"The death that He died, He died to sin, once for all." Almost 2,000 years ago God completed the work that all of history, from ancient and sudden beginning wrought by the very mouth of God to future dreadful and glorious Day of the Lord, absolutely depended upon. The Son of God set out to finish the work, going to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray and to await His betrayer and those who desired His life. In that moment He did not claim His right as the Son of God to spare Himself and leave us to face death. Instead He heard us calling His name from the darkest moments in our lives, scattered up and down the plot of history. And He answered. When they came for Him, they said that they came for "Jesus of Nazareth". "I am He," he identified Himself. At the Word by whose command the universe came into being, every man of their company fell to the ground. But, such was their hatred, that they got up anyway and led Him away.

He was accused of breaking the law by experts in the law who themselves broke the law for their own expediency. He was condemned by a furious populace who declared: "His blood be on us and on our children!"

"Surely our griefs He Himself bore, and our sorrows He carried; yet we ourselves esteemed Him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted."

"It is finished!", He said, and died.

Hebrews 7:26-27 teaches us that "it was fitting that we should have such a high priest, holy, innocent, undefiled, separated from sinners and exalted above the heavens: who does not need daily, like those high priests, to offer up sacrifices, first for His own sins, and then for the sins of the people, because this He did once for all when He offered up Himself." Hebrews 9:11-12 teaches that at that moment in history, "when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things to come, He entered through the greater and more perfect tabernacle, not made with hands, that is to say, not of this creation; and not through the blood of goats and calves, but through His own blood, He entered the holy place once for all, having obtained eternal redemption."

Then, He rose. His Father, who was well pleased with Him, called His only Son from death that He might be the firstborn of many brothers and sisters. The joy, that we cannot comprehend yet, with which the Father called His Son out of the grave awaits us who trust in the salvation worked by the arm of the Lord, once and for all.