By Pastor Samuel Chess

Grace Emmanuel Church

Port St. Lucie, Florida

Introduction: Conformed to Christ’s Image

All the evil justly due to come onto us came onto Jesus so that all the good due to Jesus might be made available to us!

I. The Principle of Divine Exchange

A) The best “deal” in the universe

1) Jesus was punished so that we might be forgiven!

2) Jesus was wounded so that we might be healed!

3) Jesus died our death so we might share his life!

4) Jesus bore our guilt so we might share in his justification!

5) Jesus was made our curse so that we might receive our blessing!

6) Jesus bore our shame so that might share His glory!

7) Jesus endure our rejection so that we might enjoy His acceptance!

8) Jesus was made sin with our sinfulness so we might be made righteous by

His righteousness!

9) Our old life died in Jesus so that His new life might live in us!

B) Understanding the Divine exchange

We looked closely at:

1) Jesus was punished so that we might be forgiven!

Last week we looked closely at:

2) Jesus was wounded so that we might be healed!

I thought this week I would cover several of the remaining seven…then I got lost in the third one…Jesus died our death so we might share his life. I promise that we won’t take 6 more weeks to finish the last exchanges. Several of them overlap but the concepts are life changing…for instance in the area of rejection, guilt, insecurity…If I could prove to you that Jesus took rejection so you didn’t have to be consumed with it that would be very freeing for some in this room…wouldn’t it?

This third exchange is so significant…especially on a day when we just observed the Lord’s Supper that I want to unfold this idea:

Here’s how the exchange reads:

3) Jesus died our death so we might share his life!

Here’s the exchange in a nutshell:

1) God gave life!

2) Sin brought death!

3) God gave life again, new life…eternally!

That sounds simple and familiar.. but there is a whole lot more to it than it seems on the surface. Lets start with the first phrase and explore what it really means.

II. The Origins of the Divine Exchange

A) God gave Life!

We know where all this started:

(Genesis 2:7) the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (NIV)

Nephesh- “God started being”, An “out of God” life

The word nephesh is used many times in the Old Testament an always refers to life forms that are life forms because the nephesh of God is coursing through their system.

We are in this huge national debate about when life starts as it relates to abortion. All of that is based on the premise that when a man and woman come together and the woman becomes pregnant the couple has started a new life. That’s hogwash! Life only started once…when the nephesh of God was breathed into Adams (and probably Eve’s) nostrils. But understand something here.. What God put into Adam’s and

Eve’s nostrils was not just air…it was the :

Breath of Life!

God took from his own living being, and the power of being that resided in him, and only in him, and invested that power in his creation. Now Adam and Eve carried the very “nephesh of God” coursing through their bodies giving life to every cell.

Understand something, when a man and a woman today come together, and a living egg and a living sperm forms a living embryo, that man and woman have not created life! They have simply transferred the “nephesh” of God to a new living person who exists solely on the infinite breath of life that God breathed into Adam. The question of when an embyo becomes viable is a useless question. Life and death is a divine choice, not a human choice!

That issue aside, I think some of the ancients understood this concept better than we do today.

(Deuteronomy 30:20) and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (NIV)

(Job 27:3) as long as I have life within me, the breath of God in my nostrils…

This is as good of theology as you can find on the subject and it is in the book that was probably written the earliest… (Job lived at the same time as Abraham long before Moses wrote about him)

(Job 34:14-15) If it were his intention and he withdrew his spirit and breath, all mankind would perish together and man would return to the dust. (NIV)

David- (Psalms 22:29) All they that be fat upon earth shall eat and worship: all they that go down to the dust shall bow before him: and none can keep alive his own soul. (KJV)

Let me give you one more passage and I will move on.. this one from the New Testament:

(Acts 17:25-28) And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.' (NIV)

B) Sin brought Death!

Now we have talked about this at length earlier in this series and I don’t intend to go over the same ground again. I want to give you something new to think about….God told Adam and Eve:

(Genesis 2:7) the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. (16-17) And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (NIV)

Physical death, spiritual death, eternal death…in other words; the nephesh of God would be mangled, contorted, fading, fading, and finally obliterated from each humans life…

Unless something could be done to keep that from happening!

The whole point in you being here in this room today is because you know, or you want to know that Jesus Christ death on the cross, his resurrection from the dead made some kind of an eternal difference in your death sentence:

(Romans 6:23) For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. (NIV)

How exactly did the death sentence become a sentence of eternal life?

C) Substituting Life for Death ….. Let me explain…

God’s view of life and death differs somewhat from our modern American “enlightened” viewpoint. We have made the taking of the life of the unborn, the taking of the life of the elderly, and just recently here in Florida, the taking of the life of the “not quite well” to be a matter of private opinion or of political persuasion. Not so with God! He took the issue of someone forcefully taking His “nephesh” from another human being very seriously.

(Exodus 21:23-25) But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise. (NIV)

(Deuteronomy 19:19-21) then do to him as he intended to do to his brother. You must purge the evil from among you. The rest of the people will hear of this and be afraid, and never again will such an evil thing be done among you. Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. (NIV)

Wow…God is mean…isn’t he? I’m going to say God just takes very seriously what we don’t take very seriously. When God planted his “nephesh” in his beloved creation, he did not intend for other human being to mess with His creation. He did not intend for us to mess with his creation either… (ie. suicide, bad teatment of the body resulting in early death)

As long as I’ve waded in this far, let me wade in a bit further…

(Leviticus 17:10-11) "'Any Israelite or any alien living among them who eats any blood-- I will set my face against that person who eats blood and will cut him off from his people. For the life (nephesh) of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one's life. (NIV)

I can’t quite explain exactly what that means in God’s mind. I do know that the entire substitution atonement theology of the Old Testament was based on this fact. When mankind sinned against God and earned death instead of life, God provided a way for man’s sins to be atoned for. It involved the death of one creature exchanged for the life of another. In always involved the shedding of the blood of a lamb in exchange for the death sentence of a human.

(Leviticus 17:11) For the life (nephesh) of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar; it is the blood that makes atonement for one's life. (NIV)

When we get to that great chapter 53 of Isaiah that we have been looking at each week we find the “why” of all of this spelled out for us…

(Isaiah 53:1-12) …. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering….Surely he took up our infirmities and carried our sorrows, yet we considered him stricken by God, smitten by him, and afflicted. 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. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to his own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth…..For he was cut off from the land of the living; for the transgression of my people he was stricken. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth. Yet it was the LORD's will to crush him and cause him to suffer, and though the LORD makes his life a guilt offering, he will see his offspring and prolong his days, and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand. After the suffering of his soul, he will see the light of life and be satisfied; by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many, and he will bear their iniquities. Therefore I will give him a portion among the great, and he will divide the spoils with the strong, because he poured out his (nephesh) life unto death, and was numbered with the transgressors. For he bore the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors. (NIV)

I can’t quite explain all this means here but it would seem that as Jesus blood ran out, it was more than just his red and white corpuscles running from the wounds in his head, out the deep wounds in his back, out the holes in his hands and feet, and finally out the spear thrust in his side, until the blood stopped oozing and clear body fluid came out instead. He had, as the crime drama’s on TV say, “he bled out”. All of his blood flowed out of his body and with it the nephesh of God himself in the flesh emptied out onto the ground.

D) Substituting Death for Life….all of Life

Let me try to explain something that’s actually bigger than my brains ability to grasp:

1) God gave all life

2) Sin brought all death

3) God allowed a substitute death for a human death to atone for sins

4) Each persons sin’s required one life taken for that specific person’s sins

Therefore: 5) How could one’s person’s death atone for the sin’s of the whole world?

Where did each human life come from? Out of God, through Adam and Eve, through Seth or one of his brothers or sisters, through Huz and Buz, through Peleg, through Hezekiah, and on and on the nephesh of God kept stretching until it filled the whole human race.

Note: God who is life (nephesh) invest only a tiny portion of his infinite life into his creation. That tiny portion is enough to fill every human who would ever live. But when every human who ever lived earned death in place of life. By God’s design a life had to be given for every one of their lives.

Only an infinite God, who is life, in whom is all “nephesh”, could give his own life in the form of his beloved Son and with one death take the place of the deaths for all mankind, for all of time!

Was Jesus death sufficient for the sins of all Americans?

Was Jesus death also sufficient for the sins of all Russians?

Was Jesus death also sufficient for the sins of all Iraqis?

If just the tiniest portion of God’s nephesh provided life for all who would ever live then the sacrifice of his Son, the pouring out of all his life, was not just enough to atone for the sins of all mankind…it was an overwhelming overpayment for all the sins of the world!

(Psalms 130:7) O Israel, hope in the LORD; For with the LORD there is mercy, And with Him is abundant redemption. (NKJV)

E) Reveling in our Eternal Life

I’m not sure if Adam and Eve’s original state included the possibility of eternal life. Perhaps not because if they had they would not have been caused against eating of the Tree of Life.

So, it is logical to conclude that the shedding of Jesus blood for our sins released for us all the possibility of sharing in the total “nephesh” of God’s eternal life available to us only as we completely embrace Jesus shed blood on our behalf.

(1 Corinthians 15:45) And so it is written, "The first man Adam became a living being." The last Adam became a life-giving spirit. (NKJV)

Jesus himself stated it this way:

(John 10:8-10) "All who ever came before Me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not hear them. "I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture. "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. (NKJV)