Christ's ransom sacrifice opens the way for people to enter God's Kingdom

During His last evening meal with His apostles, on the Thursday preceding the Friday on which He was to die, Jesus offered His friends bread and wine. He asked them to consider the bread and wine as symbols of His body and His blood and promised that everybody who would eat His body and drink his blood would acquire eternal life by doing this.

Of course Jesus did not cut off a part of His body and offer it as food to His disciples. That would have been cannibalism. Besides: it was Jesus’ intention to offer His body, in complete and perfect condition, to His Father as a sacrifice on the following day. And He wanted this perfect body to be fully equipped with His perfect blood.

This means that it also stands to reason that during their last supper Jesus did not tap some blood from Himself and offered His apostles real blood to drink. If there is one thing that the Bible repeatedly and emphatically forbids, it’s the consuming of blood and it is impossible that during their last meal together Jesus prompted His friends to transgress one of God’s main commandments.

There is no doubt about it that on the Thursday evening we are talking about Jesus gave His apostles ordinary bread to eat and ordinary wine to drink, but told them emphatically that they should consider the bread as symbolically representing His body and that they should consider the wine as symbolically representing His blood. And He added that if they would thus absorb within themselves His body and His blood this would lead to no less than eternal life.

It is highly questionable if at their last supper Jesus’ apostles understood the full import of His words. It is probable that what Jesus really meant only became clear to them after the Pentecost of that year when God poured out His holy spirit on them, when 120 of them were sitting together in an upper room somewhere in Jerusalem. During the days and weeks after this Pentecost the holy spirit made many things clear to them which they had not understood so well before and it is probable that Jesus’ words about eating His body and drinking His blood were among the subjects explained to them.

The actual meaning of Jesus’ promise that people who eat His body and drink His blood will acquire eternal life by doing that forms the most important and the most hopeful theme of Jesus’ message for mankind: the theme of reconciliation.

To be able to understand this, people must realize how terrible the transgression is that Adam committed in paradise. He did not use the perfect body and the perfect life which God had given him in the way which God had prescribed to him. In fact he robbed God of the perfect body and the perfect life He had received from Him He used them to harm God and to insult Him. He refused to use his body and his life to serve and to please his creator.

In the light of God’s perfect standards of what is righteous and in the light of the question how something bad can be undone by something good, a man was needed who could offer God something which had the same value as what Adam had stolen from God.

In order to make reconciliation possible between God and mankind a man was needed who could offer God something good which would have the same value as the harm that Adam had caused Him to suffer. So that God would be able to cross out the evil done to Him by means of the good done to Him. So that God would be able to conclude: man has first done something terrible to Me, but later on man has also done something wonderful for me; something that is so valuable and so great that My sense of justice causes Me to forget that horrible evil that man has made Me suffer and to stop blaming man for what has been done.

As we have said before: Adam had withdrawn his perfect human life from the service to God. To undo this terrible crime committed against God, mankind could only do one thing: offer God a perfect human life as sin-offering and as peace-offering. A perfect human life completely devoted to the service of God. Because all people who were born after Adam were sinners and far from perfect it was not possible for mankind to offer God a peace-offering which could meet the demands that God made for that peace-offering to be valuable enough to cause Him to forgive the sin that Adam had committed against Him. To save mankind from this hopeless situation God has given us His Son, who was indeed able to offer Him a perfect human life and who has actually done this. The human life that Jesus could offer His Father was a sinless, perfect human life. By sacrificing this to God, Jesus gave God something that had the same value as what Adam had taken away from God. After God had received Jesus’ perfect human life His sense of justice caused Him to forgive mankind the fact that one of them had willfully rejected Him and had refused to use his life to serve Him.

By offering to God His perfect human life Jesus has provided for the sin offering that God has accepted as valuable enough to repair the relationship between God and mankind which Adam had broken up. God has forgiven mankind the sin that Adam committed. To say it in Biblical terms: Christ has sacrificed His perfect human life to God as the Lamb of God which takes away the sins of the world. Christ has sacrificed His soul as a ransom to be paid in exchange for a lot of people.

As a result of the peace offering of Jesus Christ that God has accepted a new covenant has been established between God on the one side and mankind on the other side. Jesus announced this new covenant to His disciples both just before His dying and just before His ascension. But on both occasions He did not really explain the contents of the new covenant. He advised His disciples to wait in Jerusalem until He would send them the holy spirit and this holy spirit would make the meaning of the new covenant clear to them. On the Pentecost of the year 33 A.D. God indeed poured out the holy spirit on about 120 disciples of Jesus who were together somewhere in an upstairs room in Jerusalem. On this occasion the new covenant came into force and moreover the holy spirit made the meaning and the value of this new covenant clearer and clearer for Jesus’ followers during the weeks and months following this Pentecost.

The new covenant makes it possible for humans to acquire forgiveness of their sins on the basis of Jesus’ sin offering. And this forgiveness of sins results in admittance into God’s eternal Kingdom. People who make a correct use of Jesus’ ransom sacrifice can get the kind of life that Adam and Eve had in paradise before their Fall. For ever and ever!

All people sin and the wages that sin pays is death. This means that actually all people are condemned to die, but Jesus has made it possible for people to get remission of the capital punishment they deserve. They can receive this remission of the capital punishment by allowing God’s spirit to enter their life and then reap the fruits of this action: repentance of sins committed and the willingness to serve God for as long they will live.

The meaning of the new covenant largely runs parallel with the meaning of the good news which forms the main message of the Greek Scriptures: by having faith in the sin offering of Jesus and by being determined to make use of this sin offering people can be saved from death and acquire an eternal life in God’s Kingdom.

At the same time all this forms the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham: by means of your seed all the peoples of the earth will be blessed. And also the fulfillment of the promise which the angel uttered towards the shepherds when he announced the birth of Jesus: I announce to you good news which will make all people of good will very happy.

This new covenant and this good news form the essence of the message of John the Baptist and Jesus Himself: the Kingdom of God has come near: the Kingdom of God has become accessible for people.