Jesus Christ, Problem Solver

I wrote a little while back about Jesus being "the way" and not "a way". I want to revisit that, because I love the way it was put by a man interviewed in the "Case for Faith" video by Lee Strobel: "Jesus is the only way because he's the only one who solved the problem."

Absolutely. Wait, what problem?

The problem of sin. In other words, not doing what God wants us to do -- not living up to his standards. Heck, we don't even live up to our own standards of how we want to be, let alone God's much higher ones. That's not just something we pull out of the Bible, its obvious in our daily lives. We have innate feelings about what is right and what is wrong in many situations. Often we want to do what we know is the right thing, yet we choose to do the wrong thing anyway and then we feel bad about it. Sometimes we purposefully choose the wrong thing and think we are happy about that choice, but we still know we chose the wrong thing.

That's one aspect of sin, and its our biggest problem.

Why? Well, look what it does. It wrecks relationships. When we choose to do the wrong thing, we hurt people directly or indirectly, and the relationships with the people we've hurt are weakened or destroyed completely. Maybe we think we don't care about those relationships. That's an excuse, because if we look deep down, we all know that we should care about other people because it is right to do so.

Not only does sin wreck our relationship with each other, it wrecks our relationship with God.

To see this pretty easily whether you believe the Bible or not, just think of it from a parent/child point of view. Jamie and I are parents. We're bigger and stronger and wiser than our kids. We're in charge of the home, not the kids. So say one girls starts doing something they know inside is wrong and ends up hurting the other. Do you think we're going to let that slide? Heck no. Is everything just peachy keen between my girls and I at home at that time? Heck no. She's busted and goes to timeout at a minimum. There has to be justice.

Now, here's the kicker. There's no external action she can take to fix it. Being nice for the rest of the day won't do it. Making me cookies won't do it, despite how much I like cookies. Excusing her actions and arguing about it certainly won't do it. No, the relationship is only good to go again when she realizes she's done wrong and fesses up to it -- and then I as a parent, out of love, extend forgiveness to her. Justice gives way to mercy.

And so it is with us and God. But that's where the analogy ends. Take what we have as parents -- standards, just consequences for violating them, love, mercy, forgiveness, and so on -- and extend them out to infinity. Now what do you have? You have a perfect God with perfect standards who is perfectly just and perfectly merciful. That's another problem from one point of view. You've got the perfect justice of God who will in the end punish all wrongdoers -- and we are all wrongdoers. And you've got the perfect mercy of God who will forgive all wrongdoers who come to him in repentance -- humbly recognizing their state as sinners who cannot be right with him on their own terms, desiring to turning away from their sins to him and receive forgiveness.

How do you resolve these two opposing traits of perfect justice and perfect mercy? We can't, but God can. That's where Jesus comes in. He is God become a man, the God-man if you will -- come to earth to die on a cross as a payment for our sins. In other words, he didn't just experience the physical pain of crucifixion itself -- he bore the full weight of the punishment for all our sins himself. In one act he satisfied the perfect justice of God and showed us the perfect mercy of God. No man could ever do anything that, so God took care of it himself.

That is why Jesus is the one who solved the problem, and the only one who ever could solve it. That is why Jesus is the only name under heaven by which men can be saved. That is why we all need to turn to him, trust in him, and ask him to come live in us and change us from the inside out.

Grace and Peace