Every Easter we grieve the agony Jesus endured to pay for the sins of mankind. If God is all-powerful, couldn’t he have found another way? Every Easter I wonder, “Why God?” and then come to the same conclusion. I will never fully understand, but I know this: if it wasn’t necessary, God wouldn’t have allowed it.

God created men and women to be “flesh and blood.” We were created to live in the perfection of Eden. God wanted his children to walk with him. We were created for safety, provision, and peace. We were created to enjoy God’s perfection. Sin changed everything!

After sin entered the world, God set about redeeming the sin so that people could return to the perfect existence in which God had created them to live. Finally, God “so loved the world that he sent his Son.” Jesus experienced the temptations of the flesh but didn’t submit to those temptations because he was fully submitted to God.

Jesus took on flesh so that he could take on the sins of the world and “destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil” (Hebrews 2:14). When Jesus said, “It is finished,” he was pronouncing Satan’s death sentence.

Satan no longer has power over our eternal lives, so he will do all he can to control and influence our earthly witness. Jesus became a man and endured an earthly life so that he could pronounce the promise, “It is finished.” Christians can endure whatever we face in this life because we have that promise. 

Jesus didn’t want to suffer and none of us will want that either. Jesus took on flesh and lived as a man so that we could understand that these “flesh and blood lives” are temporary. God didn’t create us for this world so he did whatever was necessary to provide us heaven—the existence he wanted for us. 

Jesus chose to become a man so that he could, “destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil.” Jesus is the model for our own faith, and the pathway for our eternal relationship with God. You have eternal victory because Jesus became a man. Let’s live our lives knowing that “it is finished” and we have the perfection of Eden, God’s heaven, as our promise.