stopped sin. Why does sin still trip us up? We will get to that. But before we get into practical matters, the theory has to be hammered into us. When Paul wrote to the believers in Ephesus, he spent the first three chapters hitting home on the eternal truths that are true regardless of what condition we find ourselves in. He then expounds on practical issues – but only after using the word “therefore”. Why, what, where and when all come before how. The cross is the answer to those first four questions. The how has everything to do with them. If we think that sin was not stopped by Christ on the cross, then we are going to go about things quite differently. But it was stopped. Jesus did it. Where sin is concerned, there may be smoke, but that doesn’t mean there is fire. Fires smolder for some time after they’ve been put out.