What Christ did for us

A few years ago I attended a large youth conference in California. One of the leaders spoke on the subject of Christ’s sacrifice. I had never seen it so clearly, the depth of what Christ actually did on the cross. I would like to try to recreate that message, with a little of my own insight as well.

If I was to ask the question “Why did Christ die on the cross?”, most of us would answer something to the effect of “To take away the sins of the world”. And we would be right. But what does that mean? How can such a statement be made without shaking us to the core of our being? It’s just a simple phrase, but do we ever stop to consider exactly what it means? How much sin has the world sinned? We have to have some kind of idea of that to be able to understand what Christ relieved us from.

I’d like to give an illustration to try to help us grasp the magnitude of the sacrifice He made for us. Imagine, for a moment, that every sin ever committed was an actual physical thing. Imagine that sin consists of the most disgusting substance you can think of. For me, it would be sticky, stinky, probably a dark greenish-brown-black color.

Let’s say a normal, everyday sin (e.g. a selfish thought) was a ball of that nasty gunk the size of a baseball, since we all know about how big a baseball is. (About 10 inches in circumference)

Thinking conservatively here, let’s say that we sin only five times in a given day. And that would make 35 sins per week. I’ll even give you a freebie on Sunday, since we are obviously all more holy on Sunday *sarcasm*, so let’s make it 34.

So on an average week, assuming we haven’t done anything too awful, that we have gone to church, read our Bible, prayed and treated everyone around us fairly well, how big would our lump of sin goo be? Now, keep in mind, if we had messed up pretty big that week, it would be much larger than this.

Well let’s see. If a baseball is 10 inches in circumference, and we have 34 baseball size globs of sin, which comes out to a sin ball that is 340 inches in circumference. 340 inches is just about 29 feet, or 10 yards, which is the size of a football end zone. That’s just one week. Are you disgusted yet? Don’t forget what this ball is made out of. The most disgusting thing you can imagine. Think about it.

Now let’s do some more multiplication.
29 feet
x 52 weeks in a year
x 80 years average life expectancy
x 6,775,235,700 (population of the world in 2009)
=
817,364,434,848,000 feet in circumference of disgusting, vomit inducing sin. (Assuming my math is correct, which is actually quite an assumption...)

To put that in perspective, let’s look at the estimated circumference of the earth

The official measurement accepted by the IUGG (International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics) is 40,075,016.686 meters, to the nearest millimeter. Convert that to feet and we get
131,479,713.54 feet

Now let’s divide that number into our giant slime ball to get how many earths worth of sin-slime we have so far.

6,216,658 earths! It’s hard to even grasp how large that would be.
And that’s only the people that are alive right now , assuming that EVERYONE only sins 5 little sins per day for their entire lives!

Now here is a number that we should look at instead of the number of people alive in 2009.

100,000,000,000 (speculation on how many people have ever been born according to several sources, rounded down)

And, for speculation’s sake, lets multiply that by two for the people that are yet to be born.
200,000,000,000

So going back to our original equation,
29 feet
x 52 weeks in a year
x 80 years average life expectancy
x200,000,000,000 (speculation on how many people will ever live)
=
2.4128e+16 ft

Or 24,128,000,000,000,000 feet

Converted into earth size chunks?

183,511,201 earths

That’s how much sin Christ took on. That’s how much filth He threw on His otherwise perfect, blameless self.

It may still be hard to appreciate, since it’s such a large number, our minds can barely get around how much that is. Let’s personalize it a little bit more. Forget about the population of the world; forget about every person ever to live. What has Christ done for YOU?

29 feet
x 52 weeks in a year
x 80 years average life expectancy
=
A ball of sin 120,640 feet in circumference. That’s 23 miles in circumference of YOUR sin.
Imagine what our Heavenly Father would see, looking down from Heaven at us if we still bore those sins. Would He see us? No. He would be too disgusted by the sin to see us, and He would cast us immediately into Hell, and we would deserve it.

Now imagine a conversation between Christ and God the Father, talking about You and YOUR sin. As they are talking, Christ walks over to you, Grabs hold of your 23 mile sin ball, and says “Father, do not blame this person for all of this sin, blame me.” And He sets it on His own back. Instantly, God looks at you and sees nothing but the perfection of Jesus.

But wait; there is something else for us to understand. God looked back to Jesus, and was disgusted at the sin that He now bore; the sin that you deserved punishment for. God knew where the sin came from; He knew His son had taken the blame for something He had not done. But a Holy God could not accept sin. He could not look passed it.

Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, He endured the Cross and everything leading up to it. Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, He endured His own people, the Jews, beating him mercilessly. Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, His flesh was torn off of his body by Roman whips designed to inflict as much pain and suffering as possible. Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, He allowed a crown of thorns to be placed on His head-- A crown of thorns and mocking for the true King. Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, he hung completely naked and humiliated before a crowd that jeered at Him. Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, nails fastened Him to a cross that He was forced to carry.

Think about it. Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, He hung on a cross by one nail in each hand and one through His feet, as 100-200 pounds of your Savior hung on just those two nails, ripping apart His hands as He struggled to catch every last breath. And the only way He could breathe was to momentarily push Himself up , using the nail that held His feet in place, just long enough to breath, and then slump back down from the excruciating pain.

...


And the crucifixion, as awful and brutal as it was, was not the worst thing Christ endured for you.

Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, He suffered the full, unrelenting wrath of our Holy God, in Hell, for three days. Because of Christ’s great love for YOU, He endured in those three days what you could not have even begun to endure in an eternity. You see, Christ is infinite, you are not. You do not have the capacity to suffer enough to pay for your sins. Christ did. And when He cried out “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?”, He cried the words that YOU would have been crying from the pit of Hell for ETERNITY, had He not done what He did.

Now I ask, Why did Christ die on the Cross? Was it enough to save your soul from eternal damnation?


...How dare you doubt it?





-myii



For the law, having a shadow of the good things to come, and not the very image of the things, can never with these same sacrifices, which they offer continually year by year, make those who approach perfect. For then would they not have ceased to be offered? For the worshipers, once purified, would have had no more consciousness of sins. But in those sacrifices there is a reminder of sins every year. For it is not possible that the blood of bulls and goats could take away sins. Hebrews 10:1-4