Short Take: How does having faith in Christ give us victory over sin and death?

How would you explain to someone today, how does this blood of Christ cleanse us from all sin, and what they need to do to believe that by faith? You know, I did a video for my church that we're going to send out on Good Friday, and I talked about something I read in an article about portraiture in the Renaissance, and how these very powerful rich men usually would sit for portraits, and the artist would draw them in all of their grandeur. But the artists, for a time, began to include what they called a memento mori in the painting, a Latin phrase that means, remember you must die. So, for example, in the portrait, a shelf in the background of the man who's being painted, the artist would paint onto that shelf a clock, for example, set at one minute until midnight. Or they would paint a bowl of fruit on a table and put one rotten piece of fruit in the bowl, just as a reminder to that man that no matter how great you are, no matter how much money you have, death is always at the door. They even began, after a while, to put a little tiny hidden human skull somewhere in the painting.

Interesting. It might be hidden somewhere in a code kind of way, it might just be peeking out from under the robes at the feet of the man being painted, but it was just a way of saying you're going to die. And I was struck thinking about that, that over the past month, we have had more of those opportunities to remember death than most of us are used to having in a year or a decade. I mean, death is just stalking the land right now.

And so I think it's on our minds. In God's grace, though, he's put this thing right on top of a remembrance of the man who succumbed to death but then conquered it on Easter. The one man who has taken the keys of death and hell and has the ability to set us free from the fear of it and from its dominion. And the way he does that, of course, is by exhausting the curse of death that hangs over us because of our rebellion against God. And we deserve to die. We deserve to die spiritually. We deserve to be separated from God. We deserve to be forsaken by God. And on the cross, Jesus exhausts all of that.

He takes it all until it's got nothing else to fire at us. If we embrace him in trust and in faith, then the victory he's won over death and over hell becomes our victory too. In the same way that our sin becomes his and he dies for it, his victory over death and hell and sin becomes ours because we're united to him by faith. So the king who conquers death has in his grace said, I want this to count for all of my people as well. The key to the whole thing is that you have to be one of the king's people in order for that benefit to come to you, which means bowing your knee to him, trusting in him and relying on him to save you.