Why didn’t God make it so that there would be no sin? Because God made people in his own image, with the freedom of will to choose. God didn’t want puppets. God has a wonderful life planned for everyone, but He wanted people to choose it, not be forced into it. But people didn’t believe in His goodness and turned away from Him. When the first man and woman sinned, it began to cultivate in the blood. They rebelled and chose to do things against God’s plan of good, and so the results were ungodly too. “For the wages [payment, harvest] of sin is death” (Rom 6:23). These wages came in the form of instant death like the murder of Abel, or in various partial deaths such as a partial death of a healthy mind, partial death in the functioning of various body parts, partial death of right thoughts about prosperity. You get the picture.
God knew that once sin got started, the results would be passed down from generation to generation. Sin brings death into a person’s body, mind, emotions and spirit and if allowed to go on, eventually destroys him entirely. God didn’t want that. What would be the point if every person was destroyed and gone? God would have no family left! He had to have a way for man to escape the results of sin that would kill him. So instead of having to pay with his life for every sin, God said people could pay with something dear to them and the sin would be covered, the debt paid.
In Old Testament times sin was covered with the payment of sheep, wheat, barley and other things that had significance to the people. But God had something better in mind that only He knew the full value of. He planned to give mankind His own son, who people could then take into their lives and hearts. People would then have the one and only perfect payment for all sins—Jesus.
When a person accepts Jesus as their own, then they have the most treasured sacrifice to give. Whether we know it or not, when we first believed in Jesus, we allowed Him to pay off our sin debts for us.
Jesus took the results of all our sin, including death and hell. But since Jesus had committed no sin, even death and hell couldn’t overcome Him; it couldn’t stick to Him. God raised Him up and outsmarted the best the devil had to throw at Him. Jesus Christ rose from the dead as victorious over all adversaries.
If you don’t know Jesus Christ and you want to, then all you need to do is “declare with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised Jesus from the dead, you will be saved”
(Rom 10:9). Jesus Christ comes into our hearts and all the old sin is washed out. We become new people with the seed of God’s Holy Spirit in us to stay. The Holy Spirit in us rejects sin. So when we sin and rebel and make mistakes (and we all do), God says just admit it, say we’re sorry and we’re forgiven. No more sacrificial payments. Jesus paid it all up front. And no sin or the results of sin can overcome or stick to us either if we don’t want them. We can live in the goodness of God’s plan for a wonderful life now and we get to have it forever.
Love, Carolyn
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