Audio only:
Joe Heschmeyer examines the question: Did Jesus Have to Die on the Cross?
Transcription:
Joe:
Welcome back to Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. And I was recently asked by a friend of my brothers, why it is Christians believe Jesus had to die for our sins. Wasn’t there some other way God could have done things? And the answer is actually yes, there was another way God could have done things. So I want to address this in two parts. Long time viewers of the channel may know I’ve covered some of this ground before, but I wanted to sort of standalone episode particularly for people who may not be as familiar with all the ins and outs of Christian theology. And I want to address two things. Number one, did Jesus have to die for our sins? And number two, if he didn’t literally have to, why in the world did he Now on that first question, did Jesus have to die for our sins? Many Christians will claim in fact that he did and will usually cite to something like, well, God is a just judge. And so the holiness or the justice of God, his hatred of sin meant that he needed to punish it. You’ll hear arguments like this,
CLIP:
The price of sin of separating ourselves from God is death since God is perfectly just, he couldn’t simply ignore or forgive humanity’s sins. God is holy and righteous. His uncompromising nature means he must judge and punish sin.
Joe:
Now, if you’ve heard that, you might be reasonably wondering, wait, God can’t forgive. He wouldn’t be holy if he was forgiving. That doesn’t seem to match with the biblical presentation of God at all. And you’re right, it doesn’t. This is applying of misunderstanding of the concept of justice to God in an inappropriate way. Allow me to explain. I’m going to be relying heavily on the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas who think you’re going to see as number one, rightly considered one of if not the greatest theologian in Christian history. And number two, he in turn is going to back up his arguments using both reason and a lot of biblical evidence. So when it comes to this question, his argument is, look, if God had wanted to just wave away the problem of sin, he could have without violating anybody else’s rights and without violating any concept of justice, that it wouldn’t been unjust for God to just say, eh, don’t worry about it.
Now, you might be objecting. Well, there are all kinds of cases where you wouldn’t be able to do that. So for instance, think about a human courtroom. A judge in a courtroom is always administering justice on behalf of somebody else, the state, the common good parties in a lawsuit. And so a judge in those cases can’t just say, eh, I’m feeling generous today. You stole that guy’s money, but I’m going to let you keep it. In those cases, he would actually be acting unjustly, but that’s not how divine justice works, because God is the highest authority. He’s not answering to somebody else the common good, a higher God, nothing like that. And so when it comes to the debt of sin, that is a debt owed to God. And if you are the only one owed something, if I’ve done something only against you, you are free to just say, we’re good.
I forgive you. Don’t worry about it. And God can do that as well in regards to the problem of sin without compromising his justice, without compromising his holiness. If you forgive a trespass against you, that’s not an injustice. That’s just mercy. And so our concept of justice is skewed because when we’re thinking about justice, we’re often thinking about a judge acting on behalf of some higher authority. God as the highest authority. He’s the one offended. So the judge in the lawsuit couldn’t just say, don’t worry about it to the offending party, but the aggrieved party could. They could say, yeah, you did wrong me, but I forgive you. Don’t worry. I’m not even going to demand restitution. You could do that whether you should or shouldn’t. That’s a different question, but you can without violating justice. Now, this by the way, isn’t just a theoretical concept of justice.
This is also very clearly the way Jesus lays out the forgiveness of his father in places like Matthew chapter 18. In Matthew 18, verse 23, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a king who wanted to settle accounts with his servants. And he has one servant who owes this tremendous debt of 10,000 talents. This is so large, the guy’s never going to be able to repay it. And he calls it in, and the guy’s obviously completely unable to pay. And so he falls to his knees and he implores the judge or the king, excuse me, Lord, have patience with me and I’ll pay you everything. And at this point out of pity form the Lord of that servant released him and forgave him the debt. Now notice there there’s no question that the king or Lord here clearly represents God. And Jesus doesn’t say he acted unjustly in being forgiving.
He was compelled because of his uncompromising nature that then he had to go and demand that money from some third party. There’s nothing like that that’s not required in the parable at all. So clearly then God could have just said, problem of sin. Don’t worry about it. I can fix all this without you, and we don’t need to do anything else. Jesus doesn’t need to come into the world. You don’t need the cross. You don’t need any of this. And so for many Christians, that’s actually kind of surprising news that the biblical data does not suggest this was compulsive. It wasn’t. Christ was compelled to go to the cross. Something else was the case. So that then asked then why did Jesus die for a sin if he didn’t have to? If there was another way he could have done it. Why this way? So again, I’m going to rely heavily on the arguments of St.
Thomas Aquinas. He’s going to point to five biblical reasons why it was best that this is how the problem of sin was dealt with, that Christ didn’t have to come in. But this is the best way to do it for five reasons. Reason number one, this shows us God’s love for us. And this is quite clear from the biblical data. For example, in Romans five, we read while we were yet helpless at the right time, Christ died for the ungodly. While one will hardly die for a righteous man, though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. But God shows his love for us and that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. So a way to think about it is this, you think about great romantic scenes where a man dies for the woman he loves, he goes out and protects her honor and he dies for those kinds of moments.
And you just think, wow, what an epic love that Christ on the cross is showing an epic love, epic divine love, not divine wrath, but divine love. This is incredible self-sacrifice on behalf of Jesus Christ that he endures not only the weight of sin, but all of the brutality inflicted upon him in the surging, in the carrying of the cross, in the crucifixion. He doesn’t just die, right? He dies this particularly brutal death, and he does so while having at any moment the ability to stop it and just say, enough, I’m the God of the universe. How dare you treat me in this way. But he endures all of this. What does that tell us about him? A God who will put up with our abuse that tells us something about his tremendous love for us, that a God who doesn’t have to put up with all of this does should give us tremendous hope when we are feeling like how could I possibly be forgiven?
Think about how we treated God and the depths he went to show us his love for us and his desire to be completely united with us. So that’s the first reason, the second to show us how to be holy. Now, one of the other ways people get the cross wrong is they’ll imagine Christ had his suffering and just a total substitution so I don’t have to do mine. And that’s not actually the biblical data because the biblical data is to take up your cross and follow me. That’s what Jesus says. Or as St. Peter puts it for this, you have been called because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his steps. So one of the reasons Christ dies on the cross is to show us how to live a holy life, to show us what self-sacrificial love looks like, not just so we feel loved, but also so that we can go out and love others in the same way.
So for instance, in Ephesians five, one of the councils that St. Paul gives is for husbands to love their wives as Christ does the church. So I have a model for living out love in my relationships, particularly in my marriage, but even beyond that for how I approach my neighbor, because I’ve seen what that like in a perfect way in Jesus Christ. That’s the second reason He does. We would’ve lost that if God just would’ve shrugged and said, don’t worry about the problem of sin. The third reason is to deliver us from sin and actually to do more than that, to bring us into divine glory. Now, this is the one that maybe is most obvious in one sense given where your background is theologically. But we want to be very clear as Revelation one says to Jesus who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom priest to his God and father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.
Amen. So Christ has freed us by his blood. He has solved the problem of sin through his self-sacrificial death. And I’m actually only scratching the surface kind of the how, because I’m looking at the why. But he has made things right in the problem of sin. But not just that, because frequently there’s this common misconception Christians can have that Christ’s death on the cross balances the scales of divine justice, that the weight of our sins is balanced out by the weight of Christ’s death. But this is a mistake because Christ’s death actually goes well beyond that. His self-sacrificial love is of literally an infinite value. So it’s not a question of, okay, now we’re square. We’re much more than square. Now, if you saw my prior episode talking about with sometimes called the treasury of merit, building up treasure in heaven, those kinds of things, you’ll know that a key Christian concept is that God rewards this really selfless and loving kind of behavior.
So Jesus being both fully God and fully man has done the greatest act in human history that wins a tremendous award reward in heaven, not just freeing us from sin. But even more than that, Philippians two describes it in this way, the being found in human form, he Jesus humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every other name. So notice this divine glory is red redoing to Jesus in this way, not just because he’s owed it by being God, but also because in his humanity being found in human form, he’s humbled himself and been obedient to death. And this self-sacrificial love merits a tremendous reward. Now, this is the most theologically sort of in the weeds, this whole concept of merit. So I’m just going to leave it a little bit underdeveloped there and just kind of point to that to say, look, there is this clear idea that one of the things Jesus is doing is not just paying the price for sin, but infinitely overpaying because this is of infinite worth before God.
And those infinite merits of Christ, they were down to our good, the fourth reason to detter from sin that we take the problem of sin more seriously when we can see the damage that we cause by our sin. And Jesus’ death on the cross vividly illustrates that damage. In one Corinthians six, St. Paul puts it like this. He says, do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God? You are not your own. You were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body. So notice what’s going on there in calling us to avoid bodily sins. He’s dealing particularly with sexual sin there, but I mean you could just applies to whatever sin you’re dealing with in your life. St. Paul reminds him, look, you were bought with a price. That with a price of course means the cross.
Someone went to a great deal of effort to free you from sin. So live like it. So very concretely, this is a good way to avoid sin, is just remember the wages of sin, but also remember that you were loved enough that Jesus went to the cross. So you don’t have to live like that. So don’t live like that. And the fifth one is actually maybe my favorite. I know it’s maybe a weird thing to say, to have a favorite, to give us greater dignity. Now, this is a confusing one at first. So imagine, okay, let me unpack it like this. Imagine the problem of sin like a teenager crashing their parents’ car or imagine it like a toddler spilling the milk or juice or whatever else. And you can think of any number of situations like that. I’m a parent, all of mine are heavily skewed towards that.
But find whatever it is in your own life. And you could just say, as a parent, oh my gosh, you screw up. I’m just going to fix this for you. But that’s not actually the thing that is most dignifying to your child. That rather if you can get down there and help them clean up the mess as a little kid or help them make things right to whatever extent they can with the car, those things actually show a greater dignity to the people involved to the wrong door. So Aquinas is going to point to one Corinthians 1557 where St. Paul says, thanks be to God who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Now that line may not immediately strike you. What does that matter? But it is for exactly this reason that if you’ve got the spilled juice, you could just say, I’m going to clean it up for you.
But you’re helping them be cooperators and agents, your children, if you have them help you clean it up with you, even though you can obviously do it better on your own apart from them. That’s just how all of this works. Jesus can do everything just as well or better without your help. But because he loves you and wants to incorporate you in this action, he brings you into it. And one of the ways he brings us into it is by becoming man and dying on the cross. So you can imagine a solution to the problem where God simply at the divine level says, okay, I’m crossing that debt off of the account sheet. And then all humanity has done in that situation is cause problems cause the problem of sin with original sin, all of our sins subsequently. And all of that would just be like, look, humanity is just this kind of drag.
But Jesus doesn’t do that. He becomes men. He takes on our humanity. So now when you’re looking at, well, what did humans do? You’ve got all the nasty and all the evil and all the wicked stuff, we did all the incompetent stuff. You also have all this holy stuff. First and foremost, Jesus himself dying on the cross. And then all of the people he empowered by his death to go and do likewise and all the graces he won on the cross to empower you to go and act in a holy way. And now the balance sheet looks completely different because now there are the infinite merits of Christ on the cross, not just applied to our account in an alien righteousness, but actually won for us by a fellow man, Jesus of Nazareth, who is make no mistake, fully human. That matters because it gives our whole species a greater dignity.
And one Corinthians St. Paul can say, as in Adam all died, the problem of sin because of our first parents impacts all of us. Well, likewise, as in Christ, all are made alive. Christ becoming truly man enters this same complicated network of humanity that has often been a cause for ill with sin, but is now a cause for redemption and great goodness, this shows something really good about God’s love for us. Not just that he died for us, but that he became one of us to die to share in our humanity at its fullest level. Now, as you might imagine, this is a quarter hour presentation of one of the most fascinating, complicated, theologically in depth topic only, not even scratching, skimming the surface, right? But I want to just give that to say, no, Jesus did not have to die for your sins, but it’s really good that he did for at least those five reasons.
And in fact, if you go through scripture, you’ll find even more. Alright, final word here, because I’ve been trying to get better at promoting this. If this channel or this episode has benefited you and you want more, you can get not only all the free stuff over on YouTube, you can also find out more on shameless joe.com, my Patreon, where I do a weekly q and a answering user questions. So hope this has been helpful for you and I look forward to hearing from your comments below. Alright, for Shameless Popery; I’m Joe Heschmeyer. God bless you.