For God so loved the World that He gave His only begotten Son … John 3:16

A question that was recently posted to our Exploring Christianity website is, “Why do we say that Jesus died for our sins?” They then comment, “I wasn’t even born when He was crucified, so how could He have died for my sins?”

The answers to these questions are a bit involved and complex, so we’re going need to take some time and will probably consume at least two Posts.  So be patient.  Stick with me and we’ll get there!  Before we can answer the questions though it might be a good idea for us to first agree on a definition of “sin.”  So, let’s start there.

Last week, we talked about God’s desire for mankind; that we establish and remain in complete communion (or in harmony) with Him in life here on Earth and after our Earthly lives in Heaven.  Such a relationship would be perfect in the mutual union of God and man.  Our relationship would be so strong, that everything we did would be in complete harmony with His wishes for us and thus we would never commit a sin.  This is, presumably, the state Adam and Eve were in when they were first created and is the state we will be in when we are in Heaven.  It is also the state that Jesus has been in since the beginning of time, was continually in while alive on Earth, and is still as He is again in Heaven.  That is why we describe His life as having been “perfect.”  He was always and in every way in complete harmony with God’s desires for Him, and He never did anything that could have put Him at odds with what His Father wanted.  There were opportunities for Him to move against God’s Will (remember his anguish in the garden of Gethsemane?), but He didn’t take them.  He exercised His free will to remain in accordance with God’s intent.  He was the only “perfect” man.

So, a quick answer to “what is sin?” is “anything that we do (act, speak, think, or desire) that disturbs or inhibits our communion/harmony with God.”  An equally quick response is, “If sin is being in a state of discord with God’s wishes for us, then all we have to do is to stay in accord with God’s wishes to keep from sinning.”  Oh, if only it were that easy!

The problem results from our “free will.”  Remember that we spoke about man’s free will in last week’s post. There we concluded that it was our own free will that makes it nearly impossible for us to remain in complete and continuous communion/harmony with God.  Because of our free will, it is pretty much a given that we all will make some bad decisions, and therefore do some things that aren’t in accordance with God’s will.  And when we do these things we have moved from harmony into disharmony.  When we are in disharmony with God we are in “sin.”  We either are in complete communion/harmony with Him (like Jesus) or we are not.  There is no “in between.”  We can be in various degrees of harmony with Him (sometimes feeling closer than at other times), but even if we are slightly “out of alignment,” our harmony is not complete, and we are therefore in a state of ‘sin’.

We just cannot seem to stay in step with His wishes for us.  Something that takes us out of harmony with Him can be as seemingly inconsequential as taking a bite out of an apple when He’s told us not to.  Or as innocuous as running a red light when no one else is around (I mean, where’s the harm?).  Or “borrowing” $10 from our friend’s wallet when he’s not looking (he can afford it can’t he?).  You get the picture.  While the acts of sinning are bad, it’s what those acts do to our relationship with God that is important.  Anything that separates us from or places us in disharmony with Him is sin.  And, unfortunately, for most of us, that is where we are most of the time.

Now that we understand the definition of sin, we can move on to answering today’s question: “Why did Jesus need to die for our sins?”  I am aware of two slightly different answers to this question.  We’ll call the two answers: The Classical Answer and The Alternative Answer.

First, The Classical Answer …

The logic of this answer is (as I understand it) as follows …

God is perfect.  Since He is perfect, He cannot either create or abide anything that is not also perfect.  And, because of His great majesty, glory, authority and power, anything that might come into His presence that is not perfect is immediately destroyed.  The imperfect simply cannot exist in the presence of The Perfect. (This is why Moses was not allowed to look directly at Him during any of their conversations.  As an imperfect man, Moses would be instantly incinerated by God’s majesty.   To protect Moses, God could only appear to him as a burning bush, a large cloud, a fiery column or by some other ‘disguise’ to shield Moses’ perception to the point that we could be in His presence without harm.) [There’s a LOT of material in this paragraph for us to unpack, but we’ll get to that later.]

When God created man, he was at his creation perfect.  However, when man sinned, he became imperfect and thus unable to tolerate the presence of God (and vice versa).  Only when separated from God by being thrown out of the Garden of Eden would man be able to survive.  And it is his continual imperfection, (of being “in sin”) that prevents him from entering Heaven on his own ‘merit’.  Because we are innately sinful, we cannot ‘stand’ God’s presence, and He cannot abide ours.  For man to be returned to the complete and eternal communion with Him that God intended, something had to change.  There had to be some sort of “reconciliation” of God’s perfect nature with man’s sinful nature, or man was destined to spend eternity unable to be complete communion/harmony with God.

You might, at this point, ask, “Well, if God is Almighty and is the Creator of All Things, why can’t He just “forgive” our sins?  Seems to me that He should be able to simply wipe the “slate clean”, and then we’d be “good to go”.”

To address this, we must first remember when and where the Bible was written.   As radical as most of it was for the culture from which it came, it still had to be ‘close enough’ to the patterns of thought, logic, and theology then being used to be accepted and understood.  It had to “relate” to the people alive at the time for its insights and revelations to gain traction and acceptance (we can talk later about what a Miracle the Bible is and why and how it still speaks to us and is relevant for us today).  Otherwise it, like so much literature from antiquity, would simply have been read and forgotten.

In Mid Eastern culture of the time, there was no concept of reconcilement without cost.  There was no concept of the “free lunch.”  Everything had a cost.  “An eye for an eye,” was not just a figurative statement.  It was meant literally.  Every wrong demanded a response.  Every debt had to be paid.  Every good deed had to be rewarded.  Everything done or thought about was bound up in the conception of reciprocal action or ‘trade’.

In this vein of thought, if man sinned he could not be reconciled to God without some sort of ‘cost’ being ‘paid’ to ‘balance’ the scale.  Some ‘price’ had to be extracted from the sinner for the ‘payment’ for his sin … “The wages of sin are death…”  And the extracted price had to be at least proportional to the amount/type of the sin committed.  “Small” sins required a small price.  Especially egregious sins required a much higher price.  [See Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus for examples.]  In the Classical Answer, the only way that there could be a reconciliation between God and man was for man to “pay” to God something that was sufficiently precious to him as to ‘outweigh’ the magnitude of the sin committed.  Reconciliation between two parties involved a four-step process: (1) the sinner (or perpetrator of the sin) had to recognize and confess his error and be truly contrite (or sorrowful) about committing it; (2) he then had to ask to be forgiven by the person against whom the act was committed (i.e. it was incumbent on the perpetrator to seek reconciliation); (3) something (an act, or something of sufficient value) had to be offered to the aggrieved party to incent them to accept the apology and the offering as recompense; and (4) only after (1)-(3) had been completed, could or would the aggrieved party be willing to reconcile with the sinner and agree to restore their relationship to the harmonious state is had been in prior to the perpetrator’s sin.

Since man was the imperfect creation of God, there was NOTHING that man had or could possess that was of sufficient ‘value’ to offset the indignity of man’s sins against God.  How could a man give to God anything that was worth as much or more than anything that God had not already given him?  He couldn’t give anything to God that would be enough to make him ‘perfect’ enough to be able to abide God’s presence, to for God to abide his.

And not only was a reconciliation between God and man needed at the time of Jesus’ crucifixion, but whatever solution was then provided had to be efficacious for all time going forward.  If Jesus’ death satisfied the sins of the folks alive at the time, but not those of the people to come after, they’d then be in the same predicament as their forefathers.  The solution needed to be for everyone for all time.

What to do??  How could an imperfect man contrive to offer anything to God that would be sufficient for his past and ongoing sins?  The answer to that point in time had been animal (and sometimes human) sacrifice.  By sacrificing a man’s “first fruits” (presumably the best and most valuable), a man would give what was most important/valuable to him back to God, and presumably, this would be sufficient to expiate the sins the man had committed against God to that point.  But because the sacrifice only ‘bought’ man ‘out’ of sin to the point of the sacrifice, man had to make a continuing stream of sacrifices to God to keep paying for his subsequent sins … a never-ending cycle of inadequate sacrifices.

The answer to this crisis was Jesus the Christ.  And, we’ll finish the Classical explanation of how and why in next week’s blog.

God’s Blessings on you all,

Richard

July 13, 2018