Why did Jesus have to die for our salvation?

[sabercroft]

If I wanted to forgive someone for wronging me, I'd just forgive. I wouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to do it.

Whatever it was that God had in mind (saving us, pardoning us, or whatever), why was it necessary to sacrifice Jesus for it?

 

[LWB]

I think it is humanity that would condemn itself when faced with the flawless beauty of Love personified.

Isaiah 6:1-7 provides a fascinating glimpse of just such an encounter. Stricken with a sense of his own shortcoming, Isaiah was atoned for with a burning coal.

I think this points to the atonement provided by Christ for humanity. He became one of us so that we could fully claim to the accomplishment of his grace.

Thus the human who has believed upon the Lord, when faced with the glorious beauty and holiness of God, can be unashamed, for they were slain with Christ. The transgressions of selfishness, ignorance and hatred can be flung away, and the great project of God dwelling with flesh can get past the brief interruption of the fall and recommence as intended.

 

[wayseer]

If I wanted to forgive someone for wronging me, I'd just forgive. I wouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to do it.

Whatever it was that God had in mind (saving us, pardoning us, or whatever), why was it necessary to sacrifice Jesus for it?

Good question and one that will take something like a university course to unravel.

However, you can read Paul in Romans to get the idea. Basically, the Torah didn't work so God tried another tack. We no longer need to beat ourselves into pulp over what we have failed to do, or what we should have not done in the first place. Rather, we can claim the Grace of God and get on with life.

Essentially, basic psychology.

 

[drich0150]

If I wanted to forgive someone for wronging me, I'd just forgive. I wouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to do it.

Just because someone wronged you does not mean they have necessarily sinned against you. Their is a great distance between simply being wronged and have been purposely and willfully sinned against over and over.

For example have you forgiven anyone and everyone for every signal transgression ever committed against you to the point of it never happened in your life?

If you have give it time. some things are easier to forgive than others. If you feel this to be an obtainable goal (To forgive everyone who has wronged you) then multiply this effort for every man woman and child who ever lived, or will live. Meaning take the worst examples evil man can produce, direct it at you and then go through your forgiveness ritual you speak of, and find absolution for them, without asking anything in return.

Whatever it was that God had in mind (saving us, pardoning us, or whatever), why was it necessary to sacrifice Jesus for it?

Because the creator of the universe established a sin and atonement scale. Which says the wage for any sin is death. Because this has now been established by the expressed word of God, it becomes a matter of righteousness for a death to pay for sin.

In short because He said so.

 

[Hakan101]

Good question and one that will take something like a university course to unravel.

However, you can read Paul in Romans to get the idea. Basically, the Torah didn't work so God tried another tack. We no longer need to beat ourselves into pulp over what we have failed to do, or what we should have not done in the first place. Rather, we can claim the Grace of God and get on with life.

Essentially, basic psychology.

Well, it's not so much that God tried another tactic. Doesn't Paul mention in one of his epistles that God purposely gave the law to show how man could not save themselves with it? It is there to show sin for what it is, and show just how badly we needed a savior.

 

[ElijahW]

If I wanted to forgive someone for wronging me, I'd just forgive. I wouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to do it.

What if you wanted to bring about the resurrection of the dead? Forgiveness of sin in Christianity isn’t a God with a human personality coming to terms with our behavior but about finding a solution to our deaths, which is the cost of sin.

Whatever it was that God had in mind (saving us, pardoning us, or whatever), why was it necessary to sacrifice Jesus for it?

To establish a new idea of what authority should be like, in order to replace what we had going currently. The goal in Christianity is to establish Jesus as the sole ruler on the planet in the minds of humanity, in order to get rid of the power the earthly rulers had over the people. Instead of a king that expects the people to serve and die for him, Jesus established the example that a good king serves and dies for his people.

This liberating mankind by establishing Christ as king, leads to the kingdom of God/Heaven, which is where we reestablish eternal life and achieve the resurrection of the dead. The resurrection of the dead is where your sins are actually shown to be forgiven.

 

[salida]

If I wanted to forgive someone for wronging me, I'd just forgive. I wouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to do it.

Whatever it was that God had in mind (saving us, pardoning us, or whatever), why was it necessary to sacrifice Jesus for it?

It goes much deeper than that.

Are you a good person? www.livingwaters.com/good/
http://www.needgod.com/004.shtml
Can you keep the 10 commandments 100% of the time all the time? So, have you ever lied or steal something or break any of these commandments once in your life? If the answer is yes-than you are guilty.
Only Jesus kept these.

All of mankind is guilty but the good part is:
1Jo 1:9 If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Yes it was necessary to sacrifice Jesus because He became the perfect sacrifice for our sins.

 

[pinkputter]

If I wanted to forgive someone for wronging me, I'd just forgive. I wouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to do it.

Whatever it was that God had in mind (saving us, pardoning us, or whatever), why was it necessary to sacrifice Jesus for it?

Reason no. 1 is: The world hated Him. The world wanted Him to die, to suffer that fate. God turned that which is evil into a Victory for believers. Notice that Jesus did not want to suffer that fate, but the Father knew it had to happen. He overcame the world by allowing His Creation freedom, and in doing so granting salvation to His children. What a powerful, merciful Savior!

Yet another more specific reason is the paradox of strength in weakness.
Excerpt from Peter Kreeft:
But the incarnate Jesus is God's definitive revelation, God's face turned to us in utmost intimacy. We know far more of a person through his face than his back or his feet. So let's look at that final, definitive, total revelation of God that we have—Christ and his cross—to try to shed some light on our paradox of strength coming from weakness. Our question is: How does weakness make us strong through the cross? or, How does the weakness of the cross make us strong?
There are two questions here, not one. The first is theoretical and unanswerable. The second is practical and answerable.
The first question is: How does it work? By what supernatural, spiritual technology does the machine of weakness produce the product of strength? How does the cross work?
Theologians have been working on that one for nearly two thousand years, and there is no clear consensus in Christendom, no obviously adequate answer, only analogies. St. Anselm's legal analogy is of the devil owning us and Christ paying the price to buy us back. The early Church Fathers gave a cosmic battle analogy: Christ invaded enemy-occupied territory—first earth, then, on Holy Saturday, the underworld, and defeated the devil and his forces of sin and death. Then there is the Southern Free-Will Baptist preacher's delightfully simple Americanism: "Satan votes agin' ye, an' Jesus votes for ye, and ye cast the deciding vote." These metaphors are helpful, but they are only symbols, likenesses. We hardly know how electricity works, how can we know how redemption works?
A second question, however, is more definitely answerable. That is the practical question: How should I live; how should I behave in relation to weakness? How should I enact the cross in my life? For the cross is in my life. It is not a freak but a universal truth incarnated, not merely a once-for-all event outside me in space and time, in Israel in A.D. 29, separated from me by eight thousand miles and two thousand years, but also a continuing event within me, or rather I within it.

Christianity is more paradoxical than the simple no of humanism or the simple yes of fatalism.

There are two equal and opposite errors in answering the question: How shall I enact this mystery of the cross in my life? They are humanism and quietism, activism and passivism. Humanism says that all is human action, that we must fight and overcome weakness, failure, defeat, disease, death, and suffering. We must overcome the cross. But we never do, in the end. Humanism is Don Quixote riding forth on a horse to fight a tank.
Quietism, or fatalism, says simply: Endure it, accept it. In other words, don't be human. Go "gentle into that good night," do not "rage, rage against the dying of the light."
Christianity is more paradoxical than the simple no of humanism or the simple yes of fatalism. There is the same paradoxical doubleness in the Christian answer to poverty, suffering, and death. Poverty is to be fought against and relieved, yet it is blessed. Helping the poor to escape the ravages of their poverty is one of the essential Christian duties. If we refuse it, we are not Christians, we are not saved (Mt 25:41-46). Yet it is the rich who are pitied and pitiable, as Mother Teresa so startlingly told Harvard: "Don't call my country a poor country. India is not a poor country. America is a poor country, a spiritually poor country." It is very hard for a rich man to be saved (Mt 19:23), while the poor in spirit, that is, those willing to be poor, those detached from riches, are blessed (Mt 5:3).
The same paradoxical double attitude is found in Christianity toward death. Death is on the one hand the great evil, the "last enemy" (Cor 15:26), the mark and punishment of sin. Christ came to conquer it. Yet death is also the door to eternal life, to heaven. It is the golden chariot sent by the great king to fetch his Cinderella bride.

 

[CryptoLutheran]

If I wanted to forgive someone for wronging me, I'd just forgive. I wouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to do it.

Whatever it was that God had in mind (saving us, pardoning us, or whatever), why was it necessary to sacrifice Jesus for it?

Another way of seeing it isn't that Jesus had to die in order for God to forgive us; but rather that Jesus, as God Himself coming to us and among us and suffering with us is the demonstration of His love and forgiveness for us.

Satisfaction Theory is an umbrella term that describes several theories/theologies regarding the Atonement, that is, how in/through Jesus we are reconciled to God.

According to St. Anselm of Canterbury, an 11th century theologian and philosopher, the idea was that because through man's sin God's honor has been offended and in need to be satisfied (to this end he wrote the work Cur Deus Homo?). Since God is Lord and mankind are His subjects (remember the feudal European setting in which this theology was articulated) we have have offended God's honor which needs to be restituted, which due to man's sinfulness is impossible on our part; therefore only a man who is equal to God can restitute and satisfy God's offended lordly honor. Therefore God became man as Jesus in order to satisfy humanity's honor debt; to satisfy that debt on behalf of man as One equal with God because He is God.

Under St. Thomas Aquinas it was not God's honor that was offended, but God's justice. This Thomistic form of Satisfaction Theory ultimately became official Roman Catholic teaching. God's justice has been infringed, man's sin has breached justice and there must be a satisfaction; again, Jesus as the God-Man alone can satisfy this problem.

Under some early Protestant theologians, such as John Calvin and others, the Law has been breached, and the breaching of the Law demands death, Jesus as the God-Man alone can meet the infinite requirements of the Law in order to, vicariously on our behalf, satisfy them thereby reconciling/atoning us before God.

This latter idea is usually called Penal Substitution, Jesus has become our substitute in order to satisfy the strict penal condemnation which the Divine Law demands.

Thus, generally, under Satisfaction Theory what's needed is, of course, satisfaction without which we remain legally and morally estranged from God and held under the weight of His condemnation as universally guilty of having offended/breached/trespassed His honor/justice/law. Thus in order to remove our universal guilt a satisfaction must be made, that happens in and through Jesus as the God-Man who restitutes/satisfies God's offended honor, or breached justice, or bears the weight of the law's harsh penal demands--which becomes the only means by which that universal guilt can be removed, thereby making us forgiven and reconciling us to the God we have so deeply offended.

I don't subscribe to Satisfaction Theory in any of its forms and I'm not alone.

The Atonement story often told by Christians in antiquity looks remarkably different. Let's consider Ransom Theory:

Under Ransom Theory because of our sin we have become victims of the devil's evil tyranny, who is a thief and a murderer; we are now subjects of an oppressive regime of death and destruction which has reigned over us since Adam. God, who is unwilling to let His creation, particularly man, suffer and be lost forever will not stand by and do nothing. He condescends to meet us where we are, as Jesus Christ. God hands Jesus over to the devil as a ransom for mankind, the devil takes the deal and through the instrumentation of Rome has Jesus killed. The devil sees this as a victory, but God has an ace up His sleeve, He has tricked the ultimate trickster. Jesus harrows Hell, crushing the doors of Hell, trampling over the devil, bestowing life to all in the grave and rising again three days later. Thus the stranglehold of the devil over man is defeated, death's grasp is loosened (Jesus is risen from the dead and we too shall rise from the dead), and in Jesus we share in His victory over sin, death, hell and the devil and having been liberated from the devil's POW camp have been brought back into the freedom of sharing life with God.

That's a radically different story than the one told under Satisfaction Theory.

We can also consider another ancient Christian story of Atonement, known as Recapitulation Theory. Under Recapitulation Theory God's act in and through Jesus is to recapitulate and undo what Adam has done. Jesus, therefore, is the Second Adam, the new beginning of and for mankind. Through Adam who was disobedient, death and sin entered the world; but through Jesus who was obedient, resurrection from the dead and freedom from sin has come to all. To this end God has become what we are so that we can become as He is, He has come and shared in our life and death so that we can share in His life and resurrection from the dead. God has become a participant in all things human in order that human beings can become a participant in all the things of God.

Elements of these latter theories are united in a more modern/Western iteration known as Christus Victor Theory. Which is more or less where I fall in the conversation.

Christ did not die in order that God could forgive us, but Christ has come to proclaim God as God is; He is Love and Mercy and Forgiveness for us. God loves us even though we mess up and sin and God will not stand idly by and let us suffer and be subject to the tyranny of sin, hell and death. Thus God, in Christ, comes and becomes a full participant in our humanity, living, breathing, suffering and yes dying. Jesus becomes chief Victim, God willingly offers Himself up and over to us out of love and His compassion. But paradoxically in dying, Jesus descends into Hell/the dead and tramples upon the devil and crushes those ancient doors and leads captives free; rising from the dead He has vanquished death, vanquished sin, vanquished the oppressive power structures of this world. God has identified with the lowly, identified with the poor, identified with the weak, the oppressed, the frail, and the suffering of and in this world and has revealed Himself in and through these things. Our salvation is God's freely given and unconditional grace revealed and given to us through Jesus who offers Himself to us in weakness and fragility: God Himself as a full participant in the weakness and fragility of our human flesh, willingly becoming Victim with the victims, Downtrodden with the downtrodden, and Friend of the sinners. For the purpose of restoring us with and in Him out from the tyranny of death, the tyranny of a world governed by war and pain to see in Christ and the hope of Christ the better and reconciled world made manifest in the Resurrection and made consummate at His Parousia in the end: The kingdom of God.

-CryptoLutheran

 

[God's Word]

It's been said that "A picture is worth a thousand words". With such in mind, I'm posting this slightly over 15 minutes in length video. Although I disagree that the Jews were God's "chosen people" in the manner in which might briefly be described in the following video, I wanted to post this video as a precursor to any commentary of my own that I might add to this thread in the future. IOW, the video won't, in and of itself, directly answer the OP's question, but it will provide some visuals for things that I'd more than likely like to verbalize in the future. Thanks for watching.

YouTube - ‪The Last Adam (Jesus)‬‏

 

[Abraham Garrett]

No man can claim to fully understand the Lord Jesus Christ's wisdom, and it is quite right that these questions should be asked.

My own personal view is that Christ did not have to die for our salvation. Like all of us, when He was with us, Christ had free will. Christ chose to accept that punishment on behalf of all of us!

God is a loving God. God wants us all to know that our sins can be forgiven through Him. In Christ's death, He showed us that our sins are already forgiven through Him. All we have to do in return is accept Him for what He is, and obey His word, which quite frankly is what we should all be pretty much doing anyway. Most of His word is so ingrained in our culture that it is now known as "common sense".

Even leaving aside my calling, and all logic, and all concern for fellow humans: eternal life and salvation, in return for common sense? Sounds like a good deal to me!

 

[Emmy]

Dear sabercroft. Right through the Old Testament people paid for their sins by sacrificing an animal. Then God let them know that He did not want animal-sacrifices anymore, God wants our love freely given, with all our hearts, with all our souls, and with all our minds, and also loving our neighbour, ( all others, friends and not friends) as we love ourselves. In other words: God wants us to change our unloving and selfish characters, into loving as God wants us to love. Why did Jesus have to die? because there was NO-ONE left without sins or transgressions. God wanted no more animals, and humanity had sunk too low, all living men and women were steeped in wrongdoings. God`s Holy Law needed a final Sacrifice to pay for all past transgressions. God could have given up on us, God could have let us die and suffer all eternity. But God is Love, He loves us and wants us back again. The Bible will tell you more in detail what God did for us to save us. Jesus-God-Son died for us that we might live again, Jesus paid the prize which God`s Holy Law demanded, and none of us could pay: Sinless Blood to atone for our sins. I say this with love, sabercroft. Greetings from Emmy, sister in Christ.

 

[Faulty]

If I wanted to forgive someone for wronging me, I'd just forgive. I wouldn't have to sacrifice anything in order to do it.

Whatever it was that God had in mind (saving us, pardoning us, or whatever), why was it necessary to sacrifice Jesus for it?

If a man were to murder your entire family and then stand before a judge who, when faced with overwhelming evidence of guilt, decides to just forgive that man for wronging the laws of the state, would that be ok or would justice demand a punishment for the crimes?

Now imagine if you were standing before the Judge of the universe and He has overwhelming evidence of your guilt, be it lying, stealing, lusting, greed, anger, etc, if the judge is just, you will be punished for your crimes, and your punishment is a debt you cannot pay.

Now imagine that same judge, seeing you standing before Him condemned, declares you guilty, but knowing that you cannot pay, he then states that justice will be satisfied and I will be the one to take your punishment for you, and with that, an innocent man becomes condemned before the court on your behalf. This is what has happened.

"For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God." 2 Cor 5:21

The justice of God demands punishment for our sin. The mercy of God causes Him to punish the One who willingly took our punishment on our behalf, because we could not. So Jesus was put to death for our crimes, then raised again from the dead showing that God was pleased and satisfied with the sacrifice. Now we must believe on Him who became the sacrifice in our place for the forgivness of our sins and for our reconciliation to God.

 

[pinkputter]

Now sabercroft, I have a question for you..

Now that all these Christians have explained their perspective of why Jesus died for us, does it answer your original question?

They appear to be varied in the answers, but in reality are much of the same. Did this answer your question or lead to further confusion?