SALVATION AND ATONEMENT

God declared: “You are free to eat from any tree of the garden, but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for on the day you eat from it, you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:16–17). Sin entered creation, and with sin … death.

To make themselves presentable before God, Adam and Eve “sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves” (Genesis 3:7). Religion was born. Religion … doing religious stuff to look good before a Holy God.

Religion doesn’t work! God required more.

“Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness” (Hebrews 9:22). Salvation, forgiveness, and atonement first appear in Scripture when God sacrificed an animal to make garments to cover Adam and Eve’s nakedness. “The LordGod made clothing from skins for the man and his wife, and he clothed them” (Genesis 3:21). I suspect that those leather coats were made of lamb skin.

This, of course, foreshadows Calvary’s Cross, where Jesus became the substitutionary sacrifice for sinful mankind. He shed His innocent blood to atone for our sin. He died so that we can live. He was “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29).

God “made (Jesus) the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21). He covers our ugliness with His beauty, our wrong with His right, our sin with His holiness, our death with His life.

“… think on these things” (Philippians 4:8, KJV).