You can determine how much you value something by what you give up to protect it and keep it in your life. The biblical word for that is sacrifice.
Sacrifice was one way God’s people demonstrated to God the value they placed on their relationship to him.
It also functioned as a proxy death whereby the worshiper identified himself with the animal sacrificed and said to God, in effect, “I totally reject what I did that undermined the value I place on our relationship. In this sacrifice I declare myself dead to that decision and wish to be forgiven and restored to fellowship with you.” Hence it was fundamentally an act of repentance. Consequently, retribution for the sin was deferred and the wrath of God was satisfied.
But let’s ask why. Why is God wrathful towards us in our sin? And why is retribution so important to God that, for that matter, without a sacrifice we must forever forfeit our lives on account of our sin? After all, we read in Romans 6:23, “the wages of sin is death.”
In other words, What makes our sin so serious that it warrants God’s wrathful and eternal retribution?
First of all, consider our self-centered motivation. Left to ourselves everything we do is done to serve our selfish interests. The net effect is that we live chronically using or abusing others no matter what it looks like or what we think we’re doing. Just think of how contrary this is to a God whose whole nature is to help lift all creation into maximum blessedness. Secondly, serving our selfish interests also results in denying others any help God intended to give them through us. It is on par with standing at a pool side and coldly watching a drowning child drown. And thirdly, our sin is so dreadfully serious because it leads us to reject God’s own merciful answer to our desperate state.
On the cross, “God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” (2 Corinthians 5:21 (NIV)). On the cross, “He was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed. We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way; and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Isaiah 53:5-6 (NIV))
In other words, God himself in the person of Jesus took upon himself the totality of all that’s wrong with us — all our horrific, insolent self-centeredness. But he not only died in our place, we were crucified and died with him as well. With him the wage of our sin — death — was realized. Consequently, the warranted wrathful, endless retribution we deserved was resolved.
Frankly, there is no other sacrifice that can so completely embody our repentance and our death and so deliver us from God’s wrath and just retribution. And if we are united with Christ in his death we will be united with him in his resurrection and live forever in friendship with God.
