"No Price Too High: Jesus Values and Saves Us"

Good Friday Apr.18/03

Heb.4:14-16; 5:7-10

No Price Too High

Way back in the days before email, if people wanted to get a message to somebody far away and fast without a lot of expense, they would send what's called a telegram. Now the trick in sending a telegram is to use the fewest words possible, because there was a cost for each extra word. A certain lady was holidaying in Europe when she came across a fine porcelain figurine in a shop that just delighted her. It was just the thing she felt she needed to round out her collection. There was one problem, though: it was very expensive. She sent a telegram to her husband back on this continent explaining what she'd found and asking his advice on whether she should buy it. He cabled back, "NO PRICE TOO HIGH". Frankly, he was amazed she would even consider spending such an outrageous amount for what to him was a mere ornament. But you can't fit those details into a few words in a telegram. So when she received the cable, she read it this way: "NO PRICE TOO HIGH" - and proceeded to buy it!

        On Good Friday, we pause to appreciate the cost Jesus paid on the cross to redeem or buy us back when we were lost in sin. It was tempting for the glorious Son of God to reconsider His arrangement with the Father to take on Himself all the sin of the world, to suffer hideously death on a cross and the full weight of wrath of a Holy God; surely all His humanness cried out within Him as He contemplated in Gethsemane the suffering that lay ahead of Him, "No! Price too high!" He pleaded with the Father that there might be some other way. But in the end He accepted the Father's will and plan to save us. Because He valued us and loved us infinitely much, Jesus prepared to pay the cost our guilt incurred; the cross is the sign that as far as the Lord is concerned, "no price" was "too high" to pay so we might have forgiveness and fellowship with Him forever.

Swap Shop

Tonight in an attempt to appreciate the "great transaction" that was carried out on that first Good Friday - how Christ valued us and offered us an amazing saving - we'll visit three "shops". The first we'll call "Swap Shop", like a pawn broker's or used car dealers where you might trade what you have for something else. On that central cross at the top of Skull Hill, Jesus "swapped" His life for ours, He took our place in suffering for our sin.

        Before you make a business transaction, you generally try to determine whether you're going to get value for what you offer - otherwise it's not what we'd call a "good deal". Why did Jesus undergo such a miserable fate if He didn't have to? He was absolutely sinless, the best person you could imagine; why would He choose to endure the punishment of a most-hated criminal when He didn't have to? Because He valued our souls so much as to take our place in judgment. Way back months before this happened, miles and miles away to the north far from Jerusalem, Jesus began to warn His disciples He would have to die on the cross. Look at His teaching in Mark 8(36f). There He said, "What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul?" As the New Living Translation puts it, "How do you benefit if you gain the whole world but lose your own soul in the process? Is anything worth more than your soul?" Jesus was warning His followers not to be "conned" by the world into giving in to temptation at the expense of the wholeness and purity of one's soul. No experience, no position, no "high", nothing others call "treasure" can compare with having a soul that's intact, at peace with God. In this materialistic culture we don't value our souls enough...or the souls of others with whom we're in relationship. Jesus did, though. He values us so much that He took our place in judgment so we might be forgiven and live with Him eternally.

        Mark records, "He then began to teach them that the Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and after three days rise again." Why "must"? If He was innocent, He didn't have to go through all that! But the Son of Man "must" suffer to fulfill God's plan of redemption as prophesied in Scripture. God loved the world so much - He valued our souls so highly - that He gave His only begotten Son, so that whoever believes in Him might have eternal life (Jn.3:16). Greater love has no one than this, Jesus taught - there's no greater valuing - than to lay down one's life for one's friends (Jn.15:13). That "laying down for" is the swap. The religious leaders ridiculed Him on the cross saying, "He saved others, but he can’t save himself!" Of course He couldn't - wouldn't - He'd traded places. Jesus summarized the underlying meaning of the cross in these words at the Last Supper when He took the cup and said, "This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many" (Mark 14:24). It wasn't poured out pointlessly, or as a futile killing of a good person, but "a ransom for many" - in their place (Mk.10:45).

Sweat Shop

If "swap shop" represents Jesus' substitution, taking our place, then "sweat shop" represents His suffering when He finds Himself there. You may have heard the expression "sweat shop" referring to places where underpaid workers, often women and children, toil away under abysmal conditions to manufacture articles from cheap goods to designer labels. The Son of God came to earth and "sweated it out" for 33 years in the poverty of Palestine. Heb.4(15) says this about the way Jesus endured conditions and temptations as bad as or worse than each of us encounters: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are— yet was without sin." Despite the harshest criticisms and sweetest tantalizing tests Jesus' enemies threw at Him, He stayed pure and sinless, He never compromised God's standards. That must have been tough!

        Yet the climax of His suffering came on Good Friday, from late Thursday night until right through His crucifixion into the afternoon. Praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, He was in such distress that He actually "sweat blood". Like any healthy human He didn't want to die; but even more He shrank back from the actual state of becoming sinful, separated from His dear Heavenly Father. He called out with groans and begged the Almighty if there was not some other way. Hebrews 5(7-8) says, "During the days of Jesus’ life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission.Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered." Jesus really "sweated it out" and suffered in agony both on the cross and beforehand, wrestling with His human passions of self-preservation alone in the Garden.

        Isaiah described the suffering of the Messiah very well many centuries before the crucifixion happened. Listen to the agony as prophesied in chapter 53: "But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed...He was oppressed and afflicted...By oppression and judgment he was taken away...for the transgression of my people he was stricken." A portion of the suffering was physical, the actual pain. But it's a more subtle form of suffering to be treated unjustly. Did you know that when trying Jesus the Jews violated Jewish law 35 times? Or that the Romans violated Roman law 13 times? It was unlawful for Jesus to be forced to testify against Himself. I would have been screaming "mistrial!" but Jesus bore it patiently, silently.

        Yet we still haven't seen the worst section of the sweat shop. Jesus' worst torment came, not from the physical pain or the mistreatment by His enemies, but from incurring the wrath of God Almighty by assuming our sin. In the book When God Weeps, Steven Estes and Joni Eareckson Tada write:

But these pains are a mere warm-up to his other and growing dread. He begins to feel a foreign sensation. Somewhere during this day an unearthly foul odour began to waft, not around his nose, but his heart. He feels dirty. Human wickedness starts to crawl upon his spotless being -- the living excrement from our souls. The apple of his Father's eye turns brown with rot.

His Father! He must face his Father like this!

From heaven the Father now rouses himself like a lion disturbed, shakes his mane, and roars against the shriveling remnant of a man hanging on a cross. Never has the Son seen the Father look at him so, never felt even the least of his hot breath. But the roar shakes the unseen world and darkens the visible sky. The Son does not recognize these eyes.

"Son of Man! Why have you behaved so? You have cheated, lusted, stolen, gossiped -- murdered, envied, hated lied. You have cursed, robbed, overspent, overeaten -- fornicated, disobeyed, embezzled, and blasphemed. Oh, the duties you have shirked, the children you have abandoned! Who has ever so ignored the poor, so played the coward, so belittled my name? Have you ever held your razor tongue? What a self-righteous, pitiful drunk -- you, who molest young boys, peddle killer drugs, travel in cliques, and mock your parents. Who gave you the boldness to rig elections, foment revolutions, torture animals, and worship demons? Does the list never end! Splitting families, raping virgins, acting smugly, playing the pimp -- buying politicians, practising extortion, filming pornography, accepting bribes. You have burned down buildings, perfected terrorist tactics, founded false religions, traded in slaves -- relishing each morsel and bragging about it all. I hate, loathe these things in you! Disgust for everything about you consumes me! Can you not feel my wrath?"

Of course the Son is innocent. He is blamelessness itself. The Father knows this. But the divine pair have an agreement, and the unthinkable must now take place. Jesus will be treated as if personally responsible for every sin ever committed.

The Father watches as his heart's treasure, the mirror-image of himself, sinks drowning into raw, liquid sin. Jehovah's stored rage against humankind from every century explodes in a single direction.

"Father! Father! Why have you forsaken me?!"

But heaven stops its ears. The Son stares up at the One who cannot, who will not, reach down or reply.

The Trinity had planned it. The Son endured it. The Father rejected the Son whom he loved. Jesus, the God-man from Nazareth, perished.

Chop Shop

The "swap shop" shows that Jesus values our souls so much as to take our place in judgment. The "sweat shop" shows the price of the ransom: the intense suffering in many dimensions Jesus underwent all because of our sin. Finally, the "chop shop" is a picture of how we can be given new life by Jesus' death; believing what He did that day, we are made new creatures and find grace and mercy to help in our own daily needs.

        By "chop shop" I'm referring to those back-alley auto body garages to which thieves take stolen cars. There the car may be stripped for its parts, or sometimes the serial number is changed so it can't be traced, completely different body parts are put on, another colour of paint is applied, and the end product is a vehicle that's altogether unlike what went in there. In a similar fashion, Jesus the perfect person was chopped apart on Good Friday. He was dismantled, brought to nought, He "emptied" Himself. Then the angels opened the garage doors and hauled into the next bay this old, beaten-up, written-off wreck of a vehicle which is you and me: the repentant sinner. Divine Mercy goes to work on us. All Jesus' righteousness is applied to us, welded and bolted in place. Then like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang we emerge from the shop amidst sounding trumpets, able to run and sail and fly like we'd never been able to do before.

        Paul puts it this way in 2Cor.5(17,21): "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!...God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." This is what puts the "Good" in "Good Friday": when by faith we receive the free gift of what Christ accomplished for us that day, the Holy Spirit's power to change is unleashed in our life to remake us and energize us in God's ways. Continually, day by day, moment by moment. Hebrews 4(16) says, "Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need."

        Mark (15:37f) records that the moment Jesus breathed His last, the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Why? Were the angels providing some dramatic theatrical effects? As if that were needed! No, God was saying to humankind that the dividing wall was broken down between us and the Holy of Holies, we can come freely and boldly before God's throne as His dearly-loved sons and daughters through trust in Jesus. Ultimate access. So when we're going through struggles, God's grace is right there to help us through it. Habit by habit, step by step, through the years He's transforming us to be more like His Son who underwent the "chop shop" so we could get retooled and rebuilt. All because Jesus values us and saves us; that's His business, His specialty, what He came for.

A Valuable Misfit

Next time you're feeling rejected, undervalued, or like a misfit, remember Jesus was rejected so you could be redeemed. "The stone the builders rejected became the capstone", and He'll do it for you too. Because Jesus took our place in the Swap Shop and suffered for our sin in the Sweat Shop, He's equipped to rebuild us into something beautiful in the Chop Shop.

        In the middle 17th century, a young boy named Antonio lived in Cremona Italy. As a boy Antonio was a misfit. Everyone in the musical town could sing or play an instrument; but he could do neither. While all the others performed, poor Antonio just sat there whittling with his knife.

        One day, though, Antonio met Nicolai Amati. Amati was a highly respected man in town who had succeeded in the musical field even though he could neither sing nor play. How? Amati was a violin maker. Amati took on Antonio (whose last name was Stradivari) as his pupil, and the rest is history. Today Stradivari violins are most valuable - yet the boy started as a misfit.

        Jesus sees incredible value in you. He decided no price was too high for your redemption. By what He paid on Good Friday, we come to know how dear we are to the Father. Let's pray.