Articles
What It Takes to Be Saved (6): God's Part - A Self-Sacrificing Savior
What It Takes to Be Saved (6): God's Part
A Self-Sacrificing Savior
Mike Willis
In our previous article, I wrote about our salvation depending upon a qualified savior—one who could serve as a mediator between man and God, who could represent the interests of both man and God. Jesus is the only one qualified to represent both God and man because He was God incarnate. Furthermore, He could offer Himself as a sinless sacrifice, something no other person could do. This requires that our savior must be self-sacrificing, one who put the interests of sinful man above what was best for Him.
Paul spoke of Jesus’s sacrifice saying, “Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Phil. 2:5-8).
John explained the sacrifice that Jesus made: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. . . . And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth” (John 1:1-4, 14).
We are unable to comprehend fully the sacrifice that Jesus made in leaving heaven to dwell among men. We are better able to understand the physical aspects of that decision. He became the son of a common carpenter and lived in a small town in Israel, a town with a poor reputation. At His birth, King Herod the Great issued orders that He be killed. When Jesus grew to manhood, He went about doing good, healing those who were oppressed by the Devil (Acts 10:38). Even though Jesus performed many miracles, His own people rejected Him as their Messiah (Christ) because He did not fit their image of what that Messiah should be. They were expecting a military leader who would overthrow the Romans, which Jesus never intended to do. At the end of His life, His own people sentenced Him to death and delivered into the hands of the Roman procurator Pilate. At the insistence of the Jews, Pilate ordered Jesus to be crucified. After a horrible beating, Jesus was nailed to the cross and died six hours later.
Jesus understood full well what He was doing. The Scriptures describe Jesus’s death: He was giving Himself up as a SACRIFICE for man’s sins (Matt. 26:28). The “Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a RANSOM for many” (Matt. 20:28; 1 Tim. 2:6)). His body was made an OFFERING for sin (Isa. 53:10). He lay down His life for His sheep (John 10:15). He REDEEMED us by shedding His precious blood (1 Pet. 1:18-19).
Without a savior who was willing to put the needs of mankind above what was best for Himself, none of us could be saved. But through His sacrifice, He provided man’s only access to the Father. On the night when He was betrayed, He said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).
