He paid the Ultimate Price

By Rev Seik Pitoi
I  was sitting alone under the house late one evening, listening as I do to the BBC radio station.
I often tune in to BBC in order to catch up on the latest world news, but sometimes it can get depressing when all you hear about are terrorist killings, corruption, and natural disasters.
That night, the news about the terrorist in France killing people broke.
The shooting to death of the motorist, random shooting at a group of policemen, and then the holding of hostages in a shopping centre made it seem like the same news reel from a few months ago was being replayed.
However, there was a marked difference with this story. The difference was made by the gendarme, the French policeman Lt Col Arnaud Beltrame, who courageously swapped places with one of the female hostages so he could be near the terrorist.
The policeman secretly left his cell phone switched on in his pocket so his friends outside could hear what was going on so they could plan their attack.
Soon, the terrorist, an Islamic State sympathiser, began to shoot the hostages. When the police heard the shots being fired, they stormed the building, killing the terrorist. The brave gendarme was shot in the throat by the terrorist and seriously injured. He was reported then to be fighting for his life. A few hours later, we heard the sad news that he had died. In his place was a very thankful former hostage whose life was spared because of the sacrifice made by the policeman.
It seems more than a coincidence that this incident happened a few days prior to the Holy Week, the week that leads to the story of the greatest sacrifice ever made in history.
The gendarme was obviously a man like every other man, with his own weaknesses and strengths, passions and desires which we may never know about. But when danger struck, this gentleman rose above, choosing the welfare of others over himself.
He chose to be a substitutionary sacrifice, taking the place of another who could be set free while he was prepared to suffer in his place. Amere fallible human being, he did what our Lord Jesus did for us all, i.e., he paid the ultimate price!
As we have come to the end of the Holy Week and are now poised to draw near towards Calvary with our Lord, we will begin to see the true meaning of being a substitutionary sacrifice.
Many stories are told of good men and women, like our gendarme, giving their lives for others to live. But we are all fallible imperfect sinners, helping one another. With the sacrifice of our Lord Jesus, the rules are slightly different.
The pattern is seen in the story where this all begins – the Passover story of Exodus 12. In this story, specific instructions are given on the qualification of the sacrificial lamb. It must be a year old, male, and have no defects whatsoever. It must be perfect.
That is where the best of us will fail. None of us is perfect. The Bible says we “all have sinned and fall short” of God’s standards (Rom 3: 23), and that “none is righteous, no not one” (Rom 3: 10).
To make it worse, the prognosis is not good, either. “The wages of sin is death” (Rom 6:23a)! Not only are we not qualified because we are imperfect, but our imperfection also gives us the death penalty!
How can we help when we ourselves are being condemned to death? That is where we see our need for a perfect substitutionary sacrifice. It is Jesus, the only one that fits the bill.
The Bible says of our Lord Jesus that He was sinless and perfect (1 Peter 2: 22; 1 John 3:5; 2 Cor 5: 21), thus qualifying to be the perfect sacrifice. This was proven at His interrogation where Pilate asked: “But what crime has he committed? I cannot find anything he has done to deserve death!” (Luke 23:22).
This sentiment was also echoed by the condemned man on the cross (Luke 23: 41). Jesus is indeed the perfect sacrifice. Only He had the right to die on the cross on our behalf.
Even as He completed the work of sacrifice, His last words on the cross effectively put an “X” mark against our sins. He called out, “tetelestai”, a word in Greek meaning, “Paid in full”. All our sins and debts, past, present and future were paid off, redeemed. Our accounts were “zero-ised”, as it were!
As we go through another Easter celebration, going through the same story and watching the same drama unfold as we have seen year after year, it is easy to casually dismiss it as just another date on our church calendar.
But Passover is where life starts for us. Passover saw the birth of the Church through the Blood of Jesus. The resurrection and new life on Sunday could only come when there was death on Friday.
Friday became “Good” because every sin in your life and mine was washed away by the blood of the Lamb of God. Friday became good when the ‘death penalty’ over us was removed by Jesus and replaced by His life!
Truly, we should never forget the One who paid the ultimate price for you and me. As the words of the old song says:
“He paid a debt He did not owe, I owed a debt I could not pay, I needed someone to wash my sins away…Christ Jesus paid the debt that I could never pay”.

• Rev Seik Pitoi is a freelance writer.