Shawn Ryan to Pastor: Why Did Jesus Have to Die?

Reflection

In this short clip from Lakepointe Church, a guest puts to a pastor the question that sits at the centre of the Christian faith: why did Jesus have to die? It is a fair question, and Christianity does not dodge it. The short answer is that something had to be done about the wrong in the world. Every person has felt the gap between how things ought to be and how they are, and the Bible calls that gap sin, a turning away from God that leaves us unable to fix it from our own side. As Isaiah puts it, he was pierced for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities (Isaiah 53:5), a picture written centuries before the cross of the one who would bear it. The Christian claim is not that God is a distant judge who needed convincing, but the opposite. God demonstrates his own love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). At the cross, God does not send a substitute from the sidelines, he comes himself. Jesus himself bore our sins in his body on the cross, so that we might die to sin and live righteously (1 Peter 2:24). That is why the death of Jesus was necessary on God's terms: mercy and justice meet in the same event, and the cost is paid by the one who is offering it. For anyone hearing this for the first time, the invitation is simple. Do not ask whether the cross is fair, ask whether it is true, and then look at what it has done. Millions have found that when they stopped trying to explain their way past it and instead received it, everything changed. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son (John 3:16), and that love is still offered today.

Questions to sit with

• Have you ever assumed the cross was unfair, and what would it mean if God paid the cost himself?
• Where do you see the gap between how things ought to be and how they are, in yourself and in the world?
• If Jesus died for you while you were still far from him, how might that change the way you come to God today?

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