There are not two Gods, one stern and one kind. There is one God who has loved you from the beginning, and on Easter morning He showed us just how far that love would go.
When you open the Bible, it is easy to come away thinking there are two Gods — a severe God in the Old Testament and a gentler one in the New. But there are not two Gods. There is one God, and He has always been exactly who He says He is. Easter is the morning when everything He had been telling us about Himself for centuries finally stepped out into the light.
One God, Loving from the Beginning
From the very start, God describes Himself as compassionate, merciful, and loving. When Moses asked to see His glory, this is the character God announced about Himself:
The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin.
Exodus 34:6-7
The psalmist says the same thing: "For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee... a God full of compassion, and gracious, longsuffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth" (Psalm 86:5,15). Through the prophet Jeremiah, God puts it as plainly as it can be put: "I have loved you with an everlasting love" (Jeremiah 31:3).
And when God chose a people for Himself, it was not because they were impressive. He told Israel outright that He did not set His love on them because they were large or strong — they were, in fact, the smallest of all peoples. He chose them simply because He loved them (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). That is the whole reason.
Here is a truth worth sitting with. God did not make you so that you could serve Him, worship Him, and run errands for Him. He made you because He is so full of love that He wanted someone to pour it out on. God made you to love you. Before the world was ever formed, He had already decided to make you His own through Jesus Christ — and the Bible says this was His pleasure and His purpose (Ephesians 1:4-5).
The Problem We Would Rather Not Name
But there is a problem, and it has a name. It is called sin. At its root, sin is living for your own selfish self — putting yourself first, above everyone and everything else. That is what sin is, underneath all its disguises.
Think about it. What is stealing? It is putting yourself ahead of the person you stole from. What is lying? It is putting yourself ahead of the person you lie to. When someone defrauds his clients, he is putting himself ahead of others. Strip away the details of any wrong, and you find the same thing at the center every time: me, first, ahead of God and ahead of others.
This is what turns the world upside down, because God designed it to run the opposite way. In His very nature, everything lives for the other. The Son lives for the Father and the Spirit. The Spirit lives for the Father and the Son. The Father lives for the Son and the Spirit. Love that always faces outward is the pattern the whole world was built on. So God made us to live for Him and for one another — which is exactly why, when Jesus was asked to name the greatest commandment, He answered the way He did:
Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.
Matthew 22:37-39
A Cancer at the Root
Now you can see why sin has to be taken seriously. It is not a small stain on an otherwise fine world. It is a cancer at the root of everything that has gone wrong with us. It is the cancer that let brother sell brother into slavery for money. It is the cancer that breaks apart homes and marriages, that hardens a child against the parents who raised him, that fills this world with so much pain. Selfishness — putting yourself ahead of others — is behind it all.
And here is where we tend to protest. We want to say we are basically fine, because we have never murdered anyone or robbed a bank. But consider it honestly. The same bitterness that keeps you from forgiving your neighbor is, in kind, the very thing a man like Adolf Hitler gave himself over to. The same greed that keeps a person from being generous is, in kind, what a fraud like Bernie Madoff let run his whole life. The quantity is not the same — not remotely. But the quality is. It is the same root sin, grown to different sizes. None of us can be sure that, placed in exactly the same circumstances, we would have done any better.
That is not said to shame anyone. It is said so we stop pretending. The Bible does not flatter us: "There is none righteous, no, not one" (Romans 3:10). And Isaiah gives us the clearest picture of what has gone wrong: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way" (Isaiah 53:6). Our own way. That is the whole trouble in three words.
So what is a loving and good God supposed to do about it? Think of a surgeon who finds a cancer. What does love do? Love cuts it out. It does not leave it to spread. God cannot, precisely because He is love, allow the very thing that destroys love to go on forever in the world He made for us. People sometimes say they cannot understand how a loving God could ever judge sin. But the honest answer runs the other direction: a God who shrugged at evil, who let it ravage the people He loves without ever confronting it, would not be loving at all. The opposite of love is not anger. It is indifference. It is precisely His love that refuses to let evil have the last word.
The Ancient Picture of a Ransom
So we are in a genuine bind. A God who made a people in order to love them. A people who have turned and run the opposite way from His nature. A people who, by their own choices, stand under a just judgment — and yet a people He still loves. How does that get resolved?
The Old Testament gives us a picture to help us understand, in the laws recorded in Exodus 21. Israel was a farming society, and a strong ox was one of the most valuable things a family could own — but a strong ox could also be dangerous, and an owner was responsible for how his animals behaved. Imagine your ox had a known habit of goring, and one day it broke loose and killed your friend's wife. Under the law, because you had been negligent, both the ox and you, the owner, could be put to death. That was the penalty.
But the law made a way out. The offended party — your grieving friend — could, if he chose, place a ransom on you instead. He could say, "Even though he deserves to die under the law, let him pay this amount and live." That payment is what the Bible calls a ransom: a price accepted in exchange for a life. And notice three things about it. First, you deserved death, yet you were allowed to pay far less than you deserved. Second, your friend was never required to offer it; it was pure mercy on his part. Third, it could only come from the innocent, offered to spare the guilty. When the wounded party said, "I will accept this instead of your life," he was choosing, at real cost to himself, to make you a friend rather than an enemy.
The Ransom God Provided Was Himself
That ancient picture is pointing at something. All those Old Testament sacrifices, all that blood on all those altars, were arrows aimed at one thing God would one day provide Himself. "For the life of the flesh is in the blood... I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls" (Leviticus 17:11). Atonement. Ransom. A life given so another can live.
Here is what God is saying to us. You have deeply hurt Me by your selfishness and sin, and in justice you do deserve to die. The price for your sin is your own life. But because I love you, I will give you My own life instead. God does not merely point us to a ransom and leave us to find it. He provides the ransom Himself — and the ransom He provides is Himself. In the ox story, the friend's ransom was less than the penalty. Here it is the reverse: God gives a ransom greater than the penalty could ever be. He gives Himself. That is the meaning of the cross, where, as Paul says, God was pleased to reconcile all things to Himself "by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross" (Colossians 1:20).
Easter: The Ransom Accepted, Death Undone
And then comes Easter morning. If the cross were the end of the story, we would only have a grave. But Jesus is "the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy" (Colossians 1:18). The ransom was paid, God accepted it, and then He raised His Son — and death, which had held us hostage, could not hold Him. That is why Easter is not a sad memorial. It is the announcement that the rescue worked.
See how completely everything is turned around. Under the old order, if you touched a leper, you became unclean and had to go and be cleansed. Now, in Christ, you can touch the leper and the leper is made clean, because the ransom is worth infinitely more than the penalty. Under the old order, if you touched a corpse you were unclean for days. In the power of the risen Christ, life flows the other way — the dead are called back into life. That is resurrection power, and it is the very power Easter puts on display.
And this rescue is not for one people or one moment. The blood of Jesus was shed one time, for all people, for all time. One year after the cross, or ten thousand years after, it makes no difference — anyone who comes and trusts in what Jesus has done will be saved. Saved from sin. Saved from sorrow. Saved from the grip of failure and despair. Saved, finally, from death itself. This is the hope of Easter: not that you must climb up to God, but that the God who made you to love you has already come all the way down to bring you home.
So wherever this finds you, hear the invitation gently. You do not have to clean yourself up first, and you do not have to understand every mystery before you come. You only have to receive what has already been given. The tomb is empty. The ransom has been paid in full. On this Easter, you can simply say yes — and step from your own way into His.