Why Did Jesus Have to Die?

Welcome! Thanks for joining us for this, our twelfth post in our new year-long blog series we’re calling “Journey Together.” In this post we’ll look at two answers for the question “Why did Jesus have to die?”

Here’s why the “Why did Jesus have to die?” question is critical: if you and I don’t get clear on the need for Jesus’ cruel death on the cross, we’ll never fully grasp the full nature of God. And we’ll cheapen the significance of the cross — which I’ll admit I did for a whole lot of years. People, I was 100 percent disgusted by the cross. I hated seeing it in church. I hated hearing about it in church. And there was no way I was wearing a shiny gold replica of it around my neck! As a child I can remember thinking, “The cross is seriously yucky. Poor grown-up baby Jesus!”

I was so focused on pitying Jesus, that for years I was mad at God. What kind of loving God, I asked, would send His son to endure torture and death? But my question only showed my cluelessness about God's supreme goodness.
Click To Tweet

“Why did Jesus have to die?” Let’s look at two important reasons!



Why Did Jesus Have to Die? Because of Justice.
Why did Jesus have to die? Reason #1: So that God can welcome us into His holy presence.

Once humanity chose to sin, our sin separated us from God. Because God is completely holy. This might be hard for us to understand, so let’s use an analogy. Imagine a freshly shampooed carpet in our family playroom — and our muddy-pawed puppy racing toward it. We’d stall the puppy to prevent it from spoiling the carpet, right?

The torture that Jesus endured on the way to His death was shameful. Crucifixion, perfected under the oh-so-enlightened Romans, remains the most monstrous form of public execution ever devised. It is horrific, excruciating, and inhumane.

But when we isolate the words horrific, excruciating, and shameful, we get our first hints of the depth of sacrifice God was willing to make of Himself to reconcile us to Him.
Click To Tweet

As a child — okay, even for a whole lot of my adult years — I missed the of Himself part. The phrase “God sent His son to die” muddies the reality that God and Jesus are one.

God wasn’t an indifferent, distant bystander. He felt every slap, punch, and lash of the whip. He felt the jarring pain in each step Jesus took to reach Golgotha. He felt the sense of suffocation Jesus experienced each time He struggled to fill His lungs on the cross. God felt the suffocating weight of our evilness and sin that draped heavy on Jesus. He felt the utter despair of Jesus’ loneliness when He turned His back on Jesus. God could have prevented the cross — but yet He couldn’t, if we were to be redeemed.

Together, at the cross, God and Jesus made the ultimate sacrifice, forever wiping the mud from our paws, so we can race, unfettered, to Them, 24/7.

Dr. Andy Bannister of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries answers the question, “Why did Jesus have to die?” this way. The cross, he explains, is the cross-section of God’s mercy and justice. When true forgiveness or mercy is bestowed, someone has to pay the price for it. The cross offers true mercy and forgiveness, but not at the expense of justice. God, through Jesus, was perfectly unselfish. He stepped up to pay the exorbitant fine required for our sin.

Notes Richard Cunningham in his excellent article on BeThinking.org, “We underestimate the significance of our sin — which is why the death of Jesus looks like gratuitous violence.” Adds Bibleinfo.com, “…a just and perfect God could not simply sweep sin under the carpet and go on running a perfect universe.”

Because we can’t see our sin the way God does, we kinda think maybe His standards are too high. Like, maybe, God should take a chill pill.

Christ's suffering was so terrible because it was equal to the seriousness of our sin.
Click To Tweet

Here’s my prayer for all of us: that we begin to see how our sin hurts God — and that we gain the desire to truly honor Him wholeheartedly with our words, thoughts, and actions.

Why Did Jesus Have to Die? Because of Love.
Why did Jesus have to die? Reason #2: To demonstrate God’s complete and utter love for us.

Why, asks Cunningham, did Jesus so deliberately co-operate with a series of events that took Him to a place of torture and bloody execution? It seems unnecessary. Except for the point we just made in Reason #1: That God Himself was in Christ, personally dealing with the sin.

“True love has the power not to ignore hurt, but to absorb it,” wisely notes Cunningham. God and Jesus absorbed the pain of our sin and digested it. And Christ, he adds, “plumbed the depths of His own divine heart for those inner resources which alone can quench God’s righteous anger.”

The loving and the dying are related. But we tend to separate the two, and view the cross to be an extravagant, self-indulgent mistake on God’s part. (Or am I the only one who has told God so, repeatedly, before I came to understand why the cross is so necessary?)

Well, it’s a fact, Jack, that the disciples certainly initially thought the cross was the end of things. But after seeing Jesus resurrected, they came to realize that the cross — not the resurrection — signified Jesus’ most victorious moment of glory. John 19:30 tells us that in nearing His death, Jesus shouts, “It is finished,” not “I am finished.” Translated correctly, the word Jesus used translates to “completed.”

At the cross, His disciples viewed Jesus as defeated. They didn't get it -- until they did! Soon they were preaching that Jesus defeated sin and death and hell itself.
Click To Tweet

Why did Jesus have to die? For us to clearly see God’s commitment to be in relationship with us.

Why did Jesus have to die on the cross? I think Bibleinfo.com’s view is spot on: “The cross is graphic enough to reach the most hardened criminal, but also the most sensitive humanist.” Jesus was willing to die brutally for us, to prevent our brutal punishment.

Have you accepted Christ as Lord? The expiration date on His loving invitation ceases only upon your last breath. But why wait? Life, walked daily with Him, is so much better than walking alone.

In our next blog post, let’s look at some of the foundations of the Christian faith. Christianity is based on truth!

Catch up: The introductory post to this series.

The post Why Did Jesus Have to Die? appeared first on Josh.org.