Mahaney on the Person and Work of Christ: Christ Our Mediator

I love the following passage taken from CJ Mahaney's book Christ Our Mediator: Finding Passion at the Cross (LifeChange Books).  Its a short book that can be read quickly, but its content is fantastic.  Let us always be reflecting on the cross!  Tomorrow we will be discusing the humanity of Christ and in the following quote, Mahaney shows how Christ's humanity and deity are necessary in order for the gospel to be real.  If Chrit is one and not the other then we remain in our sins.

Since sin has been committed by man, therefore sin must be atoned for by a man.  Only a human being can be the perfect substitute for other human beings.  The deb and obligation and responsibility is mankind’s alone.  Neither you nor I, however, can atone for our sin to satisfy God’s righteous requirements; our own disobedience already condemns us before a righteous God.  Furthermore, we’re captive to sin; it’s humanly impossible for us to release ourselves from its rip.  Even if somehow, from this moment forward, we steeled ourselves to stop winning (which is impossible), our record is still stain by the sins of our past.


That’s our condition – having no possible way to atone for our sin, nor any possible way to free ourselves from enslavement to it.
 
A divine rescue is necessary.  We need a savior.  And in order to be our savior, in order to pay our debt, this individual must be like us – not just God in a form that merely appears to be human, but someone fully and truly human.  Yet he must be unlike us as well, because he must be sinless, since only a perfect sacrifice is acceptable.  He must be fully God, and not simply a man with a limited set of divine powers an abilities.  -44-45