This is an INCREDIBLY moving clip. Please take the time to view it. What Mr. Reidhead Illustrates in this can change your life. Plus it is a wonderful story.
I want to take just a moment and teach on Expiation. “A moment on expi-whaty,” you may say. Read on, you may be learning a new thing and it may set you free.
If the Church in America could understand this one thing, then all of the “self help”, “self esteem”, “self actuating” books that make it to the “Best Seller” list could be burned and the redeemed could instead begin spending our money on the poor and the needy and the gospel.
Christ bought us, to set us free.
He's already FULLY paid the price of your deliverance from His punishment.
Let’s first define the word EXPIATION, or to expiate by looking at what it is NOT. There are many groups out there that are taught that they must expiate their own sins. That means, that in some way or another they believe that they are to pay and work and do and suffer et al for their own sins or God will punish them until He is satisfied with their sufferings.
First of all, this sort of action does not describe the God of the Bible. The idea of self expiation does not demonstrate Godly righteousness, it surely is not Godly love and it displays no mercy and absolutely no grace and these are all things that we love about God, His compassion towards undeserving man kind. The thought that we can pay for our own sins takes God’s standards and trashes them, it presumes that we are able to first number and account for our sins before we can begin to expiate for them. Poppycock! This would cause the human mind to go insane. Example, if everything that is not of faith is sin (Rm 14:23) then we can have no idea of how frequently we sin against Him.
Secondly, “auto expiation” means that God will accept our flawed, selfish, self soothing works as payment for our selfish, self satisfying sins. Remember, God resists the proud and gives His grace to the humble. We are humans; everything we do has a measure of pride and self satisfaction in it. I honestly believe that no living soul has ever done anything “good” without some measure of self gratification as part of their motives, no soul other than Christ Jesus. God will not accept sin as payment for sin; it just won’t satisfy His righteousness and justice.
Thirdly, it takes the “finished work of the cross” and throws it out. All of those scriptures that tell us that Jesus was offered once for sin, become noting if we must pay for our own sin. It would take Jesus' final phrase on the cross , “it is finished” and dump it on the ground like it had no meaning. I won’t go into the Greek here because this is already longer that I had expected, but when He said finished, He meant it.
And finally, for this article anyway, self expiation means that Jesus’ death in your place was not enough. It is like saying He didn’t die hard enough. His Blood wasn’t pure enough. The Father didn’t pour out His fiery wrath and indignation on Him hard enough on the cross. That when God the Father made Jesus our sins, some of them leaked out His spear pierced side and there is more for us to pay for. Self expiation says that what Jesus did was not enough for God to be pleased and satisfied. Remember in the video, the man paid twice as much as any other auction at that place to buy this poor woman, and that is supposed to impress us. When, for us, God gave His one and only Son, God made Jesus’ soul an offering for our sins, the Creator of life was given as a payment for you, in comparison the doubled price for that slave woman is nothing.
Let’s now take a look at what Expiation is. This is the Webster’s definition: Expiation, The act of atoning for a crime; the act of making satisfaction for an offense, by which the guilt is done away, and the obligation of the offended person to punish the crime is canceled; atonement; satisfaction.
Did you get that? The obligation of the offended person to punish the crimes is cancelled!
Christ bought us, to set us free.
He's already FULLY paid the full price of your deliverance from His punishment.
We have offended God, we are sin against Him. He, in His long suffering and mercy overlooked the sins of the past, but at the fullness of time He sent His Beloved Son to be the Expiator of all our sins, to completely satisfy any obligation God has to punish us, so now He is gladly obliged to *save us. It is as if, that cup that Jesus prayed to be taken from Him, that when He was on the cross He rejected the sponge of gall and instead He drank down all that was in God’s cup of wrath. As if that cup were a mile wide and five miles deep, yet He drank it down until it was wiped clean and turned on its head.
He was offered up for our offenses and raised up for our justification.
Our guilt is done away with! The guilt of the past, the present and the future, all guilt is gone. And since Jesus is restored to the Father, we are justified, that is a righteous declaration from God about His redeemed people, just as if none of this happened, no sin, no death and no judgment. Sadly that is how many act even in the churches. They “claim” Christ but act like nothing happened. There is little or no fruit of love towards God in their lives. What could this mean?
Notice, I didn’t say that He is gladly obliged to love us, but to *save us. God never changes, if He created something in Love, He will continue to love His creation. He is not obliged to love us, He is perfection and He is love and He will always continue to love every person He has ever made, every one. Even those He rightly punishes for all of eternity in Hell. What a heart ache for God. Even though He has done all of this for mankind, most will reject Him. With all this considered, all He has done for them, there are still many who will never, in this life, bow their knee to Him, as He deserves, even though they will call themselves Christians and call Him Lord, Lord.
Are you deeply in love with Jesus because of what He has done for you? Is He the prevailing thought on your mind through out the day? The command is to love Him with all you have, and that should be easy considering what He has done for you. Recall what the freed slave woman did. How humiliating to bow down and grovel at the feet of this man, yet to her it was a great honor. She had been freed and saved. The debt that she owed was gone. She understood what her future was. she had been a slave before to another vile man who abused her so, and when he couldn’t stand to see her any longer because of the soul torturing guilt he had from what he had done to her, he did all he could do, get rid of her. She, sadly with experience was expecting to be in hell, again, yet when she was set free by the compassion and full payment of another she could only give herself in humbling gratitude. No pride. So many today have come to Jesus on their terms. They have come to Him to get a better life or to get over a difficult hill. Let me tell you and warn you friend, unless you come to Him as one who has been set free from a sure hell and come to Him agreeing to His unconditional surrender on your part, you are most likely holding your own eternity in your own hands. If that is the case, I hope you can feel it burning as you read this because what you are holding is a sure ticket to hell. Repent. Run from your pride. Flee from your self sufficiency! As long as you have it, you don’t have Christ.
Please, do not let modern preaching deceive you, Jesus didn't save you because He saw something special in you, He saved you out of deep, painful pity for you. He saved you in spite of everything “good” you have done; even your good works are a damning thing compared to His Perfections. Our best works are like filthy rags to Him. How would you respond if a sewage covered monster of a man were to see you with mud on your face and then came to you to do a good work and offer you a rotting rag of human blood and bile to clean your face. That is our good works before God, He will not accept them. The Devil has a hand full of lies, and they are good ones. Probably his most used deception is that he doesn’t exist, but second to this is that God will judge our good deeds and bad deeds and do accordingly. It is possibly the most preposterous thought for a person to think that God will weigh our good works against our bad and measure out our punishment or our reward according to the balance of a scale, yet many, even in the churches believe this way. This thought process has no grasp on reality, God’s righteousness or our depravity. This kind of thinking totally circumnavigates the Cross and Jesus died and rose again in vain.
When Jesus was on the cross, it is as if the Father crushed Him so powerfully, that one of the side effects of that explosive tumult of wrath was the destruction of your sins. You see, He did have you on His mind but this monumental event that all of eternity hangs upon was between the Father and the Son. It is not about you, It was and is about the Perfect standard of God being met by the Perfect Son of God in a Perfect manner. A demonstration that was and is so Perfect that it can even atone for a wretch like me.
Christ paid infinitely more for you and me and all who will come to Him than all of us are worth, combined…because of His worth. He didn't see a spark of goodness in you. You were filth compared to Him. He did all of this for His Glory, not yours.
Fall in love with this savior. See yourself as He does. Eternally needy and if redeemed, eternally blessed, forgiven, seated and saved. Know that you have been set free from sin, its punishment and its hold, and if you have truly repented towards God and put your trust in the Savior, Jesus, then know that…
Christ has bought you, to set you free.
With all of this, we should be ecstatic to be
Expended for His glory
Jason Getzin
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