Sacrifice

[Bakytjan]

Hello! If this is not in the right subforum or is in any way in violation of the rules, I don’t mind deletion.

I love all people and I love Christians. I now live among many Christian people. So nice people, truly. But I’ve come from a land of Shamanism, it’s my ancestral faith I love.

Question. So I talk with Christians and I learn the tenants of the Christian faith. A central idea is God sacrificing his son who is his own spirit in human body, thus spilling sacred blood as atonement for all people’s sins. What a powerful picture of God’s willingness to go to a great length to help humanity. However, I have a big resentment to this idea. In my native land, also I witness Qurban ritual every year of slaughtering sheep as reminder of Abraham’s sacrifice in the Quran. In my faith, life is not to be taken. The act of killing surely never redeems anything. Morally, it’s extremely disturbing for me to think a substitutory killing is a good act in the eyes of God. A sheep or another person has nothing to do with your badness.

I have a very different picture of the spiritual realm altogether and how it works, if compared to the Christian faith. We have a male and female supreme beings (not claiming they are universally supreme). Male Tengri and female Umai, who give life. Our Father and Mother never decree death as form of eradicating wrong behaviour or thoughts. It’s your own responsibility, up to your conscience to take up and reform yourself for better or to correct consequences of your past mistakes. It is a path of sensibility and maturity.

What is your input? How do you reconcile in my opinion unacceptable ritual of sacrificing human? In my heart, I have a problem with that and it makes it hurt.

my desire is to be open-minded and friendly. In humility and love to hear what you say? Thank you and sorry if it could be upsetting, I’m struggling to grasp how in our highly developed and educated modern day such idea could still be present - not just in Christianity of course.

 

[Sketcher]

When Christianity came about, Jews were still sacrificing animals at the temple, and Romans were still sacrificing animals at their temples. Christians didn't sacrifice animals because Jesus' sacrifice was the one and only sacrifice for sins for all time. The Romans destroyed the Jewish temple which stopped Jewish animal sacrifices, and as Christianity became prevalent among the Romans, their animal sacrifices eventually stopped. And as other pagans converted to Christianity, those that practiced animal sacrifice stopped. So at least in Western Europe, Christianity was responsible for doing away with most of the animal sacrifices. I hope you can appreciate that at least.

Now, in the context that Christianity appeared, animal sacrifice to atone for sins was normal and accepted. Part of the concept is that sin is serious enough to carry a cost, and one of the things that animal sacrifices did was to bring that point home. This was part of what Christians call the Old Covenant, which is associated with the Old Testament. Then Jesus came, as the sacrifice for the whole world's sins, once for all time - a better sacrifice that doesn't have to keep being made. He introduced the New Covenant, which is associated with the New Testament, and which is an improvement over the Old, and which was foretold in the Old.

Another relevant point: Because Jesus is divine, God in the flesh, and this was God's divine plan, a very oversimplified way of looking at this is that God did all the heavy lifting himself. Yes, there is the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and it was only the Son who suffered on the cross. The Trinity is complex and hard to understand because God is big enough to not have to be simple enough for us to understand. But what it comes down to is we have God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, three Persons, one God. Because of that unity within the Trinity, I can say that it was God's plan, and God did the hard part. Because God did the hard part, there's less from my perspective to be bothered by. After all, in leadership, when the leader visibly takes the heaviest burden, he'll have more respect among his subordinates, and a good one will be more willing to do what he or she is asked. I view it as the ultimate example of leading from the front.

 

[Maria Billingsley]

Hello! If this is not in the right subforum or is in any way in violation of the rules, I don’t mind deletion.

I love all people and I love Christians. I now live among many Christian people. So nice people, truly. But I’ve come from a land of Shamanism, it’s my ancestral faith I love.

Question. So I talk with Christians and I learn the tenants of the Christian faith. A central idea is God sacrificing his son who is his own spirit in human body, thus spilling sacred blood as atonement for all people’s sins. What a powerful picture of God’s willingness to go to a great length to help humanity. However, I have a big resentment to this idea. In my native land, also I witness Qurban ritual every year of slaughtering sheep as reminder of Abraham’s sacrifice in the Quran. In my faith, life is not to be taken. The act of killing surely never redeems anything. Morally, it’s extremely disturbing for me to think a substitutory killing is a good act in the eyes of God. A sheep or another person has nothing to do with your badness.

I have a very different picture of the spiritual realm altogether and how it works, if compared to the Christian faith. We have a male and female supreme beings (not claiming they are universally supreme). Male Tengri and female Umai, who give life. Our Father and Mother never decree death as form of eradicating wrong behaviour or thoughts. It’s your own responsibility, up to your conscience to take up and reform yourself for better or to correct consequences of your past mistakes. It is a path of sensibility and maturity.

What is your input? How do you reconcile in my opinion unacceptable ritual of sacrificing human? In my heart, I have a problem with that and it makes it hurt.

my desire is to be open-minded and friendly. In humility and love to hear what you say? Thank you and sorry if it could be upsetting, I’m struggling to grasp how in our highly developed and educated modern day such idea could still be present - not just in Christianity of course.

Jesus Christ of Nazareth was put to death by His own people. Pilot carried out their wishes, though reluctantly, his wife begged him not to. Though Jesus Christ of Nazareth is described as the sacrificial lamb, He was not ritually sacrificed as described in the Law. There is a big difference.

 

[1watchman]

Sketcher made some good points to keep in mind for a seeker after our Creator--God. As the Lord Jesus said: 'my father and I are one'. He stated: "..if you have seem Me you have seen the Father" (John 14).
God --as the Holy Spirit, manifested Self in the flesh (in His physical Son: Jesus Christ) to be the sacrifice (as Israel had done in type with animal sacrifices ---and later killed their Messiah: the Lord Jesus, when He came on earth --a terrible thing); and for which they have now been scattered over the earth as a people. Today Israelites MUST come to God on the same ground as Gentiles.
I would recommend one visit the sound site at Biblecounsel.net where one can ask questions and see answers there to many spiritual Bible matters. I have enjoyed that ministry over years which holds to Bible-only in all spiritual matters, rather than the many religions of men to please self. Let us trust God in truth (note such as John 1; John 3; all of John 14; etc as His holy "Word of Truth" shows. Our God wants us to know Him and trust Him rather than man's religious ideas. Look up always!

 

[All Becomes New]

As @Maria miles points out, the sacrifice was done by human hands. There are some more things to be said about this, however.

First, one of the Ten Commandments is "Do not murder." What does this mean for Jesus' sacrifice? It means the sacrifice was done by human hands, which is a sin, but nonetheless what God decreed to happen. You see, there is a difference between God's commands, which can be broken, and God's decrees, which will happen regardless of what anyone else wants to happen. Jesus sacrifice was a decree of God which would happen to make a sacrifice for the sins of the world. But this was done by people breaking God's command of "Do not murder." So God can exercise his decrees regardless of His commands.

Secondly, the really important thing to understand here, which @Sketcher touched on, was that Jesus did not die without His own decree as the second part of the Trinity. Jesus laid down His life willingly, it was not forced on him. And He did it because it was the decree of the Father, the first part of the Trinity. Because Jesus was God, he knew the decrees of the Father perfectly. In this sense, Jesus sacrificing Himself was a decree of God to the world and a command for Jesus. And since Jesus was perfect, he did what God commanded Him to do.

Finally, the death of Jesus Christ is called the Atonement. It's a way of saying that there was a wrong done against God (breaking God's commands) and so there would have to be a punishment for the wrongs done to God. So because of God's love for His creation and wanting to make things new again, God punishes Jesus, who was God in human form, which God needed to be human for the punishment to satisfy His need for punishment against the wrong done to Him. A good book to buy to get a better understanding of this is the book "The Atonement and Death of Christ" by William Lane Craig. In the book it gives a good look at the judicial system that God has for humans and why Jesus' death on the cross was necessary for salvation.

Hope that helps!

 

[1watchman]

Good thoughts, Counter!

 

[aiki]

So nice people, truly. But I’ve come from a land of Shamanism, it’s my ancestral faith I love.

Well, if you had been given a counterfeit $100 bill by your father, handed down to him from his grandfather, would it make the bill any less counterfeit?

Question. So I talk with Christians and I learn the tenants of the Christian faith. A central idea is God sacrificing his son who is his own spirit in human body, thus spilling sacred blood as atonement for all people’s sins.

Um, this isn't quite it. God the Father, Christ the Son, and the Holy Spirit are all God in that they share a fundamental divine nature or essence, but they are not perfectly identical to each other, or mere facets or forms of one Being. Some folks mistakenly describe the Trinity in terms of water that takes the form of ice, vapor and liquid, but this is the heresy of Sabellianism or Modalism (or Monarchianism). Instead, God is three distinct Persons - not mere manifestations or forms of one divine Being.

A better analogy is to an equilateral triangle rather than to water. Each side of the triangle is exactly like the other three sides (being equilateral) but if you removed any one side, the triangle would no longer be a triangle; each side is integral to the nature and existence of the triangle. Moreover, Side A of the triangle, though identical in length and geometry (a simple, straight line) to side B and C, is still clearly distinct from side B or C in its position in the triangle. Inasmuch as this is true, it can't be said to be truly one-and-the-same line as the others (saying it is would contradict the logical principle of the indiscernibility of identicals).

Anyway, all this to say that God did not sacrifice His own Spirit in the form of a human. This isn't what the Bible teaches or what orthodox Christianity espouses.

However, I have a big resentment to this idea. In my native land, also I witness Qurban ritual every year of slaughtering sheep as reminder of Abraham’s sacrifice in the Quran. In my faith, life is not to be taken.

Christ gave his life, it wasn't taken. He could have refused to atone for your sins and mine at any point during his Passion, but he willingly chose to sacrifice himself for the sins of the World.

The act of killing surely never redeems anything. Morally, it’s extremely disturbing for me to think a substitutory killing is a good act in the eyes of God. A sheep or another person has nothing to do with your badness.

God's holy justice requires satisfaction. There must be a payment made for sin. This is God's law and it is just. Being sinful creatures, we have no hope of properly satisfying God's perfect and holy justice. And so, Christ willingly did for us what we could not do for ourselves. He paid the price for our sin, redeeming us from the holy and just wrath and punishment of God. And he could do so precisely because he was God, perfectly holy and infinite - the "Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world." (John 1:29)

In this, God shows His mercy, love and grace to us, without yielding His holiness and justice. The Atonement of Christ is thus a beautiful, astonishing thing, revealing to us the incredible love and wisdom of God. There is no higher, greater example of such love and mercy.

I have a very different picture of the spiritual realm altogether and how it works, if compared to the Christian faith. We have a male and female supreme beings (not claiming they are universally supreme). Male Tengri and female Umai, who give life.

And you believe in them because? What evidence have you of their existence? Have they walked among mankind, as Christ did, teaching and performing miracles, actual figures of history?

Our Father and Mother never decree death as form of eradicating wrong behaviour or thoughts. It’s your own responsibility, up to your conscience to take up and reform yourself for better or to correct consequences of your past mistakes. It is a path of sensibility and maturity.

It is a path of impossibility, in the Christian worldview. God's standard for our moral conduct is Himself, His own perfection. God doesn't lower the bar for us; for that would be to accommodate sin. Instead, in Himself, God offers us His perfection, to clothe us in His perfect righteousness, that we might be accepted by Him.

Humans look around among themselves and try to gauge their own morality via comparison. Some set the bar very low, comparing themselves to, say, Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer and succeed with flying colors in meeting - and exceeding - their standard (though guilty of all sorts of "lesser" evils, which their very low standard permits). Others shoot a bit higher, aiming to be as least as "good" as their neighbors (and a little better, if they can manage it). Still others try for the "saints," working to live like Mother Theresa, or Gandhi, or Buddha. But none of these standards are the right one; none of these standards are anywhere close to God's standard. As good as the best of us are, we are all of us unfathomably distant from God's standard of holy perfection.

There is, then, no working ourselves into heaven, into God's good graces, no "I did it myself." Our best versions of "sensibility and maturity" are foul, rotten rags in the sight of God "in whom is no darkness at all." (John 5:5) And so, God makes a way through Christ for us to enter into relationship with Him as one of His children. (Colossians 1:13-20)

This is where Christianity differs from all other religions: God reaches down to helpless Man. In all other religions, Man must work to reach God. In the former dynamic, God is the hero; in the latter, Man is.

What is your input? How do you reconcile in my opinion unacceptable ritual of sacrificing human? In my heart, I have a problem with that and it makes it hurt.

John 15:13
13 "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friends.

1 John 4:9-10
9 By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.
10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

John 10:9-15
9 "I am the door; if anyone enters through Me, he will be saved, and will go in and out and find pasture.
10 "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.
11 "I am the good shepherd; the good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.
12 "He who is a hired hand, and not a shepherd, who is not the owner of the sheep, sees the wolf coming, and leaves the sheep and flees, and the wolf snatches them and scatters them.
13 "He flees because he is a hired hand and is not concerned about the sheep.
14 "I am the good shepherd, and I know My own and My own know Me,
15 even as the Father knows Me and I know the Father; and I lay down My life for the sheep.

John 10:17-18
17 ...I lay down My life so that I may take it again.
18 "No one has taken it away from Me, but I lay it down on My own initiative. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again...

 

[ViaCrucis]

Hello! If this is not in the right subforum or is in any way in violation of the rules, I don’t mind deletion.

I love all people and I love Christians. I now live among many Christian people. So nice people, truly. But I’ve come from a land of Shamanism, it’s my ancestral faith I love.

Question. So I talk with Christians and I learn the tenants of the Christian faith. A central idea is God sacrificing his son who is his own spirit in human body, thus spilling sacred blood as atonement for all people’s sins. What a powerful picture of God’s willingness to go to a great length to help humanity. However, I have a big resentment to this idea. In my native land, also I witness Qurban ritual every year of slaughtering sheep as reminder of Abraham’s sacrifice in the Quran. In my faith, life is not to be taken. The act of killing surely never redeems anything. Morally, it’s extremely disturbing for me to think a substitutory killing is a good act in the eyes of God. A sheep or another person has nothing to do with your badness.

I have a very different picture of the spiritual realm altogether and how it works, if compared to the Christian faith. We have a male and female supreme beings (not claiming they are universally supreme). Male Tengri and female Umai, who give life. Our Father and Mother never decree death as form of eradicating wrong behaviour or thoughts. It’s your own responsibility, up to your conscience to take up and reform yourself for better or to correct consequences of your past mistakes. It is a path of sensibility and maturity.

What is your input? How do you reconcile in my opinion unacceptable ritual of sacrificing human? In my heart, I have a problem with that and it makes it hurt.

my desire is to be open-minded and friendly. In humility and love to hear what you say? Thank you and sorry if it could be upsetting, I’m struggling to grasp how in our highly developed and educated modern day such idea could still be present - not just in Christianity of course.

Think of it like this:

God united Himself to humanity in Jesus, that means God became human. The union of God and man together in Jesus involves God's total participation in our humanity. To that end, God gives Himself away freely in love, to suffer and die at the hands of violence--by our own hands. But His dying isn't a tragic martyrdom, but rather the act of God to destroy the very power of death itself. Christ rises from the dead, having defeated the power of sin, death, hell, and the devil; in this victory He has rendered all the violence and vain power of this world impotent. Corrupt people conspired and colluded with their own Roman oppressors, and Rome, the greatest power the world had ever known, killed the Son of God in the most shameful and humiliating way it could--crucifixion (a death sentence reserved only for the worst offenders)--but Christ shatters the violent bonds of death by rising from the dead.

By His death He shares in our death, for this reason in our Scriptures it is written that He "suffered the death of every human being"; and having shared in our mortality, weakness, and death He now, by His rising from the dead, invites us to come and share in His life. Having abolished the power of sin, canceling out the debt of transgressions which were rightly held against us as sinners, establishing peace between us and God by restoring us to communion with God through and in Himself, we now have a new life from God.

In that new life we have already become partakers of the future world which God has in store for all of creation. The hope of the renewal of all creation, the resurrection of the dead, is ours now as a gift, through faith, and we can look upon the resurrection of Jesus as God's promise and guarantee. That what God did for Jesus He will do for us and, in fact, the whole of creation.

The day will come when this present age reaches its conclusion, history has reached its end. Jesus who having died, risen, and ascended to take up His throne with the Father as Lord and King over the whole universe will return. When He returns the dead will be raised, from mortal to immortal. And God will renew and bring healing to all of creation--a new heavens and a new earth in which justice, life, peace, and love prevail. No longer shall men know war, for swords will be beaten into plows, and spears into pruning shears. The lion shall eat straw like the ox, the wolf and the lamb shall lay down together in peace, and justice shall cover the earth like waters cover the oceans.

Life wins.

That is the Christian Gospel.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[Leaf473]

Hello! If this is not in the right subforum or is in any way in violation of the rules, I don’t mind deletion.

I love all people and I love Christians. I now live among many Christian people. So nice people, truly. But I’ve come from a land of Shamanism, it’s my ancestral faith I love.

Question. So I talk with Christians and I learn the tenants of the Christian faith. A central idea is God sacrificing his son who is his own spirit in human body, thus spilling sacred blood as atonement for all people’s sins. What a powerful picture of God’s willingness to go to a great length to help humanity. However, I have a big resentment to this idea. In my native land, also I witness Qurban ritual every year of slaughtering sheep as reminder of Abraham’s sacrifice in the Quran. In my faith, life is not to be taken. The act of killing surely never redeems anything. Morally, it’s extremely disturbing for me to think a substitutory killing is a good act in the eyes of God. A sheep or another person has nothing to do with your badness.

I have a very different picture of the spiritual realm altogether and how it works, if compared to the Christian faith. We have a male and female supreme beings (not claiming they are universally supreme). Male Tengri and female Umai, who give life. Our Father and Mother never decree death as form of eradicating wrong behaviour or thoughts. It’s your own responsibility, up to your conscience to take up and reform yourself for better or to correct consequences of your past mistakes. It is a path of sensibility and maturity.

What is your input? How do you reconcile in my opinion unacceptable ritual of sacrificing human? In my heart, I have a problem with that and it makes it hurt.

my desire is to be open-minded and friendly. In humility and love to hear what you say? Thank you and sorry if it could be upsetting, I’m struggling to grasp how in our highly developed and educated modern day such idea could still be present - not just in Christianity of course.

Hi Bakytjan,
I hear what you're saying. Even *if* sacrifice doesn't make sense to you and me, it definitely made sense to the ancient Israelites.

For a more modern, Western explanation of Christianity, I suggest reading what Paul said to the highly educated thinkers in Athens. It's in Acts chapter 17. It ends with the claim that God raised Jesus from the dead.

Do you believe God made Jesus alive again after he was dead?