I went to see The Passion and I thought it was really beautiful, but then I started to think that dying on a cross seems like a really funny thing for a God to do.
We (Christians) always say that it was necessary for the forgiveness of sins, but if this is the case then why? Why would God have to demonstratively show his love for us. Couldn’t he have done it any other way? Why did he have to suffer phisically for sin, when sin is usually an emotional or mental thing anyway. The more I think about it the more odd it seems to me. Maybe someone could help me understand the necessity of Jesus dying on a cross. Please don’t say just because it fufilled prophecy, because God could have created different prophecy to begin with. Cors
Yes, with a lot of things I wonder why they’re that way and not some other way (particularly when it comes to heaven and hell). But I think part of what God wanted to show us by Jesus dying on the cross is that sin is not just emotional, that these emotions and hurts are just the symptoms of something deeper which really is like being dead. And only He can make something dead live again.
I once heard a fantastic sermon about this, which I can’t recreate properly, but the point was that God is _unable_ to leave sin unpunished.
Yes, all-powerful God is _unable_ to do that. He has to punish it.
And if I think about it for a while I think I can see why. If you spoke to a relative of someone killed in the Omar bombing, and said to them that you thought those who were guilty of killing their son or mother should be let off because you were feeling merciful, how would they respond? Would it be right?
So God has to punish the wrong that we’ve done, so the only option he had was to punish himself if he wasn’t going to punish us.
I guess that’s the whole point of free will. If he punished us for the decisions we made it would not be fair to give us free will.
When I went away from God I eventually came back because I felt that God had done “the right thing” by sending Jesus – to sort of pay us back for all the misery etc. rather than “an unbelievably generous thing” which was totally undeserved.
I’m not sure what I think about this now, but it could be ok to worship God for just doing the right thing – after all he didn’t have to. It’s a bit of a change of perspective though.