Get Right With God?
Jesus Christ is More Than Enough
“You better get yourself right with God.”
I bet you’ve heard that phrase before. I certainly have. You can even hear the phrase used in the 2007 film The Heartbreak Kid, starring Ben Stiller, when Martin finds out Eddie has been cheating on his wife with Martin’s sister. Martin angrily shouts, “You gotta get yourself right with God, buddy!”
It’s a hilarious scene but in truth, it’s a terrible misunderstanding of God, the Bible, and the Christian faith.
Nobody gets themselves right with God. It’s utterly impossible. But in my years serving as a minister of the Gospel, I’ve encountered those who think they do and even those who try. Some do so because they think their salvation depends, in part, on understanding and obeying particular Christian doctrines correctly (precision obedience). Others think that certain spiritual practices, such as prayer, will somehow help them, like a cashier I recently heard who said to me, “I’ve got to get myself prayed up; get God in me.”
Whether people are aware of it or now, such attempts at getting ourselves right with God say that what God has accomplished in Christ crucified is not enough. That’s a problem sort of like the Jewish believers the writer of Hebrews had in mind, who were starting to believe the sacrificial offerings of bulls and goats was still necessary. But the writer of Hebrews is clear in chapter 10 that the Law, with its sacrificial offering, can never make us right with God “because it’s impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins” (v. 4).1
Instead of worrying about getting ourselves right with God, the writer of Hebrews says in v. 10, “We have been made holy by God’s will through the offering of Jesus Christ’s body once for all.” And then a few verses later, in a more well-known passage, we read in vs. 19-21:
Brothers and sisters, we have confidence that we can enter the holy of holies by means of Jesus’ blood, through a new and living way that he opened up for us through the curtain, which is his body, and we have a great high priest over God’s house.
We have such confidence because Jesus is the perfect offering to take away sins and make us holy. Why? Because Jesus is the very incarnation of God, or as the writer of Hebrews says at the beginning of Hebrews, Jesus is “the imprint of God’s being” (Heb 1:3). What Jesus offers as a sacrifice is his body and that matters because what Jesus offers, as Fleming Rutledge says in her book The Crucifixion, is “his entire incarnate life on the cross.”2
So as we inch closer to Holy Week in this season of Lent, let’s remember that we can’t and don’t get ourselves right with God but God does get us right with himself. We know God does that because God has said so in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ. As I said during my message to the Newark Church last Sunday, God has established a second or New Covenant in Jesus Christ, through the suffering of Jesus on the cross whom God raised from death as the Lord and Messiah and that is more than enough for our salvation.
All scripture quotations unless noted otherwise are taken from the Common English Bible, copyright 2011. Used by permission. All rights reserved
Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015, 254, also writes, “The miracle of Christ’s sacrificial death is that priest and victim have become one. Instead of an unthinking animal involuntarily slain, the Son of God knowingly offers himself. Instead of a sacrifice endlessly repeated by sinful human beings to no ultimate avail, Jesus’ death is once for all, having been made by the one who abides forever (7:24). Instead of a mere animal physically unblemished, this Victim, though he becomes “lower than the angels” in order to offer himself as a sacrifice for us, is in fact the incarnate Son…”