The Solution: The Law & The Cross
by Editor(s)

Part 4 of the Teacher/Trainer Outline

What would man do now? Through the Fall, Satan entered into man and began operating him without man’s awareness of being taken over (Eph. 2:1-3). However, man’s fall (unlike Satan’s fall) was not total. Man retained his sense of right and wrong. This knowing of right and wrong is written by God on the heart of every man. This knowing is what we understated conscience to be (Rom. 2:14-15). The retention of a conscience is what gives man the ability to aspire to rightness.

God not only gave an inner law (conscience), but through Moses, He also gave the outer Law (the Ten Commandments), which clearly spell out His standard for mankind. That Law is a reflection of God’s own perfect character. He makes it clear that nothing short of keeping every "jot and tittle" of the Law (perfection) is acceptable (Mt. 5:48; James 2:10), and that the consequence of not keeping His Law perfectly is spiritual death and eternal suffering (Gal. 3:10).

The purpose of the Law was to (1) reveal the holiness of God; (2) bring to the consciousness of man the sinfulness of his deeds, thus making him aware of his need for a saviour (Rom. 5:20; Gal 3:24); (3) declare that the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23); and, (4) break man’s deception in believing he had the ability to do good and to please God.

Man’s dilemma did not leave Godwith a problem. God’s solution was planned before the foundation of the world, so man was never without a remedy. Although the justice of God required the death of the offender (Ez. 18:4), God, in His mercy, established the principle of blood sacrifice as an acceptable substitutionary death for the forgiveness of sins (Heb. 9:22). This principle, in the form of animal sacrifices, was first revealed to Adam and Eve (Gen. 3:21-24) and then more fully developed under Moses.

These sacrifices were a foreshadowing of the eternal sacrifice that was yet to come. But the blood of bulls and goats had no merit in itself and had no power to eternally remove man’s sins (Heb. 10:4). Sins were not man’s only problem. He also had within himself the sin producer–the indwelling spirit of Satan himself.

God’s answer to both of these problems, (the sins and the sin) was for Christ to go to the cross, and in the spirit sense taking all mankind with him ("We died with Him" – Rom. 6:8a). Christ had lived a perfect life, so He was an acceptable sacrifice. He took upon Himself the sin nature and became sin on our behalf (2 Cot 5:21). His shed blood provided forgiveness for our sins by washing them away, and the sin spirit which He accepted on our behalf was separated from Him when He died (death being really nothingmore or less than the spirit leaving the body).

The part man plays in the answer to his sin state is to put his total trust (faith) in the provision God has made. "Whosoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life" (John 3: 16 ).

The Spirit of God raised Jesus from the dead, and we, having died in Him, are also raised to newness of life by God’s same Spirit. The Bible speaks of this experience as being born again; that is, we are born anew with the Holy Spirit joining Himself to our spirit for the purpose of Him living his life through our lives (we the container – He the operator).