How did Jesus save us by giving his own life? Christians are always telling me Jesus loves me and died for me. But how? I didn’t exist until 2,000 years later. How did Jesus’ death take away sin? Time to read this netizens this answer explains well... The central belief of Christianity is that God sent his only son Jesus to die on the cross for us and by doing so freed the world from sin. But how does that work? - This answer lies is understanding the origins of the Jewish observance of Passover. Pre-Jesus, Judaism was the faith practice set forth by God through Abraham and Moses. A set of laws and regulations for the “Children of Israel” (i.e. Jews) to follow in order to attain righteousness and enter heaven. One criteria was an annual animal sacrifice to erase the past year’s sins from an individual’s spiritual account. Around 1441 BC, Egypt had captured and enslaved Israel. God sent ten plagues on Egypt to prove the existence and power of Israel’s god to the Egyptians. The tenth of these plagues was the instant death of every first born child in one night. To avoid this plague, the children of Israel were instructed (by God through Moses and Aaron) to cover the exterior door frames of their homes with a lamb’s blood, roast the lamb and eat it with unleavened bread and herbs, and not to have any leftover. When God passed by that night, taking the souls of every first born child, He would pass over the homes marked by the lamb’s blood. (Hence the name ‘Passover’) Jesus is often referred to as the “Lamb of God”, an allusion to the first Passover. When Jesus came around 1400 years after the original Passover was required, the “children of Israel” had wandered from God once again. A Passover sacrifice was needed to secure the “children of Israel’s” salvation once again. To end the cycle of failure caused by human nature, Jesus (in the relational position to God equivalent to a human father’s relationship to his son) offered himself as a final blood sacrifice to God, securing salvation for anyone who accepts His sacrifice is sufficient. How can, God, who does not have a physical form, have a son? -We get caught up in semantics on this point and create a lot of unnecessary confusion on this point. Is Jesus God’s son? Spiritually speaking, yes. Biologically, only as much as Eve is God’s daughter. Humans define father-son relationships two ways; biologically or adoptively. Jesus being God’s son is meant to reference how close his relationship to God (our father) is. Biologically, Mary was Jesus’ mother. However, his conception was an act of divine creation, not biological fertilization. Adam was created from dust on dry land. Eve was created from Adam’s rib, on dry land. Jesus in physical carbon form was created in Mary’s womb. I would assume using Mary’s egg, but only because that’s all my small my can conceive! The ‘how’ matters less than the ‘where’ in this case, prophetically speaking. The Messiah spoken of in ancient Jewish prophecy required being born from a virgin; a prophetic detail difficult for any potential imposter to replicate! By fulfilling every messianic prophecy, Jesus exists as the human extension of God. How does Jesus’ death take away my sin? -God is love, light, goodness, and so on; nothing opposite of God can exist in the presence of God (i.e. hate, dark, evil, etc.). What that means for us is we cannot exist in the presence of God because human nature. I find it easier to understand this way: God is ultimate selflessness, human nature is ultimate selfishness; these two philosophies cannot coexist (one cannot be simultaneously selfless and selfish) which separates us from God. When you get right down to it, the root of every sin is selfishness. As I just explained, selfishness is opposite to God, which is how it separates us from Him. Acknowledging Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection as required, adequate, and ultimately covering our life with enough selflessness to exist in the same room as God is how sin is removed. Tantamount to the lamb’s blood over the door frames of enslaved Israelites in 1441 BC. Accepting Jesus’ sacrifice is evidenced through living your life by the morals and principles He taught by example; complete selflessness. Especially as I had not even committed the sin at the time, nor had I even been born. How can one person save the whole world? -To best explain this, we have to look at the concept of time. The human mind perceives time in the form of minutes, days, months, years, etc. God created time, He did not just set it in motion. Now imagine a timeline. When you look at a timeline, you see the beginning, the end, and everything in between simultaneously. The periods noted on the timeline understand time only by their period, the days and years in which they existed. We can comprehend the days we are alive and can grasp the concept of “past” through the study of history. God (and thereby Jesus) views the entire timeline at once. What we perceive as past present and future, God sees as “now”. This gets into a sticky concept of predisposition and free will; if God sees the entire timeline and knows the future, does that mean every decision we make has already been made for us? I equate God’s knowledge to the author of a “choose your own adventure” book the author (God) knows every possible outcome, but the choice of which page to turn to next is up to the reader (us). If we are removed from sin, does that mean no one goes to Hell? -No. The only ones “removed from sin” are those who have accepted Jesus’ sacrifice and resurrection, devoting themselves to living as selflessly as possible. Anyone who has not embraced Jesus as covering for their selfish nature will “go to hell” (hell being eternal isolation from God) because, as I explained above, selfishness and selflessness cannot simultaneously exist.
Posted on: Fri, 28 Mar 2014 13:02:59 +0000
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