The only solution to fallen humanity was death and resurrection. Jesus was God’s unblemished little lamb who came to take away the sins of the world. If we had died for our own sins, God would’ve lost us forever, and He was not prepared for that to happen. How could God kill what we had become without actually killing us? Therefore, how could God resurrect us as a new kind of self if He didn’t kill us first? The wisdom of God – His divine madness – was that He would clothe Himself with our fallen and broken humanity, and as the second Adam, He would take us to the place of execution, and as us, He would die for our sins, and in so doing our fallen false self would die in His death, thus wiping out not just what we had done but what we had become so that in His resurrection, clothed in our redeemed humanity, we would be raised up as a New Creature freed from the reign of sin. No longer under sin’s condemnation or ruling power, now joined to the resurrected life of Christ, we are free to live His life, not by imitation but by participation and manifestation. Now joined to another, to Him who was raised the dead, we now live from Christ a life that bears fruit for God – Romans 7:4b. In the upper room the night before His crucifixion Jesus told His disciples, “Little children, I am with you a little while longer. You shall seek Me; and as I said to the Jews (John 8:22), I now say to you also,’ Where I am going, you cannot come.’” – John 13:33. Jesus was going to the cross to change our history and our future. He had to go alone for He alone was the unblemished lamb who could become sin on our behalf that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.
