SID: Hello. Sid Roth with Jim Richards. And I was asking Jim, how do you get your first love back or how do you fall in love with God all over again, and deeper than ever before. Because you want to. And I’m going to have him explain how.
JIM: The Bible says that it all happens, like we said earlier, when you look at the propitiation what Jesus did on the cross. The propitiation is the satisfying of wrath. Isaiah asked this question. He said, “Who has believed our report?” Well Sid, you know, not many people, not even many Christians have really believed the report that God gave about Jesus. We believe in the historical Jesus. We believe he lived and worked miracles. But our faith has got to be based on what happened from the cross to the throne. What happened there?
SID: And it seems to me the emphasis is based on the historical Jesus than on what he accomplished.
JIM: Right. And that’s the model. The historical Jesus is the model, but the power is in the death, burial and resurrection. So let’s just kind of walk it through. You know, Isaiah says, of course, it says that, “He was bruised for inequities.” We have to start with this realization that Jesus, first and foremost, it was our inequities. He became our sin. He didn’t just slip on a little backpack and carry it. He became it. Man brought sin into the world. Only man can take sin out of the world. And God is loving father. He never wanted to hurt us. But as a righteous God, sin had to be dealt with. So Jesus goes to the cross with no sin of his own, and while he’s on the cross he becomes the sins of the world.
SID: But you know what? Just dying on the cross is a horrible, painful death. But then you couple it with what he really was doing in the invisible world. It’s amazing he did that for me.
JIM: Oh it is.
SID: It’s amazing he did it for you. Amazing he loves you so much.
JIM: He became our sin and then he had to take all of the curses of the Law. So any curse of the Law that you go back to read in the Old Testament, as a believer, I could never stand up and say, okay, God is putting this on me because I failed. No. I might be suffering consequences of my actions, but Jesus became that curse. And for me to say that God is putting that curse on me after Jesus, it means I just don’t believe what Jesus did for me. So he becomes the curse of the Law: poverty, sickness, shame, disease. And he even is rejected of God. Why? So we won’t have to be rejected of God. God bruised him with sickness. The word “stripes”, where it talks about the stripes, it wasn’t the stripes of the Roman soldiers that got us healing. That word “stripes” is the word “bruising”. God bruised him with our sickness. God bruised him with our infirmities.
SID: What does that mean, he got bruised?
JIM: It means to violently impact something so hard that it causes this impression in their physical body. The language in the Hebrew says that, “Our inequities violently rushed upon him.” So he becomes our sin. And when Jesus said, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” he wasn’t just quoting a scripture. He was quoting a scripture about a reality that he was experiencing in our place. And then he dies. Now he dies really as a sinner in a certain sense, because he became our sin. And he goes to Hades. Now Hades is the abode of the wicked. And people say, I know the Bible says that. But why do think that’s important? Because if he hadn’t gone to Hades, I have to go. In other words, anything that Jesus did not pay the price for, mankind would have to pay the price for.
SID: So in affect, he was our substitute.
JIM: Exactly, yeah. He was our substitute. It’s an exchange. He takes all that we deserve. We get all that he deserves. Now there he is bound. We know that Jonah in the whale was a type of Jesus buried in our sin. I was in the depths, you know, the seaweed wrapped around my head. I was about to give up. But here’s the most incredible thing. The Bible teaches us that Jesus was raised up by his faith. Imagine this.
SID: As a man.
JIM: As a man.
SID: Overcoming all of that. We’ll never have to overcome all that.
JIM: That’s right. See, as a man, can you imagine. He’s down there and his emotions are saying, God has totally given up on you. And he says, “No, my God says I am priest forever after the Order of Melchizedek.” It says, God is going to lead you. No. My God says that my body shall not suffer corruption. Well you know, every emotion—
SID: So he was using his faith on the promises of God just as we’re to use our faith on the promises of God.
JIM: That’s right. And so he’s believing God. And see, Paul says, basically, experiencing this new life is really just about believing three components, if you will. You know, we got to believe the inheritance that we have in him. We got to believe in the resurrection power so that we can experience the resurrection power in him. And Paul just breaks this thing down real simple. So now he’s believing God and the Spirit of God, according to the Scripture, the Spirit of God raised him up. See, he didn’t even raise up by his own power. The Spirit of God raised him up and then the resurrection power, he stripped the devil of all principality, power, right and might so that he had no rights ever to attack us again. Now that’s not to say we don’t put up with things. But I’m saying Satan has no right to touch us.
SID: I’m reminded. He says, “All authority has been given to me.” If that’s all, my understanding is the devil has got none.
JIM: None. Exactly.
SID: I like that.
JIM: So and you know, I believe scripturally that’s when Satan got cast out of Heaven, because Jesus purged the Heavenly Holy of Holies. I don’t think Satan got back in to Heavenly Holy of Holies after that. And then he goes to the Father and he receives an inheritance, and he sets down at the right hand of God. Now this is where it gets freeing. See, I tell people this all the time. You don’t have to have the faith for healing really. Here’s what you got to have the faith for. Did Jesus take that disease in his death? Did Jesus conquer that disease in his resurrection? Did Jesus obtain healing or health and eternal life as the inheritance? Then here’s the question. Am I in him and do I believe I share in his inheritance?
SID: And that’s the question for you. Are you in him and do you believe that you are partnering with him in his inheritance? Of course. The same spirit that raised Messiah Jesus from the dead dwells in you.
