For centuries, leading up to the birth of Jesus, God promised through the prophets of ancient Israel that he would send a Savior to redeem the world from it's fallen condition. This Savior would be a servant and would redeem the world through his suffering, death, and resurrection.
In the fulness of time, this foretold Savior was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the the Holy Spirit, and the name given to him was to be Jesus. In Hebrew, this name is Yeshua (from which we get the modern day name of "Joshua"), and it literally means "God saves!"
The title "Christ" (in Hebrew: Messiah, in Greek: Christos) means, "The Anointed One." In the Old Testament, priests, prophets, and kings were anointed with a flask of consecrated oil, and in several instances, the Holy Spirit came down from heaven to confirm such a sacred appointment (e.g., with Kings Saul and David, kings of Israel). Jesus experienced this anointing in his baptism in the Jordan River by John the Baptist when the Holy Spirit descended upon him.
The salvation brought by Jesus was not political. Jesus' contemporaries expected him to defeat Israel's Roman occupiers and return political sovereignty to the people of Israel. Instead, Jesus conquered the greatest universal enemy of humanity: the power of sin and its seven deadly forms: pride, envy, greed, anger, lust, gluttony, and sloth. All of is provoke by Satan, the Prince of Darkness. Christ defeated of sin and Satan not by ostensious power, but by his innocence and humility. Jesus Christ - the Eternal Son of the Father - took on human nature and accepted the wrath of the Evil One and those under his influence on our behalf.
Jesus suffered and died on the Cross. He did so voluntarily. He gave his life freely as a gift, absolving our sins and those of the entire world.
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: "I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God." That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity
