Dr Paul Allen

He hath made Him to be sin for us,…that we might be made the righteousness of God .… 2 CORINTHIANS 5:.21 The modern view of the death of Jesus is that He died for our sins out of sympathy. The New Testament view is that He bore our sin not by sympathy, but by identification. He was made to be sin. Our sins are removed because of the death of Jesus, and the explanation of His death is His obedience to His Father , not His sympathy with us. We are acceptable with God not because we have obeyed, or because we have promised to give up things, but because of the death of Christ , and in no other way. We say that Jesus Christ came to reveal the Fatherhood of God, the loving-kindness of God; the New Testament says He came to bear away the sin of the world ( RV mg). The revelation of His Father is to those to whom He has been introduced as Saviour : Jesus Christ never spoke of Himself to the world as one Who revealed the Father, but as a stumbling block (see John 15:22-24). John 14:9 w...

English: Icon of Jesus Christ (Photo credit: Wikipedia ) Matthew 27:45–50 “About the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘Eli, Eli, lema sabacthani?’ that is, ‘My God , my God, why have you forsaken me?’” ( v. 46 ). Because the process of crucifixion is foreign to our experience, it is easy to overlook just how terribly painful this method of death was. It could take days for the crucified person to die from a combination of asphyxiation and exposure. People were hung on a cross in a position that forced them to use their arms to lift their body weight in order to draw a breath, causing the nails driven through their wrists and feet to tear at their flesh. If Rome wanted to prolong suffering, rope was used instead of nails to attach the person to the cross. God’s condemnation of our sin in the flesh of Jesus ( Rom. 8:3 ) was signified by the physical pain our Lord endured on the cross. At the same time the Romans were nailing Jesus to the cross, the Father w...