Why did Jesus come?

If you ask people why Jesus came, you’ll get many different answers. 

Some people say he came to bring peace on earth, or end the sufferings of the world. 

What would you say?

Mark’s gospel doesn’t give any of those as the main reason Jesus came.

The main reason Jesus came was to rescue sinners.

Mark 2:17

“It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but those who are ill. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” 

And this is one of the central threads of the whole Bible. 

In the Bible, “sin” is when we put someone or something else at the center of our lives, instead of our loving Creator. 

We try to live a single day treating others the way we want to be treated ourselves. We find we can’t do it. We try to be more patient with our children, or with someone at work, and we find we can’t do it.

All of us instinctively know we ought to treat others in a way we’d want to be treated ourselves. But here is a challenge for you: try to live a single day like that. Without any unkindness, or impatience, or lack of generosity.

You see, sin is something we keep doing, even when we know it’s wrong, even when we know it’s damaging ourselves and others. Pain, conflict, and suffering are part of everyday life.

But sin also damages our relationship with God our Creator and in the end, leads to death and judgment. Jesus knows it can be quite uncomfortable hearing his diagnosis. This is not a physical diagnosis like we get from the doctor but a spiritual one. 

But that is the reason why he came to the world. We all need to be forgiven. We need to be rescued. 

The God of the Bible isn’t detached or uncaring. He takes our pain and sorrow with such deadly seriousness that he promises to enter into it himself. He’ll undo the death and dysfunction. He’ll open the way for human beings to return, to run back into the arms of the loving God who made them.

What if the god that we don’t believe in, or the god we don’t trust, isn’t actually the real God, the God of the Bible?