What do we need Jesus for, anyway?
A long time ago and far, far away, God made a covenant with ancient Israel. He promised to be their God and they promised to be his people. To make a long story short, they were not very good about their end of the deal, but God was faithful to what he had promised.
There was, however, a tiny problem: The Jewish people were being ruled by the Roman Empire. It was like they had been enslaved in their own land. And so the question naturally arose: Where is God when you need him?
The Jews came up with several basic answers to the question, and I’d like to describe these, not because you are all so interested in ancient history, but because those same basic answers are still floating around today. People still try to deal with their problems in the same basic ways.
Approach number 1: The Sadducees were the priests, and as long as people brought money to the temple, the Sadducees were pretty wealthy. In fact, they found that if they paid the Roman rulers enough money, then they could be appointed as high priests and get even more money. So they thought they had a pretty good arrangement, and life was pretty good. They responded to the problem by saying, “Problem? There’s no problem here.”
Approach number 2: The Pharisees were religious leaders, too, but they were not priests, and so they had to get their religious significance in some other way, usually by being super-religious. They had rules for doing this, rules for doing that, and if you kept all the rules, you looked pretty impressive to all the ordinary people who were not quite so disciplined. And the Pharisees said, God’s people are being ruled by pagan Romans, and that’s a real problem. If we all just kept the law better, then God would get rid of the Romans for us. If every Jew kept the Sabbath correctly for just one day, then the Messiah would come. But they couldn’t seem to get everybody to do it, not even for one day.
Approach 3: The Essenes were more fanatical than that. They said the priests weren’t keeping the laws right, and the Pharisees weren’t keeping the laws right, or they weren’t keeping the right laws, and the solution to the whole mess is to form a commune in the desert and wait for God to destroy all the ordinary Jews and start all over with the faithful remnant living in a monastery in the desert. Perhaps you’ve heard of the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were the people who had all those scrolls. It gave them rules for how to have a super-holy community. Women were not allowed, and you had to walk one mile outside of the compound every time you wanted to use the bathroom. If you broke the rules, you were thrown out into the desert with no food and no water. These guys were serious. Apparently all of them were killed when the Roman army went through in the year A.D. 70.
Approach 4: This group was called the Zealots. They were underground fighters. Some of them were bandits. They attacked the Romans, and anybody who helped the Romans. Eventually they started the war that got everybody else killed. They attacked the Romans, and killed all the Sadducees, and then when they were besieged in Jerusalem, they attacked each other. When Jerusalem fell, some of them escaped to a desert fortress called Masada, and the Romans besieged them there, too. Eventually they all committed suicide rather than be taken captive by the Romans.
The fifth and last approach was taken by the common people. They knew there was a problem, but they didn’t think they could do anything about it, so they just endured the problem as best they could. Life was hard, and then you died, and you hoped for the best after that.
Well, there was one more way to look at it, and that was the God looked at it. He could see that there was a problem – not only with the Jews but also with the Romans – and he did something about it. He sent his Son into this setting, and he sent him as a baby.
Now, it seems to me that God could have sent him as a 30-year-old man if he wanted to. The Greek gods supposedly did stuff like that. They came down to earth to check things out, and if everything wasn’t going the right way, they called down a few thunderbolts and took care of the problem pretty quickly.
But Jesus came here as a baby, and he eventually grew up and after getting established in the carpentry business, he quit his job and started travelling around the country preaching.
And the Sadducees said, We don’t need Jesus. We don’t have a problem.
And the Pharisees said, We don’t need Jesus. He isn’t religious enough.
And the Essenes said, We don’t need Jesus. He hasn’t separated himself.
And the Zealots said, We don’t need Jesus. He won’t fight the Romans.
However, the common people said, “I like what he says.” But after a while, they changed their mind and said, “If he’s not going to get us out of this mess, we don’t need him, either.”
So they all got rid of him, and they all said, We don’t need yet another Messiah who dies.
Well, as you know, Jesus came back from the dead, and eventually people began to see that yes, we did need a Messiah who died – and the Romans needed that Jewish Messiah as much as the Jews did. All of them had misunderstood what the problem really was.
OK, let’s fast-forward to modern America. We have a problem today, and people deal with it in the same basic ways.
First, there are the modern-day Sadducees, the people who have more money than the average earthling. They say, I don’t think there’s a problem here. I have all the stuff I need. How could there be a problem when I have what I want? Sure, my marriage is a mess and I take drugs to keep me happy, but everything is OK, isn’t it?
And there are the Pharisees, who say there’s a problem and they are going to do something about it by being really religious. They say, Look at what I am doing. I must be OK. And they say this is a Christian nation and if everybody kept the Ten Commandments on their wall, then we’d be OK. If we would all just repent, then God would heal our land. That might be true, but they just can’t convince everybody to try it.
And there are modern Essenes, the super-religious who have special rules and they kindof retreat from ordinary society and spend almost all their time only with people who think like they do. Someday they might move to a place of safety while everybody else gets killed.
And there are modern zealots, who think that political action is the answer to our problems. Homeless people? Global warming? Terrorism? We need more laws, better candidates. We are going to get involved and solve these problems ourselves.
Well, Jesus comes to these people and they all say, We don’t need Jesus. Wealthy people don’t need help. Religious people don’t want Jesus messing around with their traditions, and the super-religious say that Jesus is just way too easy on sin. And the political zealots say that all this talk about Jesus is just deluding people into inactivity.
But the common people – maybe they will listen. Maybe they will listen to a message that says, The problem isn’t what you think it is. The problem is far more serious than what you think it is. We do need Jesus, but we also need to understand why we need Jesus. So my message today is titled, What do we need Jesus for, anyway?
The apostle Paul tells us why we need Jesus in Ephesians, chapter 2. Paul wrote this letter to non-Jewish people in and around the city of Ephesus, in what is now part of the nation of Turkey. These people used to be pagans, worshipping the goddess Diana and all her friends. But now they have given that up and have become Christians. And in Ephesians 2, verses 1 and 2, Paul tells them why.
Eph 2:1 As
for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins,
Eph 2:2 in which you used to live.... when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient.
Now imagine that – you were dead when you used to live.
What is Paul talking about? Is he talking about zombies, who are half-way between life and death, walking around seeking real life?
Or is he talking about a puppet like Pinocchio, who can walk and talk, but is not a “real boy”? He does not have real life?
Maybe it’s a little of both. In the world today, we have people walking and talking and going through all the motions – even making a living – and yet still searching for something more out of life. There’s got to be more to life than this, they might say.
And they go around looking for life in all the wrong places. Some people look for meaning and significance in money, or political power, or by being famous, or by gangbanging. Some people try to make a name for themselves in high school, or on YouTube, or by being the first one in their circle of friends to do the latest fad. Some of them create imaginary worlds in which they are heroes, and they live in the fairy-tale world of cheap novels and other peoples’ dreams. Some of them commit adultery to spice up their life.
None of that stuff works. Not that I’ve tried it all and failed, but I have tried in my own way to make a life for myself, and I achieved some measure of success and found that it was a hollow victory – a handful of ashes. Indeed, there has got to be more to life than this.
Some people get more desperate, and some people get more depressed. And some people are like the fox and the grapes – the story from Aesop’s fables about the fox who was walking through the forest one day and saw some delicious-looking grapes. He jumped and jumped, but couldn’t quite reach them. Eventually he gave up and said “the grapes were probably sour, anyway.”
And some people today say there isn’t any use in looking for meaning to life, because there isn’t any. Life is just a big cosmic accident and we came from nothing and will end up as nothing, so there’s no point in looking for anything more than what we already have. There is no problem, because problems are just an accident of brain chemistry.
This way of looking at the world comes at a high price: it means that good and evil are accidents, and have no real meaning. Nothing is really good, and nothing is really evil, because nothing really matters.
Some people buy into that, but most people do not. Most people are convinced that love and courage are good, and betrayal and cowardice are bad. And most people long for a better world, and a better life. And indeed, I think they should. Life could be more than it is. Life could be characterized by love instead of betrayal. Life could be filled with joy instead of sorrow. It could be filled with meaning instead of pointless drudgery.
And I think that is what Paul is talking about in these verses. Without Christ, people are dead men walking. Going through the motions, but not going anywhere in particular. Walking and talking, but having a lot less life than they could have, a lot less than what God created them to have.
Paul is saying that without Christ, our life is not much more than death. It doesn’t matter much whether we followed an evil spirit, or followed everybody around us, or whether we just did our own thing—we all end up dead, if we don’t have Christ. But with Christ, our life can be a lot more than it was before.
Now, does that mean that Christians have life all figured out, that we have everything the way it ought to be, that our lives are always filled with love and we never break any of our promises? Well, no. But we are convinced that life can be better, a lot better, and that with Christ, we are on the path toward what life should be.
Now, this is not just a matter of seeing a goal, and trying to work for it. Christianity is not just a matter of saying, “Life can be good – therefore, be good.” No, faith in Christ means that we cannot do this on our own strength – we can do it only “in Christ.” This new life is possible for us only if we are connected to Christ, and the only reason we can be connected to Christ is that he has chosen to be connected to us. He chose to become a human, a real human, and to lead us out of the trap we were in.
It started with the incarnation, in Jesus becoming a real human being. And since all humans die, Jesus had to die, too. He experienced life, and death, and then resurrection into better life, so that he can offer all that to us if we are spiritually connected to him. So he transforms our life, changing it from a meaningless death into a meaningful life.
Now, where are we in that process? Christ has moved us from the category of death, to the category of life. He has given us a different destiny. But this new life in Christ is more than a change in destination – it is also a change in the way we live. We put aside the ways that lead to death – the selfishness and other behaviors that cause problems in this world – and we seek to live the way life ought to be – with love and faithfulness.
We don’t do this perfectly, and we have a long way to go, but we are starting on the right path, and because of Christ, we have confidence that it will in time be done. In this life, we struggle to do what is right, and we look forward to a day in which we will be transformed so that it is no longer a struggle. We will do what is right, and everyone around us will be doing what is right, and then we will have life the way God intended it to be.
And we will look back on our mortal existence as kind of a shadow life, a life that is a fraction of what it could be, a Pinocchio-puppet life in which we are seeking to get a real life. And it is from this perspective that Paul is saying that we were once dead in our trespasses and sins, when we just lived the way that everybody around us did, when we were, without knowing it, following the lead of the evil spirit.
Verse 3: All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. Some of us lived this way longer than others. Some of you young people who came to faith early in life may not remember much of what life without Christ is, and maybe because of your parents, maybe you never really had a life without Christ.
But you’re not perfect yet, and you don’t have everything that life could be yet. You need to be transformed, too, and you will be. But now, you’ve got a struggle just like the rest of us, with your sinful nature and a choice as to whether to follow its desires and thoughts. And you can still see here the choice you have to make in life – you can choose the dead-end life, or you can choose the never-ending life that God offers.
You can choose to do things your own way – that is the approach that has gotten humanity into so much trouble – or you can seek Christ and the life that is in him. He may not tell you where to go to school and who to marry and where to work, but then again, he may. The main point is that he gives us a fundamentally different perspective on life – a life that is characterized by love rather than self-centeredness. That is something we need Jesus for.
We all want the results of love, but we find it harder to give those results to others. It takes faith in a future life for us to say no to the desires that we have right now. It takes Christ to give us that life, and Paul is saying that when we turn to Christ, we are on the path to life, not the path to death. And this is not something that we could ever do simply by being convinced it is the right thing to do. It comes only as a gift. This is something we need Jesus for.
Verses 4 and 5: But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, 5 made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved.
Yes, he has rescued us from a pointless, meaningless life, and given us a real life, with real hope, and confidence that life is worth living because it is going someplace good, and the things that we like about life right now are just a tiny fraction of the good things that God has in store for us. And for some people, there’s not much good at all about their life right now, but they can look around and see glimmers of what life could be, and they know that it can get much better than this.
And Paul is saying that the decisive moment has already come. God has already made us alive with Christ. And not only that, verse 6,
2:6 And God raised us up with Christ and seated us with him in the heavenly realms in Christ Jesus, From God’s perspective, we are already with Christ in heaven. Our names are there. We are with him in heaven – and he is with us on earth. Because God has raised Christ to this new and glorious life, and because we are joined to Christ by faith, we have new life in him. We used to have a dead-end life. Now, in Christ, we have real life, life the way it should be, life that will last forever.
Now, how could we be united with Christ in his life? It is not because of anything that we did – it is because he was willing to join his life with ours. He was willing to become a human being, and that is what we celebrate at Christmas. He became like we are, so that we can become like he is. He gave up life in heaven – for a time – so that we could be given life in heaven.
And when Christ was born, that is why the angel told the shepherds, “I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you: he is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:10-11). 1 Timothy 4:10 says that Jesus is the Savior of all people, especially those who believe. That means that he is the Savior of the people who don’t believe, too, it’s just that they don’t know it yet. He’s got a plan for them, but we don’t know exactly what that is yet.
He was born, so that we might be born again. He shared in our life, so that we might share in his. We were once dead in trespasses and sins, but in Christ we have been given real life – the life of heaven – life the way it is supposed to be. That’s what we need Jesus for – for life – forever.