Did Jesus have to die?

As a young Christian girl, I could never understand why we would refer to the brutal butchering of the God we worship as “Good” Friday. I could never seem to make any sense of what appeared to be a severe oxymoron. Okay, so people do celebrate victories in battles and wars, where the proud and high-flying flag of the victor brings in its wake death and destruction. But, the crucifixion of Christ was certainly a different matter. As far as I knew, Jesus wasn’t the Commander-in-Chief of any army - he wasn’t clad in armor, riding a grand horse and decapitating the Romans left, right and center!

And my confusions didn’t end there. We are talking about the Son of God here, who walked on this earth 2000 years ago doing the most incredible miracles, healing the lame and blind, delivering people from demons, raising the dead, ordering the winds to be still! So….why didn’t he just zap all those Romans who were persecuting him? I am sure he could have ordered lightning and thunder down on them and fried their brains. Why didn’t he? This was the same Jesus, who walked into the synagogues and gave all the hypocrite religious leaders a good piece of his mind. He would have made an excellent lawyer today. I’m sure he could have defended himself flawlessly in front of Pontius Pilate. Then, why did he silently, like a lamb awaiting slaughter, let his enemies falsely accuse him of sedition and whatever else?

I needed to get to the bottom of this and I began to find the answers a few years ago. The first piece of the puzzle: 1000 to 700 years before Jesus came to this earth, prophets like Isaiah and great kings like David made prophesies about the very details of his crucifixion – Kind David prophesied the betrayal of Christ by his disciple Judas, and Isaiah wrote "He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth" (Isaiah 53:7). When the Roman soldiers pierced his hands and feet and gambled for his clothes, they had no clue that they were fulfilling a prophecy made by King David in 900.B.C. (Psalm22:16-18)

This was mind-blowing! So, does this mean that Jesus had to die, in the very horrifying manner in which he did? Yes sir, it did. And then it started to dawn upon me. This was always God’s plan for mankind! God wasn’t some heartless, unloving father who got kicks from sending his son to the guillotine. Neither was he suddenly overcome by a surge of mercy and pity for the pinnacle of his creation (that’s us, btw) when he sent his son to save the day. Contrary to what I once thought, things never got out of hand; God was always in charge.

Okay, so now to the big question- why did Jesus have to die in the first place? (When this part of the puzzle came together, I felt that I had been hit by a truck- what a revelation!) I had heard many times that Jesus died for our sins. But hello..I wasn’t even alive back then, so whose sins were we talking about. And why was this relevant now, anyway? I read, inquired, listened, believed, and finally this is what I got.

 God, the creator of the heaven and earth, and of you and me, is perfectly holy. His standard of holiness is way way over our league and over our grasp, and he absolutely detests sin; it’s like a sick stench in his nose. Now here is the shocker- for him, murder is sinful and so is an unspoken lie. We can try to be as good as possible, but we can never meet God’s standard. Now God is perfectly good, holy, loving and merciful, but also perfectly just. And the Bible is really clear on this bit: ‘the wages of sin is death’ (Rom 6:23). There is no other payment for sin, but death. And that is how death came on the scene when Adam and Eve disobeyed and lied in the Garden of Eden. And guess what, we inherited that sin DNA. Hmmm…dismal..

But as I just said, God is also perfectly loving and merciful. And he didn’t create us to just die. So that is why he intervened in the form of Jesus walking the earth. The sinless Jesus (born of Virgin Mary, so no Sin DNA) was all man and all God, and when he went on the cross his death was enough payment for all the sins of mankind – past, present, and future sins.

So, when God looks at those who believe and receive Jesus in their lives, he no longer sees their sins. Instead, he sees his beloved Son. That’s what we mean by “being covered by His blood”. The story doesn’t end at Good Friday, thankfully, but at Easter – when Jesus rose from the dead. The only one in history to defeat death and sin, he made a way for all others to do so too, asking no more than that we believe and receive this truth.

Many questions still need answers. But, then again, who am I to even attempt to understand the workings of God’s mind? So, I’ll let him reveal to me as much as he wishes. And then, maybe I’ll ask him when we eventually meet.