The Solution
God is love in both substance and expression - the sending of His Son, Jesus, into our world was the most supreme illustration of love; it cost Him everything but provided for us the only cure for our, otherwise, incurable disease.
Since Jesus is God's Son, He shares all of God’s qualities and substance – He is God. Further to His coming into our world, when He was born to the virgin Mary two thousand years ago, He is now both God and man in one person.
As a result of the fact that His conception was not in the natural way (Mary had never been with a man), He did not inherit the sin super-virus; thus, throughout His thirty-three years on earth He did not commit a single sin. His life and teaching was a model for all – He obeyed God fully and loved and welcomed all people, regardless of ethnicity, social status, age or gender.
However, he did not come just to set an example for us and show us God; He also came to bring the solution to our sin crises, to remove the barrier between us and God and restore peace and friendship with Him.
As well as love, justice is also central to God’s character. Thus, He will rightly judge and condemn us at the end of life, because sin is a crime against Him and thus, has eternal consequences. However, because His love makes Him want to provide a way for us to be restored, to become His friends and to be adopted into His family, He sent Jesus into our world to save us from inevitable judgement.
The sudden end to Jesus’ life was in God’s plan all along, because on the Cross God’s justice and love were perfectly satisfied. The unavoidable penalty for sin could only be cancelled out by punishment, so God punished His own Son for our sin, in order to set us free from its hold, power, and consequences. He bore the price for our disease and failure – the life of one perfect man – God’s Son, for the lives of many imperfect people – God’s creation. He did all this, because He loves us.
Once His work had finished and Jesus was buried in a tomb, three days later God brought Him back from the dead to crown His success and present proof of His real identity – He is God’s one and only Son.
So, in the death of Jesus, God’s justice is satisfied. God’s love is also satisfied, because now the barrier between God and us is gone and the potency of sin has been disarmed. This opens and clears the way for us to return to God and begin a new relationship – God and us at peace and adopted into His closest family – forever.