You are Barabbus!

And here, to whet your appetite, is an extract from Mike McKinley's brand new book, Passion.

Barabbas is famous for being the man who was set free instead of Jesus. We only know a few things about him. We know his name. Barabbas means “son of the father” (bar=”son”, abba=”father”). Some early manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew tell us that Barabbas’ full name was Jesus Barabbas.

We also know that he was in jail, having been found guilty of starting a riot and committing a murder. He was a dangerous criminal, a killer.

Barabbas is the opposite of the people we’d like to be, and like to think of ourselves as. But for a moment, put yourself in his shoes. You are sitting in a Roman jail awaiting your death. You know you will be crucified for your crimes. And, in your more honest moments, you know you deserve it. There aren’t many worse ways to die. And so day after day you sit in this jail, anticipating the nails, the mockery, the excruciating pain, the blood filling your lungs, the breaking of your legs. That’s your future. You don’t know when it’s coming, but you know it is coming.

And then on this fateful day you hear a mob outside. Something is going on. Has word gotten out that today is your day, your day to die? It sounds like it: you can hear the crowd screaming: “Crucify him! Crucify him!”

Imagine what you’d be thinking! Finally, the Roman guards come and get you. They drag you out in front of the angry mob and… you are set completely free.

As you stand there, you watch another man stumble off under the weight of the cross—the cross you’d pictured yourself carrying. You discover as you ask some bystanders that it was Him they’d demanded be crucified; it was Him the shouts were directed at, not you. You ask what He’s done, but the people near you are surprisingly hazy on that. But they chose you to live, they say, and Him to die. Somehow, you are going free because that man is going to die.

Jesus bore the guilt and shame and curse and disgrace and death that Barabbas deserved, while Barabbas received the release, the freedom, the life that Jesus deserved. Barabbas was now a free and innocent man as far as the law was concerned. Jesus was the condemned one.

You really are just like Barabbas! You and I are sinners; we sit in a spiritual prison, bound helpless, awaiting the day where we get the just punishment that we deserve. But then Jesus goes off to the cross in our place. He gets what we deserve: we get what He deserves.

This is the glory of the cross; that God the Father sent God the Son to die for men and women like Barabbas; men and women like us.

Ultimately, Jesus didn’t die because Pilate was weak. He didn’t die because the religious leaders hated Him. He died because you and I are weak and because we have hated Him in our hearts, and because He loves us. We won’t grasp the events of Good Friday unless we stand in Barabbas’ shoes, and find that they fit us.

What story do you live in? What story do you use to make sense of your life? Maybe your story is that you have been dealt a bad hand in life, or that you are the victim of other people’s actions, or that you would be a hero if others would just give you a chance. Or maybe your story is that you’ve worked hard and figured things out and so you deserve the good life that you currently enjoy. And maybe there’s an element of truth to some of that.

But the Bible tells a fundamentally different story. It tells us that we are all rebels against God, and that when God came to earth, we banded together in cowardice and anger and envy to kill Him. And so the real hero of our story came to save us and deliver us from ourselves. Jesus stood in our place; He took what we deserved. And now that He’s done it, we are free and able to live differently. Our chains have been removed; we are no longer God’s enemies. Life is now ours to live for God’s glory, free from slavery to sin and the crippling fear of what other people think of us.

If you have Jesus, then you are invited to live your life with gleeful freedom, in the light of the greatest, most exciting story imaginable. It changes everything when you live in God’s story, because only there can you be truly free.

To order your own copy of the book with our launch off of 15% off, click here.