Christ is Our Atonement

“Good Friday is good news.” We’ve got this tendency to boil down theological truth into these bite-sized, feel-good nuggets and just assume that everyone’s on the same page when we say it. But talking about Jesus shouldn’t feel like an inside joke to people who are new and trying to understand from the outside.  As a church, we should fight for clarity and not just simplicity.

Chances are, if you’re from the Northshore or you’ve been here for a while, you have some kind of familiarity with the broad strokes of the story of Jesus: he was born of a virgin, righteous life, died for our sins, rose from the grave, and ascended into heaven. And it’s really easy to zoom past that “died for our sins” part and just take it for granted if we grew up around the Bible or going to church.

But what does it mean that Jesus died for our sins? Why did he die for our sins? And why is Good Friday—the day we reflect on the death of Jesus on the cross—why is good Friday truly good news? In this small passage we’re looking at in Romans 5 this evening, the Apostle Paul is writing to the church in Rome and trying to elaborate on the “why” behind the cross of Christ.

You see, at this point, Paul hadn’t visited Rome yet on any of his missionary journeys. But he heard that there were new Christians there, and as they started to gather together as the church, Paul wrote the letter Romans to help provide clarity around the doctrine of the Christian faith and how it applied to their lives.

So, here in these six verses, Paul shares three reasons why Jesus dying on the cross is certainly sad news, but ultimately good news. But this good news isn’t just good by itself—it’s good news in response to bad news. If we didn’t need Jesus to die for us, then God the Father sending him to die wouldn’t just be unnecessary; it would be evil.

ILLUSTRATION: I heard an illustration once of a man who worked on a drawbridge that was used by trains. He would raise and lower the bridge as needed, so trains could safely get across. One night he brings his young son with him to show him his job.

But as a train starts to approach from the distance, he realizes his son has wandered off. Over the next few seconds, he frantically looks for him and finally finds the boy on the other side of the bridge with his foot stuck in the track. The man sees the train full of hundreds of passengers coming toward the bridge, and he sees his son, and he has to make a choice.

An awful choice that no one should ever have to make. If he chooses to save the people on the train and in the process he loses his son, it would be devastating. This is a made up story, and it still breaks my heart as a father.

We would feel crushed for that man’s loss… unless the train was still 5 miles away when he found his son. If he had plenty of time to save his boy and also lower the bridge in time for the train to get across, but he chose to sacrifice his son anyway… we wouldn’t pity the man anymore. We’d hate him. He didn’t do a hard thing; he did an monstrous thing.

The central claim of Christianity is that Jesus died for our sin. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” But just like the man on the bridge, the only way this can give us hope, the only way we can trust this kind of God, is if this was the only way to make things right.

Jesus himself said in John 14:6, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Christianity isn’t compatible with believing there are multiple ways to get to a good God. The cross of Christ has ruled that out for us. So, the question we need to answer this evening is how was the cross worth it? What bad news resulted in Jesus’ death being good news?

Three ways. First up: right at the start in verse 6, we see that we are weak, but Christ is strong for us. Let’s read verse 6 again:

Romans 5:6 ESV

⁶ For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.

ILLUSTRATION: That word weak is hard to swallow. I mean, who likes to be called weak? I haven’t worked out since Nora was born 10 months ago, so I asked ChatGPT recently to give me some 30-minute bodyweight workouts that I could do from home a couple times a week during my lunch break.

I looked at the rep counts it gave me for push-ups, and I wrote back that it was being way too conservative, and I could do at least 5 more each set. Then, I started my first workout. It’s a different kind of humiliation when you have to tell an AI that you could not in fact do those extra 5 reps and were on the low end of the range it gave you. Sure, enough ChatGPT tried to be very reassuring.

The Bible doesn’t discriminate here. It’s not that some are weaker than others. Everyone’s described as “weak” in verse 6. But what does Paul mean when he uses that word? Let’s think about the context of the verse. We could look backward at verses 3-5, and we see this list of noble traits that God develops out of the times of suffering in our lives when we trust him: things like endurance, character, and hope.

It’s after calling out these positive traits that God works in us that Paul offers the contrast in verse 6 of “while we were still weak.” So it seems this weakness of ours is connected to our morality or our character. And that’s immediately confirmed at the end of the verse when Paul uses another term to describe our weakness: “Christ died for the ungodly.”

When you hear that word, “ungodly”, what comes to mind? Maybe it’s a particular time in your life. Maybe it’s something perverse you’ve seen reported in the news. But the word is much more broad than our worst examples—it’s simply things that are not of God.

And that’s how we’re described in the Bible as our original condition. We aren’t of God. Sin has separated us from God. Our moral character doesn’t reflect him. Our greatest attempts to be Godly in our own power only demonstrate our weakness and inability.

ILLUSTRATION: Maybe that sounds harsh to you. So let me ask: Can you think of someone you would say is a better person than you? I’m guessing that someone came to mind pretty quickly. If you could think of someone so easily, and that’s just another person who’s still flawed and struggles and fails, imagine how much better an all righteous God of the universe must be.

Compared to just about anybody in a gym right now, I’m weak. Compared to the God of the universe, we’re all weak.

But where our weaknesses bring shame and insecurity in so many other areas of our lives, with God it’s the prerequisite for experiencing his strength: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.” You don’t need a surgeon to operate if you just have a splinter, and you don’t need a Savior to die for you if you just struggle sometimes.

The weaker, the more ungodly you see yourself apart from Christ, the more you’ll understand and the more you’ll be thankful for the cross of Christ. So, how weak are we? In 1 Corinthians 2:14, Paul tells us:

1 Corinthians 2:14 ESV

¹⁴ The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned.

On our own, apart from God, we can’t even grasp the things of God. They seem foolish to us. Jesus dying in our place to reconcile us to God the Father doesn’t make sense. And that’s exactly why Romans 5:6 says that Christ died “at the right time”. He died when we were weak. He didn’t wait for us to make ourselves strong enough for him because we don’t even understand him, so we’d never find our way to him. No, Jesus’ death is the ultimate demonstration of God’s strength in intentionally rescuing his people.

On the cross, Jesus did for us what we couldn’t do for ourselves. And now, for those of us who are Christians, we still operate the same way in our daily lives—reminding ourselves of our neediness as we learn it in deeper and deeper ways, but then resting in the joyful provision of our strong Savior. That was Paul’s conclusion as well in 2 Corinthians 12:9.

2 Corinthians 12:9 ESV

⁹ But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.

As Paul continues to elaborate on the good news of the cross, he doesn’t just connect it to our weakness and inability; he ties it to our actual sin. Let’s re-read verses 7-8.

Romans 5:7–8 ESV

⁷ For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— ⁸ but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

Here we get a look at Jesus’ sacrifice from a human level. It’s not often that somebody dies for someone else. Like Paul says in verse 7, people might be willing to die for a good person. But that’s not what happened with the cross. Jesus didn’t die for people that deserved it. He died for sinners.

The fact that he uses the same phrase to talk about “while we were still weak” in verse 6 and “while we were still sinners” in verse 7 tells us he’s elaborating on the same thing, moving deeper into unpacking our need for the cross. We’re not just helpless people that need saving; we’re rebellious people that need changing, which tells us something about God’s motivation here.

Verse 8 gives us the foundation: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” Jesus died because of the love of God. And if the whole “Jesus, God sending his Son, Trinity” conversation is confusing to you,  Paul elaborates in 2 Corinthians 5:19 that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself on the cross. Jesus is fully man and fully God. As one commentator put it, “Christ’s action is God’s action. Christ’s love is God’s love.”

But in Romans 5:8, once again, the timing matters. God showed his love for us in that—meaning, the next thing he’s about to say is the way that God showed his love for us—God showed his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. God’s love for us is something we have never earned nor deserved. That’s both freeing and humbling. Freeing because you don’t have to impress the Creator God of the universe for him to love you.

ILLUSTRATION: Macie and I are re-watching the tv show Frasier right now, and we just finished an episode where a doctor starts another show at Frasier’s radio station. Everything Frasier does, this guy can do better. Plus, everyone keeps commenting on just how handsome he is. Like he does most episodes, Frasier makes a fool of himself going out of his way to do everything he can to prove he can measure up to this other man.

And that’s just a guy! Imagine trying to do that to the God of the universe. Perfect in every way. If you think you need to show God how good you are in order for him to love you, you’ll live both exhausted and defeated believing that Christianity is built around shame and effort rather than peace and rest. You don’t have to earn God’s love, and that’s a freeing thing.

But you also can’t earn God’s love, and that’s a humbling thing. Plenty of people stay away from following the God of the Bible because they’ve bought the lie that they need to earn their salvation. But on the other side of the coin, there are plenty of us as Christians who think we’re somehow earning more and more of God’s favor as we perform better and better as good people in our own eyes.

That’s not the gospel either. We aren’t saved by God’s grace only to be perfected by our own effort. It’s not Jesus’ work and then my own. It’s Jesus working for me, then Jesus working through me. The gospel fuels every part of the Christian life.

So, if we don’t earn it and we don’t deserve it, then why does God love us?

It’s who he is. He is a God of love, and he loves his people. Verse 8 is essentially telling us that Christ died for us because of who he is, not who we are. Again, that’s good news because we are sinners, but Christ is righteous for us.

When we think of the word “sinner” our mind often goes to comparison. “Well, I’m not that much of a sinner because I don’t do this or I’m not as bad as that.” Hitler? Big Ole sinner. But Rob? Not as much.

I don’t think comparison is a bad thing here, but I think we have the direction of our comparison wrong. Sin is about the way we rebel against God’s rule before it’s about how it affects the people and the world around us. So, if you want to know how big of a sinner you are, you shouldn’t be looking at your neighbor; you should be looking at your Creator.

And Scripture tells us God is perfectly holy in all he is and perfectly righteous in all he does. How do you compare to that? Just two chapters earlier in Romans 3:23, Paul tells us “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” When our standard is the God of the universe, then we realize we are more sinful than we could ever have imagined.

But that same God knows all the ways you sin in your thoughts, feelings, and actions. He knows your sin better than you do, and that sin is against him! And yet, while you were still a sinner, Christ died for you. We are sinners, but Christ is righteous for us.

And when we acknowledge our sin against God and turn away from trying to rule our own lives and relying on our own ability and instead trust what Christ accomplished for us, then his righteousness becomes ours. It’s not achieved by us. The theological term is that his righteousness is imputed to us. It’s transferred to us. He takes on the penalty of our sin, and we take on the blessing of his holiness.

Paul draws this out even more with his next description of how our bad news makes the cross good news. Look with me now at verses 9-10.

Romans 5:9–10 ESV

⁹ Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. ¹⁰ For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.

That word for justified in the Greek was often used in a first century courtroom. When someone was justified they were declared innocent, and that means they received all the legal benefits of that innocence (even if the court made a mistake and they were actually guilty).

With the gospel, it’s not a bad jury that leads us to being declared innocent in God’s eyes. It’s that Jesus’ innocence was transferred to us by his blood. Like the end of verse 9 says, we are saved from the wrath of God because it’s been poured out on Jesus in our place.

The wrath of God isn’t something that’s heartless here like we might think of with that term. It’s quite the opposite. God’s wrath is the outworking of his commitment to justice, which is something we desperately want from God. We want to be able to trust that God is going to right every wrong, and the gospel is a testimony that he does and he will.

God punishes everything that would hurt his creation whom he loves. But there’s a problem: the creation he loves is rebelling against him and hurting the rest of his creation. So, even though he would be justified in pouring out his wrath on all of us, God upholds his justice while demonstrating his love by pouring out his wrath against sin on Christ.

And Paul drives this home with one more parallel statement describing our bad news. Not only are we weak and sinners, but verse 10 says, “while we were enemies” of God. Most people don’t think of themselves as an enemy of God. Someone might be indifferent to God, but enemy is a strong word.

ILLUSTRATION: Let’s think about it though. If your boss at work gave you a list of responsibilities to benefit your company, and then you choose to do things your own way trying primarily to benefit yourself, would you say you’re working against each other?

For those of you who have a toddler: when you sit down for dinner and your kid would rather die than eat the food you made for him, and he’s finding all kinds of creative ways to let you know about it—even though you love him—does it feel like you’re on the same side in that moment?

Because of our sinful nature, we’re born trying to be king over our own lives rather than submitting to the king of heaven. And no two kings fighting over the same territory have ever been called friends. In our sin, we are enemies with God. That’s the bad news.

But the cross of Christ is good news. Verse 10 says that through the death of Jesus, we have been reconciled to God. That means we were distant; we were enemies. But through Christ, we have been brought near; we’ve been made friends. Forgiveness has happened, and it was purchased without compromising God’s justice through the sacrifice of Jesus. The hero dying for the villain.

But that’s not all. Not to spoil what’s coming up on Sunday, but Jesus didn’t stay dead. And as we read in the back half of verse 10, we’re also saved by his resurrected life. We can be confident that because Christ has risen from the dead and is reigning at the right hand of the Father that one day we will experience the culmination of our salvation in eternity with him. That should be a source of hope and peace for you in every circumstance you might go through in life. If your faith is in Christ, then your sanctification is promised, and your future is secure.

And this is why, whether we’re reflecting on the somber nature of Good Friday or celebrating Easter Sunday, reflecting on what has been provided for us through Christ should inevitably lead to worship. Just look at verse 11 as we close:

Romans 5:11 ESV

¹¹ More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

After all this talk about who we are apart from Christ, reflecting on the sacrificial death of Christ leads Paul to rejoice, and it should for us as well.

If you acknowledge your weakness and your need for God, if you repent and turned from your sin against God, if you place your faith in the person and work of Jesus to reconcile you with God, then today truly is “Good Friday.”

In Christ, we are declared something we still don’t deserve, and then over the course of the life of a Christian, God continues to work out the new heart he’s placed within us as we become more and more like him. Again, him working through us, so he should get all the credit and all the glory.

Let's pray.