Paid in Full

For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.- Romans 5:19 (NIV)

For God’s will was for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.
– Hebrews 10:10 (NLT)

So Jesus also suffered outside the gate in order to sanctify the people through his own blood. – Hebrews 13:12 (ESV)

The debt of sin paid by His death.  I love how Isaiah 53 puts it in such poetic and picturesque terms, especially in the old English.

4Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.
5But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

Isaiah calls Him a “man of sorrows.”  How else would you describe a man mocked for offering Himself as a sacrifice to for the world? What other label would you place upon a man sent to His own and they received Him not? Think of how hard it has been to love and forgive those who have hurt you or slandered you.  Imagine if you had the power to wipe them out with your very words.

Thank God for Jesus being the God-man.  He was fully God and He was fully human.  He had enough God in Him to refrain from unleashing armies of angels on Jerusalem that day.  He was human enough that He bled, though.   He was so godly that He asked the father to forgive the people who persecuted and ridiculed Him out of their ignorance, “for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). 

He wasn’t hung in the midst of the marketplace.  He wasn’t stretched before the other zealots  and insurrectionists for seditious acts of rebellion against the emperor and his constituents.  Pilate may have ordered it, but the Lord orchestrated it to happen.  He was taken to the outskirts of town and hung amidst the outcasts.  The King James Version used the phrase: and he was numbered with the transgressors.

Jesus died at Calvary.

Jesus died on the cross.

Jesus died as a cure for our condition.

… and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors.– Isaiah 53: 12 (KJV)