For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in the while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:7-8 (ESV)
The words of the beloved hymn, Amazing Grace, have confounded the logic of generations with their testimony of Jesus’ sacrificial death on behalf of those who possess little or no regard for His suffering for their sins. However, it was the Apostle Paul who, in speaking plainly to the church at Rome, provided the best picture of God’s grace in making a way for all mankind to enter into a relationship with Him.
What would it take to motivate any one of us to sacrifice our own life for someone else? It’s not that far-fetched that a husband would lay down his life for his wife—his partner through years of joy and tears and shared life experiences. Similarly, parents who love their daughter more than life itself could make the supreme sacrifice to protect her. Beyond those two examples, the idea of substitutionary death becomes a much more difficult prospect. Paul goes as far as to say that there is little motivation to give one’s own life to preserve that of an upstanding, honest, and even spiritual person. And, he ventures that exchanging one’s life for one who has been generous, loved and a blessing to many, would be only slightly more acceptable.
But God did what only God could do because God saw what only God could see! God saw us wallowing in our arrogance, pride, and selfishness—our sin—and knew the potential of what His love could do once we grasped the true nature of what His life, love and grace was supposed to look like. God chose to provide us the ultimate picture of self-sacrifice in sending his Son to die for us—we who possessed no redeeming qualities to warrant such an act love, or even worse, could have been among those who spat upon Him in his agony.
Just as Jesus endured the shame of the Cross because of the glory that lie ahead, we can live in the light of His amazing grace because of that one moment we were able to see ourselves through the eyes of God.
