OP ive had the same question and here’s what i think the real answer is: listen I’m not a theologian defending this position, just trying to state what it seems Christians are supposed to believe on this topic, because on its face it seems as you say…no sacrifice at all.
In short, it’s not about the finality of death…it’s about the experience of death and the inherent corruption of it to a being who otherwise would never have to go through it.
to my understanding the idea is God experienced death (and suffering) which previously he had never done, and otherwise would never have done. Probably
I’ll get flayed for this analogy but in Superman the movie (the old one from the 80’s) Superman gives up his powers to be with Lois, and in so doing experiences things like weakness and vulnerability for the first time. It’s kind of like that.
So Christians believe, at least the ones who bother to ask this question, that God chose to experience suffering when, being perfect, he didn’t have to. And that suffering changed him permanently, even though he wasn’t dead permanently. The focus isn’t on the permanence of death, but rather on the experience of death and what it would mean for a perfect deity to experience it, and what would motivate them to be willing to do this, and what the outcome would be.
This theme is in some movies and literature…where there is this character who is perfect and beautiful and should never have to encounter any of the things we encounter, and thus be corrupted, but then because they love the human character they choose to, and are forever marred.
Maybe it helps to imagine if you were a being who could live your whole life without suffering, pain or death (the experience of powerlessness, pain and alienation in dying and death)…if you said ‘you know what? I’m going to voluntarily go through it,’ that would be a sacrifice because you don’t need to and it would change you permanently.
Why would experiencing a human death (and suffering) change a God that should already be all knowing and thus would know what it would be like to experience death? If God had to experience something in order to know what it’s truly like and can be changed from such an experience, doesn’t that make God not all knowing and wouldn’t that discount his Godhood?
Also I’m not trying to debate, just want better understanding.
I’m maybe a little far out from a lot of Christians theologically, so maybe I’m not in charge of authoritative answers here, but I would say that there’s maybe a difference between understanding something, and having experienced something yourself. I think there’s a powerful difference between a God who is smart enough to help you, and a God who’s been through all things, and is going to help you, and that latter one is just more meaningful in terms of bridging the gap between you and an infinite God.
Yes, I can understand the pathos behind it. What I don’t understand is akin to what
u/Midnight_Magician56 said. How is dying in human form supposed to be a grand symbolic sacrifice of how God loved his children so much he was willing to suffer and bear that pain when an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being would have already known what that death would be like? From my perspective, the whole thing loses its gravitas and symbolism simply because it’s not novel to God even if he was Jesus. If he is truly omni-everything, death would not be a foreign concept and he would know full well what it was already like before even experiencing it.
Yeah, to be clear, I’m not a huge believer in the trinity meaning that there’s only one individual involved in the whole thing, I think that’s maybe an oversimplification that loses some things. And, I think we tend to lose something when we oversimplify God down to questions of if he’s Omni everything, can he make burritos that he can’t eat? My point being, I approach this topic with a lot of humility and recognition that time maybe isn’t a great vantage from which to comprehend eternity, and that I personally cant even describe everything I do feel about this, kind of like how it’s hard to describe love in general. So I probably can’t give anyone an authoritative answer to that that’s going to satisfy.
But I will say that I think the pain that you and I have experienced in life matters to us, and I think it matters to God. In a sense, it doesn’t matter, because when I lose someone I love, it’ll just be a blink in God’s eyes and then I’ll be reunited with them, and wrong will be made right, so it maybe shouldn’t matter, but it still hurts, and that hurt is real. In the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, he cries with his family, even though he knows that he’s going to raise him back from the dead, and I think that’s beautiful and right and matters to me, even though maybe in the long run it doesn’t make sense if we imagine ourselves as God. So maybe it matters because what we experience and feel just does matter to God? And for me, if God cares about my stupid meaningless human activities, then maybe I care about yours, and I can love a little more deeply, and try and make things mean something in response. So I don’t totally know how God works, but it matters to me I think.
Actually going through a tortuous and painful death could be considered a sacrifice no matter how many times you’ve experienced it tbh.
But to add some light theology to the discussion:
The purpose of the death was to permanently satisfy the payment of sins (“without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sin…” Hebrews 9:22) It was also to fulfill the prophecies to the Jewish people.
Jesus, being God in human form, accomplished 2 things in his human life as well:
He experienced every temptation that we do, as a human, so that he could 1. relate to us in the remainder of our lives here on earth (Hebrews 4:15) and so that 2. he could be the perfect (human) sacrificial lamb of atonement (see purpose of his death above), since no other human would ever be able to live a perfect life (Romans 3:23)
Edit: to add, it’s not that God did something *as a service to us* as much that he did something *we were not capable of doing ourselves*
Which brings me to the question I had since childhood. Why are we to feel grateful for god's sacrifice when god is the one who created the rules that made it necessary for him to make such a sacrifice. He loopholed his own rules when he literally could've just decided to do something else.
Bro, logically NONE of this makes sense. It's just humans coping with their own mortality and knowing that potentially ALL of this is essentially meaningless and we are just a cosmic accident.
The argument could be made that the entirety of the "sacrifice" would necessarily include the ~30 year lifetime of perfection that he lived. If he had fucked up at all anywhere along the way, he would have been incapable of providing the "ultimate sacrifice" in the end.
You could say he "sacrifices his life" in the sense that he died, but you could also say it in the sense that it was something he had to dedicate his entire mortal life to accomplishing.
So it wouldn't just be the weekend,but would be everything that lead up to that weekend as well.
It's sort of like when a master painter whips out a masterpiece in an hour. You don't just count the time it took to make the painting itself, but the years of practice it took to be able to accomplish that.
This would apply to humans yea. We can "understand" things but not really get it until it happens.
But an omniscient God would not be limited by anything. They would have to know literally every single thing. Including every emotion and every kind of pain.
They'd know it before they even created it.
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This is an interesting analogy. But God is all-knowing in Christianity, with zero exceptions, since the beginning and the end — without limitations of time or perspective. He knows the human experience in all its variations better than we know it ourselves. He does not need to personally experience anything to understand it perfectly.
i.e., God doesn‘t need to experience childbirth to know every detail of what a woman experiences in that process, and to have infinite empathy for it. He even knows the specific experience of your wife‘s childbirths, and not just the human experience of childbirth in general.
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I'm an atheist, and so I'm just guessing, but maybe God made up this scenario of suffering through his proto-human, to show humans that they can and should refrain from being terrible to each other 24/7.
IMHO, religion's one redeeming value is that it keeps shitty people from being as shitty to others as they might otherwise be.
As a “learning experience,” I guess I’d have to agree with you eddiewachowski. I’m not a Christian, but I think it was more than just “to learn about dying.” Whether or not it’s “sufficient” is going to have to be debated further I guess.
The point of Christ death is not that death and pain were not known to God, but that in his time of death Christ was taking on the sins of all humanity, and sin creates a separation between humans and God. At his most human, what Jesus experienced is the separation between himself and God, which God before had never experienced, as he was never "made flesh".
I'm not sure that God's omniscience should be interpreted in that way. He's all-knowing in the literal sense, as in he knows everything there is to know (what causes cancer, what will happen 5 minutes from now, where socks actually go when you can't find them in the dryer, and so on). But I don't think God has first-hand experience of what it's like to be a human.
To use an analogy: imagine someone who grew up since birth locked in a room where the only visible colors and black and white. While in the room, this person learns all the physical properties of the colors: the number of nanometers of the wavelength of red, say. Even armed with this knowledge, the person would still not know what red looks like. Similarly, God may *know* everything there is to know *about* what it's like to be human, but still not know what it's actually like to be human.
Small but important correction from my classes. (Please don't interpret this as rude, I just want to let to give my info). We are not made in God's image. Adam and Eve were. But as soon as they sinned, every child was made in the image of their parents, as God is perfect but we are not. This means that we are not made in God's image but rather our parents. Hope this helps! :)
> We are not made in God's image. Adam and Eve were. But as soon as they sinned, every child was made in the image of their parents, as God is perfect but we are not
If Adam and Eve were made perfect like God, then why would they have sinned? Can God sin?
Eh not really. Never heard that one before but it still doesnt make sense. We all came from adam and eve. It's also kind of a sick belief that people are considered to have sinned before they were even born.
The problem we run into here in terms of a canon answer is that one of the things people disagree on pretty consistently is what it means to be all knowing because one very common position is that god actually co-experiences humanity. But that's not a universal position because the bible doesn't really try to lay out too much of god's metaphysical nature.
I would have a serious problem with this interpretation from a Christian perspective. If God only has an intellectual knowledge of certain aspects of humanity, and not an intimate complete knowledge (that includes perfect empathy of what we go through), then God is not fully omniscient. He is supposed to know us better than we know ourselves, how the smallest aspects of the human experience shape our decisions, our insecurities, etc.. That is what puts God in a position to judge us ultimately, in a way that we are not meant to judge each other.
We don’t know what’s going through other people’s heads and how they experience their life, but God is meant to fully know all of that, down to the smallest feeling. By definition, he cannot be merely book smart.
Not necessarily to know they’re evil, I can see bad things like that and know they’re evil. But some Christians, myself included, I think do believe that Jesus experienced ALL the evil to be able to better succor those that will suffer those things.
Death is an act that every living thing that has ever been or ever will be will experience.
The significance of a god electing to experience death was and still is pretty novel, as far as religions go.
I think that the point is that although he did not have to, he became mortal and experienced things as we do. It is humbling to go from being an omnipotent god to being a human with no power except for what is in your mind. He humbled himself, allowed himself to be tortured, shamed, tried by men, and finally killed for US.
At least that is the way I see it. I like how we are keeping things civil so far. Let’s keep the dialogue going.
It’s a nuanced thing and the explanation above isn’t quite what a theologian would say.
Central to the Christian story (perhaps most central of all) is the idea of the “mystery” that Jesus was both fully human and fully God.
See, the fundamental story of the Bible is that God made the world to be co-ruled by humanity. But the disobedience of Adam and Eve introduced sin into the nature of man, separating us from God. The Old Testament is the ongoing story of man being unable to repair that relationship, even with Gods help: Noah shows that even if bad influences are removed, we sin; Babel shows that even when cooperating we sin; Abraham shows that even a family special relationship we will sin; the prophets show that even when God warns us we will sin; Moses shows that even if God literally writes rules in stone and gives them to you, we will sin.
The point is—we separated ourselves, and we can’t fix it.
So God did.
God is a “unity of diversity”—three personalities perfectly fused as one. And one of those personalities took on human flesh—“Immanuel”, one of the names of Jesus, literally means “God with us.” We can’t go to him so he came to us.
By being a human and dying but being perfect and therefore risen, Jesus defeats death for all humans (more on this in a moment). It is as if he blazed a trail that now other humans may follow. As a result, in the last chapter of the Bible we are shown a future in which, once again, “we will be Gods people and he will be our God”—together again, relationship eternally restored.
So it isn’t that Jesus had to “make a bad sacrifice”—it’s that the only way to fix what was broken was for a perfect human to die, and no human could do it … so God stepped in and became human to do it for us. That’s why the ability to be risen doesn’t minimize the sacrifice because the permanence wasn’t the point — it was about having a perfect human die, so that death could be defeated.
But of course that answers one question and opens a much more difficult one—how does that work exactly? How does a perfect humans death allow God to cancel death?
This is called “atonement” and is a hotly debated point in Christian theology. Personally, I would say it’s pointless to argue because if it really is true, we are likely unable to understand it…it’s like trying to explain calculus to a kid who just learned two digit arithmetic. The words wouldn’t even make sense except by analogy.
And analogies are what we have. One analogy (penal substitutionary atonement) imagines a person found guilty of a sentence, and someone must pay that sentence; Jesus innocently endured more pain than any of us deserve and thus “pays our debt”. One analogy (Christus victor) imagines a cosmic battle with Satan, sin and death on one side and Jesus defeated them all and proved superior, so faith in him can be gifted that same ability. One analogy (ransom theory) is what you see in Chronicles of Narnia—basically Jesus makes a deal with Satan, trades his life for all the other souls, and Satan agrees without realizing God planned to just start raising the dead anyway. All of these analogies have at least some scriptural support; none are slam dunks.
The OPs question reveals probably a default that they have imagined penal substitutionary atonement and this are trying to reason out why taking a punishment that is known to be temporary would mean anything. But that’s asking a very specific question about a single analogy that is intended to help us visualize something that the Bible itself calls a divine mystery that we are incapable of actually understanding.
There is a deep, deep chain of questions you can't answer here. They're all really silly too, a God cannot be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving at the same time.
Look, if you choose to believe in a God, that's fine, it's not at all wrong to imagine that the universe has some kind of subjective significance or that there is some higher layer to reality that involves the will of conscious entities.
But you just can't reconcile that in a "human" way with human world rules. We are severely limited as a species, so trying to come up with storylines about deities is peak hubris and peak foolishness.
The real answer, as someone who used to be very Christian and very deep into apologetics, is that most "believers" simply do not think that deeply about it.
Basically what I've noticed is belief is founded on one of two things
1. Simply accepting it and not thinking much about it (the vast majority of people)
2. Coming up with convoluted arguments so long and winding that by the time you've worked yourself to the end of the thought you've most forgot some of the foundational premises or other arguments you have which rely on certain premises that you've since contradicted (the few people whose brains go brrr so much they can't help but think deeply about it)
Same reason why Jesus wanted to go for a fast, even if he really didn’t need to: it was to test himself.
God may had known what death was like, but the point of it was going through it as a human
I don’t follow the reasoning of your last sentence. God being all knowing would know what death is like in concept, but he would also know what it’s like to go through it as a human because that’s the whole point of omniscience. He’s supposed to know all. If a God had to place himself in a human body to experience something to know what it is like, would that even make him God?
There is no reasoning, it's simply speculation. None of us are God so these assumptions are simply wild guesses, and yours is as good as mine. God by our definition is all knowing and is not bound by time. He would simply know of everything at all times.
So unless the Christian God is different from that definition of God, that prior explanation Blacodex pointed out is not correct.
There is no understanding. Every answer an apologist gives to a critical mind, 10 new questions arise. There's a reason all of their arguments turn away from the laws of logic and into every fallacy known to man, the most popular I know of being circular reasoning, argument from "authority," and confirmation bias.
Then they'll turn around and strawman the hell out of your position and think they struck gold. Religious nuts are pathetic and deserve pity for being incapable of applying critical thinking skills across all aspects of life, including what you were told to believe from the moment of your conception.
I’m sure there’s many interpretations, but did this make god vengeful towards humanity? Or empathetic to the suffering that humans experience? Did Jesus “die for our sins” or is humanity destined to repent for having sinned by killing god?
The way I was taught (Southern Baptist) was that in old times, we would sacrifice lambs for our sins. Our sins dying along with the lamb, cleansing us of the sins.
But God sent himself to Earth, as Jesus, to endure the temptations of sin, and most importantly, die. Jesus wasn't literally God, rather an aspect of him, and reflected that in life. He lived a life not unlike ours, though he was always overcoming sin and living a perfect life. He preached love between all of mankind and that the only salvation was accepting God's forgiveness for our sins.
However forgiveness alone wasn't enough, you had to be cleansed of it enter God's kingdom. Just because you are forgiven doesn't mean you are cleansed of it. (Think like you're a child and you rolled around in mud. Your mom may be mad but forgives you, but you still aren't going to bed without taking a bath first) So when the time came, Jesus gave his life on the cross, taking upon himself all the sins of mankind. Past, Present, Future... all sin would be cleansed through his death. He would be the lamb of all of mankind, for all of history.
It wasn't about experiencing death, it was about cleansing us of our sins. The death was simply needed to cleanse the world of sin. He died so that through him, we may be cleansed and be able to enter heaven, because God has already forgiven us regardless whether we ask for forgiveness or not.
But how could Jesus enter heaven if he took on the sin of mankind, well thats the purpose of the Resurrection. He died and took sin down with him, and rose again to be clean once again and taken, body and soul, into heaven, as the Son aspect of God. (Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost)
This is why its preached so heavily to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, because he is the only pathway into heaven now, as his sacrifice has taken upon your sins. You can't just sacrifice a lamb anymore because your sins already died with Jesus, but you must take that path because its the path God himself gave you. You have to accept Gods forgiveness by accepting Jesus Christ's sacrifice.
Here's a better analogy. It's like saying a billionaire worked at a fast food restaurant for a day. If Bill Gates worked at McDonald's that would give him some perspective of working in food service (maybe he gets yelled at, maybe his body hurts, maybe he messes up the orders) but he still gets to go back to being a tech billionaire. In the end, that one day is no sacrifice at all. It would be laughable to claim otherwise.
Now, back to the Jesus example. Giving up godhood permanently for the greater good would be a true sacrifice.
What I don’t get then is why did god/jesus have to die, then resurrect himself, then go back to heaven, just to promise to come back yet again for a 3rd time? None of it makes any sense
Doesn't it all just go to illustrate that God isn't actually omniscient if he has to send Jesus to get an idea of the suffering that humans (including the Isrealites) had been experiencing for millenia? And thus how could God possibly be engaged enough with the happenings on Earth for omnipotence to be meaningful either?
I was raised Christian, but never truly understood what that meant. At age 21 I decided to become a better Christian so I began attending Bible study to truly understand my religion. On the second or third class we discussed the holy trinity and I found myself wondering the same thing…”why was the sacrifice necessary?”
I was unable to get any answer other than “because it was.” That was the beginning of the end of my faith. Ironic that my quest to become more serious about my religion made me leave it behind…but not unusual. My mom went back to college to become a pastor and came out with a severely weakened devotion…the people at the college were unfazed. They said learning about the history of the Bible always goes one of 2 ways.
Jesus of Nazareth is an actual historical figure and most scholars and historians agree that he was crucified. In fact, his life and crucifixion are the two aspects of Jesus’ life that we can confirm with certainty.
Why couldn't God just like forgive and forget ? He can incarnate and torture himself in a body but can't forgive? Just the religion on the whole is in rocky foundations logically. Even if we are sinful and depraved God can still forgive if he is all loving and powerful. You don't need to crucify yourself to prove you love someone.
Because god isn’t ONLY merciful and loving. He is those things, but he is also just, as in justice, and that’s just as important. Justice means that evil deserves to be punished. If we as society let a known serial killer go free to continue killing, that isn’t mercy or love. That’s injustice.
So how do you square it if you want to be both just and merciful? Evil happened, justice demands a price has to be paid. So god pays it himself. He takes the responsibility and takes the punishment so that justice is served. Then he can offer mercy to those willing to accept it.
The concept is called “substutionary atonement” and has been debated and written about, unsurprisingly, for approximately 2000 years. Thomas Aquinas wrote some of the definitive work on it if you want to read up on it.
Now, a more important question for me is why does he create humans, test them despite knowing the outcome and judge them based on something they did after he allowed them to?
That doesn't really make sense to me. What was the cost? What did God's death achieve? And why am I still going to be punished if I do not believe, despite the fact that he supposedly died for me?
I'm willing to accept that mercy. But I have no reason to believe it exists.
Instead of killing himself Jesus could be a slimy lawyer who convinces God the evil never happened? I read Aquinas its less a critique of that and the simple fact that God can't forgive so he needs blood from himself. A just person can forgive.
Well, we don’t know how the universe came into existence so it’s just as likely that some god who’s not bound by this universe’s laws spoke it into existence as it is that it’s just always existed, or that we’re all in a simulation. We can use science to get all the way back to the big bang but why it happened or what came before- that’s anybody’s guess.
So a god creating everything isn’t such a leap to me: we have as much evidence for intelligent design as we do non-intelligent design. None, only speculation
This is only true if you believe in penal substitutionary atonement, which is popular among evangelicals and fundamentalists but isn't the majority opinion among all Christians. Nor was it believed by any Christian for the first 1.5 millennia of Christianity.
OP, you'd be better off asking a Christian sub about this like r/OpenChristian or r/ChristianUniversalism. But the answer is that Jesus wasn't a sacrifice *to God*, he was a sacrifice *for us*. He collectively saves all of human nature from death because we rise together with him.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christus_Victor
The logic I heard was that you had to accept God's forgiveness. In old days, you'd kill a lamb as a show of your acceptance, since sacrificing the lamb cleansed you of your sins. Think of it this way: God forgave you for your sins, and you showed him your acceptance by doing what you can to rid yourself of sin. Just because it's forgiven doesn't mean it isn't still there.
So when Jesus died, he took upon all sins of mankind. Since your sins died with Jesus, you now simply have to accept God's forgiveness, and that is shown by following and accepting Jesus as your lord and savior. This means following the preaching of Jesus and if you stray, finding your way back to the righteous path.
I'm an atheist but it makes sense in the terms of the rest of the teachings of the Bible.
> Since your sins died with Jesus, you now simply have to accept God's forgiveness, and that is shown by following and accepting Jesus as your lord and savior.
If my sins died with Jesus then why do I have to do anything further? Either my sins are gone or they aren't, by Jesus's dying.
Theres 2 parts. Being cleansed and accepting forgiveness. Thats why. If you got mud all over the house and yourself, your mom may forgive you for making a mess, but you still have to clean up before being allowed to go to bed. Jesus said he'll help you with it, but you gotta at least provide him the mop and help out. Your sins are cleansed through him. By accepting him, you are asking him to be your savior, which he would be. He gave his life so that you may allow him to take them upon himself. But if you don't accept him, you're not relinquishing your sins to him. You have to allow him to take them, and the only way is following his word and accepting him. You need to try to be righteous, and when you fail (not if) you repent and ask for forgiveness. He will always accept it if you truly mean it and take those away as well. This isnt a logical thing, when he died for all of mankinds sins, he didnt actually claim all sins right then and there, he became a beacon for all sins to transfer to him. All sins would be cleansed, so long as the link is there.
It's not so cut and dry as that. Some Christian traditions believe that those who basically lived as God commanded could be given the chance of Heaven. There are some who think that everyone goes to Heaven eventually. It's variable.
"hell" is a place from Norse-Germanic mythology and appears nowhere in the Bible in the original languages. The Bible actually says everyone is saved (see: Philippians 2:9-11, 1 Timothy 4:9-11, Romans 11:25-32, etc.).
I'm pretty sure there's an understanding that people are born out of Christianity and live a different upbringing in the Bible. And it also states God is just and delivers his verdict individually, ofc athiests especially those who left Christianity would be screwed still though
«My God my God, why have you forsaken me»
This is what Jesus is saying when he dies. The sacrifice was to be separated from God. When you are omnipotent/omnicient this is supposed to be really bad as it’s experiencing not being that way.
Psalm 22 starts with that but the next few verses say
“Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel, in you our fathers trusted; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame”.
The psalm is about having patience and trust in god in the face of suffering and oppression. Jesus quoted it, because he knew his followers would know what it meant, and that he was confident in God, that this was Gods will, to have trust that God is just and in control of all things.
And like, super crucified. They didn't normally use nails, they just tied you to the cross. Also the stabbing and the carrying the cross were all, I believe, unique to him.
Which is like a light breeze for an omnipotent being🤷🏻♀️ the "sacrifice" is still a stupid concept. Sacrifice implies losing something, the Jesus thing isn't a sacrifice at all
This sub isn't going to give you a serious answer so here it is. The Romans didn't kill Jesus, Jesus chose to give up his life which happened when he said "it is finished".
The sacrifice is that he bore God's wrath so that the people he came to save wouldn't have to.
Separation from God.
Fun fact, Hell isn't ever described directly as this fiery place, only as a separation from God. The only time a description of the Hell we think of appears in the Bible is in Revelations when talking about the Beast, The False Prophet, those not written in the book of life, Death and Hades being cast into a Lake of Fire and Brimstone. But its not ever called Hell.
The way you worded that is a nonsensical question...
God inflicted the wrath reserved for the elect onto Jesus and he verbally acknowledged what it was like while on the cross, that he was forsaken by God.
So we don’t really know what was going on there, only that he was forsaken. I’m just trying to get a better understanding of what happened. If god hadn’t inflicted the wrath on jesus and inflicted it on us instead, what would that be like for us?
This will be a long explanation.
In Christianity God is a trinity. Father, Son, Holy Spirit.
When God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush he said His name is "I am". In the Hebrew grammar I am has the three times past, present and future. So God is He who always was, He who is and He who always will be. Alpha and Omega. Beginning and End. That is a tremendous declaration since it means God is a being that transcends time and existence itself since he Always has been and Always will.
When Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the garden of eden because of the devil's temptation, they stopped "being". To be is basically the essence of God himself, so from that moment onwards we stopped being in God, lost our sense of being and started looking for our sense of belonging in the world and mundane stuff.
Jesus is the second person of the trinity, the verb of God who's incarnated into a human. The verb is that who gives action to the subject. God is ( was and will be). The subject is God and the verb to be. Jesus said to a pharisee, before Abraham was I am (declaring He is not only God but the action of being).
So basically God gave himself into sacrifice, his being, his action and divine property of being itself so that we could be in Christ through his sacrifice in the cross. So everyone who was believed in Him throughout the time, finds salvation and can get our sense of being back. That's why there's never been a greater love than Jesus dying for us, He who was the embodiment of being itself lowered himself from a divine status to a human one, suffered and died like a cursed individual in the hands of his own people so that we could be saved through that selfless act of love and sacrifice.
Also the Holy Ghost was sent to us by Jesus as a paraclite, the one who consoles so that through it Jesus gives testament of his love for us even after his ascension to heaven.
I genuinely appreciate this detailed explanation. As it typically does, this raises logic questions for me about God's motivations and depiction as 'perfect'.
As a root cause, it seems God himself is to blame for Adam and Eve disobeying him since they were apparently both designed by God and, according to that explanation, were part of God's being. It wasn't their fault that they had the ability to be tempted; God (intentionally?) created a design flaw but still blamed it on them, for which human 'sin' was then a foregone conclusion. That is, God created the concept of sin, built it into humans, and thus the whole debacle with Jesus could have been avoided by redesigning that instead of complicating it with a tortuous journey for God/Jesus/humans at large.
It's amazing for me to extrapolate that this initial design flaw has then translated into thousands of years of both religiously-driven cruelty and kindness, even between Abrahamic religions.
Hi, I can definitely see why you think that. Let me try and explain those interesting points.
You're right when you say that Adam and Eve were designed by God. According to Genesis we were created in his image and likeness. What does that entail? That both Adam and Eve were created "free". God is a free being and as such He did not created us with restrictions in mind. He gave us his spirit and reason to measure our actions and deduce the possible good and bad outcomes of them. They were not part of God but they were in a direct communication and in total sync with him, we were with Him and He was with us.
However, we were tempted. What is temptation? At its core temptation is not trusting in God and believing that God restricts us from achieving our plans. God clearly said, if you do this, these consequences will happen. The snake (the devil) as the liar he is (also called Father of Lies) manipulated God's words and said to Eve, "it's not true that you will die, he just doesn't want you to be gods like him".
It's reasonable to think that there was an oversight from God and that he might not be perfect after all. Thing is you can't really love without freedom. And this applies to human relationships as well. We can either be the jealous and overprotective bf and gf always afraid of being cheated on and restricting our SO from being free. Or we can be the loving kind and say, you know what I trust you and love you and I'll give you the freedom you deserve. Whatever happens, it depends of how that person uses their free will.
God can't make a squared circle, it's a logic error. As such, he can't create a human that's not free, because that will be going against his nature (image and likeness). So it's true that, in His love for us he left that door open for a possible temptation. And still knowing perfectly well he went along with it.
The concept of sin was introduced by us. Sin is the act of disobeying God's will. God has a will, it's how things should be, but he does not force his will on us because that would be going against our freedom. But God in his mercy has given us our salvation in the form of Christ. I always like to make the analogy of God being kind of like waze or google maps. It gives you the best and optimal route and we somehow believe our way it's better. But what do those apps do if you select an alternative ( and not so good) route? It recalculates everything and helps you get to your destination.
The holy Trinity is weirder than that. Although all three are the same God, they're not all the same.
Jesus mortal life ended when he was crucified, just like your mortal life will end when you're going to die, but your immortal soul is immortal, and will be in heaven eternally.
It's not so much a self sacrifice death the way we talk about it today. The point was that like the animal sacrifices before him he was the lamb sacrificed to atone for sin.
After the Old Testament, God took a chill pill. He quit with His shenanigans and magically got Mary pregnant. So much is borrowed from other religions in Christianity. The Rite of Spring is a Pagan holiday. The sacrificial lamb, as it were. And spring is a time of regrowth. It’s all essentially a myth based on anthropomorphising spring. “He is Risen.” So are the flowers and plants, and the temperature outside. It’s all just Paganisms repurposed.
You're right, the sacrifice of Jesus only makes sense in the context of how other religions viewed sacrifice at the time. Greek mythology, for example, was filled of sacrificing animals and burning their meat (and all the punishments for humans who did it wrong or tried to trick the gods). Christianity inverted the concept of sacrifice, which must have been mind blowing at the time, but doesn't quite hit the same for a culture who doesn't get that concept.
He was really close with his father, and on that day, his father abandoned him. It really sucked, plus there were nails in his hands and he was thirsty.
I dunno man. It goes further back than even that. If the Christian god is all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful then most of it doesn't work. You cannot forgive someone else for something you did and have it mean anything. You cannot sacrifice something you can never lose.
I mean, it was done to save humanity from gods own wrath/judgement, so if god thinks it was enough then it was. No use trying to understand it logically unfortunately.
Non Christian here. That’s one of the ones I never understood, the trinity. Haven’t heard a rational explanation of it either. Three different aspects of the same thing? So why did Jesus say “father why have you forsaken me”? Or “forgive them father.. etc”I mean it’s like Jesus never intended to be a god or something.
I've always been of the mind that death has meaning because we don't know that it isn't final. Every bit of evidence and fact indicates it is the final, horrifying conclusion.
Religion would have us act "on faith" and believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, there is something beyond that twiling veil.
I, too, question what kind of a sacrifice it is for a being that is 100% sure it is literally a part of god, that it is truly 100% immortal, knows 100% that there is life and glory after death, literally speaks to and for god, who is its father and also itself, to "die" for the sins that it did not commit, for the salvation of those who do not deserve it but did commit those sins.
Also, you and that god who is also your father and also you, whom has guaranteed literally and personally to you that this death shit don't ***really*** apply to you and that you're TOTALLY good dawg- you and that god, one and the same, are the ones that make up the rules that say that sin even exists, much less gave beings the ability to sin, and you're also the one keeping score of those sins and that they matter.
I'm just curious, in those exact same shoes, who WOULDN'T make that sacrifice? You have 100% proof that death is only a temporary delay to a return unto eternal grace, glory, and power, and it's all for you, Damien- Just on the other side of that door.
"Ah, but Jesus had to have faith, too!" Sure, but given he had a direct hotline to God, he was the product of immaculate conception and was heralded by prophets, AND he had the ability to perform miracles up to and including raising the dead, who wouldn't have faith with all of those privileges?
***I truly mean no disrespect with any of this. I wish I could believe. I'd love to have some measure of comfort instead of just the screaming void of non-existence. These are thoughts I've had since I was a child.***
What kind of sacrifice was it really for him? He had nothing to be scared of, and he knew it. That's why death is scary. We're expected to push all of that down and walk by faith, but it's like God didn't hold himself to that same standard. He gave Christ all of the cheat codes and behind-the-scenes footage, let him read the script, and then everyone applauds when he allows himself to be sacrificed for the sins of man for a limited period of horrific torture while he knows 150% that a perfect eternity awaits him as a literal eternal god-king.
Like, given allll the evidence he had; conversing with God, having the ability to perform miracles, interacting with Satan in the desert, the visions and prophecies; who wouldn't have done the same thing when ultimately they have nothing to lose and everything to gain? Also, as the perfect omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creater of ALL, you've known all of this was going to happen, and how it was going to end, since before you even created the concept of time.
Again, I guess with questions like these the answer is always going to be "You must let go of your doubt and experience faith!", and yet it's not like Jesus was just some unknowing rando that God monitored and rewarded after he made all the right moves unbeknownst to him. He knew beforehand all that would happen and, as part of the godhead, planned it all out.
So like, not even holding itself to the same standards that its holding us imperfect cretins to.
If “God” made, from scratch mind you, humans and animals and plants and light and darkness and everything else in the universe then why isn’t he still making stuff? He get bored with his cReAtiViTy and just stopped?? Also, if Jesus died and then came back to life and he hasn’t died a second time….then WHERE THE FUCK IS HE?? Just go on walkabout for 2000 some odd years?? He isn’t “coming back” and I wish they’d shut up about it. Getting pretty old hearing about it year after year.
I've always wondered by Zeus would bother coming down to the mortal plane to impregnate human females with no clear goal - does he just look around, trying to find hotties? What's the deal, Zeus?!
And wouldn't he have the power to NOT endow the offspring with some of his powers? The whole "demigod" thing seems like a loaded gun.
Very simply the sacrifice was Jesus mortal existence he was no longer able to be a man with his death he rejoins God and is no longer a mortal man. While we all agree a heavenly existence is the end goal a mortal life is not without merit
Christians claim that the protagonist of their story was in fact the messianic king of the Jews, prophecied by the Jewish prophets. Those Jewish prophets (the authority of whom must be taken as inviolable if any Christian claim is to succeed) made it clear that said king would usher in an era of everlasting peace between nations. Reconciling the state of the world over the last 2000 years, (not to mention the actions of the church) with what they say their guy is all about - that's how otherwise rational people end up convincing themselves that three is strictly equal to one
The nature of Christ is called the mystery of the Hypostatic Union if you want to look it up.
It goes into questions like, "Did Jesus remember creating the world when he was like 3 years old?"
Based on how his siblings call him crazy and stuff at certain times, my understanding is he set aside his memory of eternity past when he was born a baby. So walking around he was a sinless baby. But as he grew up, like he does with believers, the Holy Spirit told him the truth about God and himself, and he believed the Holy Spirit. Since he was sinless he spent every moment in tune with the indwelling Holy Spirit perfectly, and more or less re-learned who he was and such through the Holy Spirit.
In that way you can see how much he sacrificed becoming like us: not only was he confined to a body but he gave up the eternal memories he had.
But different people will have different interpretations. I think the resurrected Jesus regained his full godliness while retaining his redeemed humanity.
In terms of his death, he was tempted in every way we are, so he had to fight doubt too, "What if I'm just crazy?" But he did it all without sin and believed God unto death. So he really is the best example to us.
Jesus is God, came to earth fully God and Fully Human, living the perfect life, sinless, giving his life willingly. Now what I have not seen mentioned is the BLOOD OF JESUS, which is so important. In the OT you’d have to sacrifice perfect lambs and use their blood for protection. Jesus is the perfect lamb the blood of Jesus saves us, he then died on the cross and rose again showing he is God.
Now to be saved, Repent, turn away from your sin and believe in Jesus Christ, that he died and rose again. he is God and he loves you so much.
“but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his BLOOD, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.”
-Romans 5:8
> In the OT you’d have to sacrifice perfect lambs and use their blood for protection. Jesus is the perfect lamb the blood of Jesus saves us, he then died on the cross and rose again showing he is God.
Why does God care about things dying before he can forgive people for sins? That's pretty fucked up. If a friend of mine does something against me, and then apologizes, how fucked up would I be if I said he has to shoot a dog first before I forgive him? And that's the god you believe in?
I have to admit, even the kindest answers to this question from this sub border on the ridiculous. And then the apologetic reply is that this is "God's logic," and not comprehensive by mere humans. And then some of the responses are considered "acceptable," as long as you're from a specific denomination.
I swear, if God exists, I wish I had a front-row seat to Judgement Day to see what "He" says to the masses as in "You chose the wrong denomination, folks, so all of you are going to Hell. But I knew this from the beginning of the Universe anyhow, and I didn't do anything to change things, you know, because of the LOLZ and stuff. Have fun burning!"
Jesus is perfect and abhors sin. On the cross, the sins of the world were placed on Him and God judged him in the place of sinful men to pay for those sins. He experienced the wrath of God towards sin, which was horrible beyond comprehension.
The other thing is, God could have sent his message in literally any way. He CHOSE to do it by torturing someone and then blaming everyone else for it.
He gave humans "free will" yet threatens anyone who doesn't behave according to his arbitrary rules with eternal torment. That's not an *actual* choice. It's coercion. It's like when the mob asks for "protection" money. Sure, you don't *have* to pay, but you really, really should.
Furthermore, God created humans. Meaning all of our behavior is essentially his fault. If he didn't want us to act the way we act, why create us this way? It really seems like the motherfucker is deliberately trying to railroad people into choosing between living life naturally and being sent to hell or repressing all of your basic human impulses and needs (that God gave you) and living in fear.
He could have cured disease, and fed the starving and ended death at any time, but... he didn't. Instead, he sent an avatar down to do some party tricks, then tortured it and blamed us for it.
God is a monster. And if you ask me, Lucifer was entirely justified in demanding better treatment from the bipolar, histrionic, narcissistic, violent, child-killing sociopath who created him.
Almost all Christians believe they’re the same being but different persons. Any church that uses the nicene creed (most of them) does. “I believe in one lord Jesus Christ… begotten, not made, consubstantial with the father… I believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the father and the son.”
The last three words in your quote (“and the Son”) were, iirc, one of the causes of the Great Schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy back in the 11th century. I’m not sure if the Orthodox Church ever adopted them.
Yes! The “filioque” as it’s called from the official Latin version. Orthodox Christians believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds directly from the father, not the father and the son. They still believe in the consubstantiality of all three persons of the trinity but have a slightly different theology on the relation between the three. So for these purposes it’s all the same.
Christian metaphysics/theology is confusing.
Also! In what world is Sunday three days after Friday.
Jesus was crucified and it took several hours for him to die, so let’s say he is finally dead at like 5pm.
He’s dead Friday evening, all day Saturday, and then is resurrected early morning Sunday (6am). So he’s dead during three days, but only dead for like a day and a half.
I have a big problem with this!
Like many things in the Bible, this makes perfect sense when put into historical and cultural context for the time it occurred.
In this case, the key item is the definition of a day. Hebrew days ended/began at sundown…
He was crucified on a Friday and died in the afternoon. This was the first day.
When the sun set on what we would now call “Friday night”, the Hebrews started the next day (Saturday, aka “day two”).
Day three began when the sun set on what we now call “Saturday night”.
The empty tomb was discovered on a Sunday morning, hence it was “the third day”.
OK but why? I get the point was the pain of torture. But....so?
Lots of people were tortured before that. Lots of people have been tortured after. Many arguably even worse. They don't get to come back.
From how I was raised, it was never about the actual death itself, rather that the sin dies with the person. Thus Jesus would come, live a life not unlike ours (though is sin free as he is a part of God, that being the son part of the holy trinity) then accept all the sin of mankind upon himself in his last moments, and die, cleansing the world of mankind's sin, allowing for mankind to be saved, so long as they accept God's forgiveness for their sins.
God already forgave you by sending Jesus to cleanse you, all you need to do is accept it. How do you accept it? By accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and trying to follow the righteous path set by Jesus/ God himself. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life"
Do I believe all this, not really, but when I was younger, I was a diehard Christian so I have a decent understanding of the teachings of my specific denomination of Christianity. (Baptist) So it might not line up with the thoughts of others like Catholics, but for us, its about acceptance of Jesus mainly and trying our best, repenting when we fail. Our practice of baptizing that we are named for is simply a symbol of our public acceptance of Jesus. This is why we're known for missionary trips, trying to spread the word. My former church would host trips to Africa to try to spread the word, while also helping isolated communities out by building schools, helping get access to clean drinking water, etc (I know I'm saying our or we like I consider myself part of the religion, but I've fallen away from it because it contradicts with too much scientific evidence. but its still a lovely sentiment to me)
Someone had to pay the price for sin and everyone has sin so God came in the flesh and died for sins were guilty of that way anybody who believes this fact will have ever lasting life
So God can do anything except forgive mankind because Adam took an apple without asking, so God had to send his son, who is also himself to the earth to get killed so that we can be forgiven for something we didn't even do?
Sounds logical, yes.
Doubly insane is that being omniscient, god knew this was going to happen in the first place.
So he made this hullabaloo about not wanting to let humans into heaven, but he also knew what the outcome was going to be.
So fucking stupid.
Yup. The whole fucking bullshit bible can be deconstructed so easily with basic observations like this. The whole Adam and Eve nonsense story doesn't make sense either, because: why would an omniscient God create humankind in the first place if he knew what the outcome would be, and why would he put a "tree of knowledge of good and bad" in there, knowing Adam and Eve would eventually eat the fruit?
Worst fairy tale ever written. Zero stars. Do not recommend. It's all so fucking stupid, and people who follow it can't even explain it either. 🤷♂️
Amazon recommendations:
People who bought into this story also bought into Life is Fair if You Are a Good Person, and Every Bad Person Gets What's Coming To Them, If Not in Life, in Hell!
That’s not lost on Christians.
The point is God knew this plan of redemption was the way to bring the maximum amount of glory to himself. That’s the point of human history. It’s all about God not about humans
It's all fiction. None of it makes sense. None of it has been proven. You can't make sense out of nonsense fiction. Don't try. Just walk away and never listen to anyone who claims it makes sense to them.
The way it was explained to me when I used to go to church is that during his crucifixtion he endured all of the pain of every single sinner who would have otherwise gone to hell. So he essentially experienced the infinite suffering all of the saints across history would have felt, literally taking their punishment for them.
Always been an atheist, but dated a religious girl for quite a long time which is why I was in church hearing this stuff.
Because the bible doesn't make sense. It's a storybook with plot holes. Don't question that garbage, all you'll get is one of the many copy-paste 'answers m' to these plot holes that Christians possess.
Jesus is not unkillable. He is omnipotent, so he has the power to avoid being killed, but he purposely chose not to use it and instead willingly laid down his life.
Theologians debate the details on how his sacrifice grants us salvation (called atonement theory), but the fact of the matter is that Jesus was willingly killed, even though he had the ability to prevent it.
OP ive had the same question and here’s what i think the real answer is: listen I’m not a theologian defending this position, just trying to state what it seems Christians are supposed to believe on this topic, because on its face it seems as you say…no sacrifice at all. In short, it’s not about the finality of death…it’s about the experience of death and the inherent corruption of it to a being who otherwise would never have to go through it. to my understanding the idea is God experienced death (and suffering) which previously he had never done, and otherwise would never have done. Probably I’ll get flayed for this analogy but in Superman the movie (the old one from the 80’s) Superman gives up his powers to be with Lois, and in so doing experiences things like weakness and vulnerability for the first time. It’s kind of like that. So Christians believe, at least the ones who bother to ask this question, that God chose to experience suffering when, being perfect, he didn’t have to. And that suffering changed him permanently, even though he wasn’t dead permanently. The focus isn’t on the permanence of death, but rather on the experience of death and what it would mean for a perfect deity to experience it, and what would motivate them to be willing to do this, and what the outcome would be. This theme is in some movies and literature…where there is this character who is perfect and beautiful and should never have to encounter any of the things we encounter, and thus be corrupted, but then because they love the human character they choose to, and are forever marred. Maybe it helps to imagine if you were a being who could live your whole life without suffering, pain or death (the experience of powerlessness, pain and alienation in dying and death)…if you said ‘you know what? I’m going to voluntarily go through it,’ that would be a sacrifice because you don’t need to and it would change you permanently.
Why would experiencing a human death (and suffering) change a God that should already be all knowing and thus would know what it would be like to experience death? If God had to experience something in order to know what it’s truly like and can be changed from such an experience, doesn’t that make God not all knowing and wouldn’t that discount his Godhood? Also I’m not trying to debate, just want better understanding.
I’m maybe a little far out from a lot of Christians theologically, so maybe I’m not in charge of authoritative answers here, but I would say that there’s maybe a difference between understanding something, and having experienced something yourself. I think there’s a powerful difference between a God who is smart enough to help you, and a God who’s been through all things, and is going to help you, and that latter one is just more meaningful in terms of bridging the gap between you and an infinite God.
Yes, I can understand the pathos behind it. What I don’t understand is akin to what u/Midnight_Magician56 said. How is dying in human form supposed to be a grand symbolic sacrifice of how God loved his children so much he was willing to suffer and bear that pain when an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being would have already known what that death would be like? From my perspective, the whole thing loses its gravitas and symbolism simply because it’s not novel to God even if he was Jesus. If he is truly omni-everything, death would not be a foreign concept and he would know full well what it was already like before even experiencing it.
Yeah, to be clear, I’m not a huge believer in the trinity meaning that there’s only one individual involved in the whole thing, I think that’s maybe an oversimplification that loses some things. And, I think we tend to lose something when we oversimplify God down to questions of if he’s Omni everything, can he make burritos that he can’t eat? My point being, I approach this topic with a lot of humility and recognition that time maybe isn’t a great vantage from which to comprehend eternity, and that I personally cant even describe everything I do feel about this, kind of like how it’s hard to describe love in general. So I probably can’t give anyone an authoritative answer to that that’s going to satisfy. But I will say that I think the pain that you and I have experienced in life matters to us, and I think it matters to God. In a sense, it doesn’t matter, because when I lose someone I love, it’ll just be a blink in God’s eyes and then I’ll be reunited with them, and wrong will be made right, so it maybe shouldn’t matter, but it still hurts, and that hurt is real. In the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, he cries with his family, even though he knows that he’s going to raise him back from the dead, and I think that’s beautiful and right and matters to me, even though maybe in the long run it doesn’t make sense if we imagine ourselves as God. So maybe it matters because what we experience and feel just does matter to God? And for me, if God cares about my stupid meaningless human activities, then maybe I care about yours, and I can love a little more deeply, and try and make things mean something in response. So I don’t totally know how God works, but it matters to me I think.
That’s beautifully put, thanks for your input and happy easter!
Lol, burritos!
What a beautiful response. 💛
Actually going through a tortuous and painful death could be considered a sacrifice no matter how many times you’ve experienced it tbh. But to add some light theology to the discussion: The purpose of the death was to permanently satisfy the payment of sins (“without the shedding of blood there can be no remission of sin…” Hebrews 9:22) It was also to fulfill the prophecies to the Jewish people. Jesus, being God in human form, accomplished 2 things in his human life as well: He experienced every temptation that we do, as a human, so that he could 1. relate to us in the remainder of our lives here on earth (Hebrews 4:15) and so that 2. he could be the perfect (human) sacrificial lamb of atonement (see purpose of his death above), since no other human would ever be able to live a perfect life (Romans 3:23) Edit: to add, it’s not that God did something *as a service to us* as much that he did something *we were not capable of doing ourselves*
Which brings me to the question I had since childhood. Why are we to feel grateful for god's sacrifice when god is the one who created the rules that made it necessary for him to make such a sacrifice. He loopholed his own rules when he literally could've just decided to do something else.
Bro, logically NONE of this makes sense. It's just humans coping with their own mortality and knowing that potentially ALL of this is essentially meaningless and we are just a cosmic accident.
Jesus died and was resurrected in three days. He only sacrificed his weekend. My salvation is the value of a weekend.
The argument could be made that the entirety of the "sacrifice" would necessarily include the ~30 year lifetime of perfection that he lived. If he had fucked up at all anywhere along the way, he would have been incapable of providing the "ultimate sacrifice" in the end. You could say he "sacrifices his life" in the sense that he died, but you could also say it in the sense that it was something he had to dedicate his entire mortal life to accomplishing. So it wouldn't just be the weekend,but would be everything that lead up to that weekend as well. It's sort of like when a master painter whips out a masterpiece in an hour. You don't just count the time it took to make the painting itself, but the years of practice it took to be able to accomplish that.
I have a Baptist friend who says that Jesus is incapable of sin. That doesn't make much of a sacrifice if he literally can't do it.
This would apply to humans yea. We can "understand" things but not really get it until it happens. But an omniscient God would not be limited by anything. They would have to know literally every single thing. Including every emotion and every kind of pain. They'd know it before they even created it.
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This is an interesting analogy. But God is all-knowing in Christianity, with zero exceptions, since the beginning and the end — without limitations of time or perspective. He knows the human experience in all its variations better than we know it ourselves. He does not need to personally experience anything to understand it perfectly. i.e., God doesn‘t need to experience childbirth to know every detail of what a woman experiences in that process, and to have infinite empathy for it. He even knows the specific experience of your wife‘s childbirths, and not just the human experience of childbirth in general.
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I'm an atheist, and so I'm just guessing, but maybe God made up this scenario of suffering through his proto-human, to show humans that they can and should refrain from being terrible to each other 24/7. IMHO, religion's one redeeming value is that it keeps shitty people from being as shitty to others as they might otherwise be.
Have you been a waiter at 1 pm on a Sunday? Some of the rudest people are coming straight from church.
My friends in food services have told me as much
And leave those fake 20 dollar bills with a bible quote on them.
As a “learning experience,” I guess I’d have to agree with you eddiewachowski. I’m not a Christian, but I think it was more than just “to learn about dying.” Whether or not it’s “sufficient” is going to have to be debated further I guess.
The point of Christ death is not that death and pain were not known to God, but that in his time of death Christ was taking on the sins of all humanity, and sin creates a separation between humans and God. At his most human, what Jesus experienced is the separation between himself and God, which God before had never experienced, as he was never "made flesh".
I'm not sure that God's omniscience should be interpreted in that way. He's all-knowing in the literal sense, as in he knows everything there is to know (what causes cancer, what will happen 5 minutes from now, where socks actually go when you can't find them in the dryer, and so on). But I don't think God has first-hand experience of what it's like to be a human. To use an analogy: imagine someone who grew up since birth locked in a room where the only visible colors and black and white. While in the room, this person learns all the physical properties of the colors: the number of nanometers of the wavelength of red, say. Even armed with this knowledge, the person would still not know what red looks like. Similarly, God may *know* everything there is to know *about* what it's like to be human, but still not know what it's actually like to be human.
But we were created in his image. He should know exactly what it's like to be human if were just non magical copies of him
Small but important correction from my classes. (Please don't interpret this as rude, I just want to let to give my info). We are not made in God's image. Adam and Eve were. But as soon as they sinned, every child was made in the image of their parents, as God is perfect but we are not. This means that we are not made in God's image but rather our parents. Hope this helps! :)
> We are not made in God's image. Adam and Eve were. But as soon as they sinned, every child was made in the image of their parents, as God is perfect but we are not If Adam and Eve were made perfect like God, then why would they have sinned? Can God sin?
Eh not really. Never heard that one before but it still doesnt make sense. We all came from adam and eve. It's also kind of a sick belief that people are considered to have sinned before they were even born.
I always think of original sin as simply human nature. No matter how saintly we are, we are not and never will be perfect.
The problem we run into here in terms of a canon answer is that one of the things people disagree on pretty consistently is what it means to be all knowing because one very common position is that god actually co-experiences humanity. But that's not a universal position because the bible doesn't really try to lay out too much of god's metaphysical nature.
I would have a serious problem with this interpretation from a Christian perspective. If God only has an intellectual knowledge of certain aspects of humanity, and not an intimate complete knowledge (that includes perfect empathy of what we go through), then God is not fully omniscient. He is supposed to know us better than we know ourselves, how the smallest aspects of the human experience shape our decisions, our insecurities, etc.. That is what puts God in a position to judge us ultimately, in a way that we are not meant to judge each other. We don’t know what’s going through other people’s heads and how they experience their life, but God is meant to fully know all of that, down to the smallest feeling. By definition, he cannot be merely book smart.
Did you make your wife experience that though? You designed childbirth pains and the death experience?
Well… he did get her pregnant TWICE, so at least one time he went in knowing what would happen. But I see your actual point lol
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Not necessarily to know they’re evil, I can see bad things like that and know they’re evil. But some Christians, myself included, I think do believe that Jesus experienced ALL the evil to be able to better succor those that will suffer those things.
Death is an act that every living thing that has ever been or ever will be will experience. The significance of a god electing to experience death was and still is pretty novel, as far as religions go.
I think that the point is that although he did not have to, he became mortal and experienced things as we do. It is humbling to go from being an omnipotent god to being a human with no power except for what is in your mind. He humbled himself, allowed himself to be tortured, shamed, tried by men, and finally killed for US. At least that is the way I see it. I like how we are keeping things civil so far. Let’s keep the dialogue going.
It’s a nuanced thing and the explanation above isn’t quite what a theologian would say. Central to the Christian story (perhaps most central of all) is the idea of the “mystery” that Jesus was both fully human and fully God. See, the fundamental story of the Bible is that God made the world to be co-ruled by humanity. But the disobedience of Adam and Eve introduced sin into the nature of man, separating us from God. The Old Testament is the ongoing story of man being unable to repair that relationship, even with Gods help: Noah shows that even if bad influences are removed, we sin; Babel shows that even when cooperating we sin; Abraham shows that even a family special relationship we will sin; the prophets show that even when God warns us we will sin; Moses shows that even if God literally writes rules in stone and gives them to you, we will sin. The point is—we separated ourselves, and we can’t fix it. So God did. God is a “unity of diversity”—three personalities perfectly fused as one. And one of those personalities took on human flesh—“Immanuel”, one of the names of Jesus, literally means “God with us.” We can’t go to him so he came to us. By being a human and dying but being perfect and therefore risen, Jesus defeats death for all humans (more on this in a moment). It is as if he blazed a trail that now other humans may follow. As a result, in the last chapter of the Bible we are shown a future in which, once again, “we will be Gods people and he will be our God”—together again, relationship eternally restored. So it isn’t that Jesus had to “make a bad sacrifice”—it’s that the only way to fix what was broken was for a perfect human to die, and no human could do it … so God stepped in and became human to do it for us. That’s why the ability to be risen doesn’t minimize the sacrifice because the permanence wasn’t the point — it was about having a perfect human die, so that death could be defeated. But of course that answers one question and opens a much more difficult one—how does that work exactly? How does a perfect humans death allow God to cancel death? This is called “atonement” and is a hotly debated point in Christian theology. Personally, I would say it’s pointless to argue because if it really is true, we are likely unable to understand it…it’s like trying to explain calculus to a kid who just learned two digit arithmetic. The words wouldn’t even make sense except by analogy. And analogies are what we have. One analogy (penal substitutionary atonement) imagines a person found guilty of a sentence, and someone must pay that sentence; Jesus innocently endured more pain than any of us deserve and thus “pays our debt”. One analogy (Christus victor) imagines a cosmic battle with Satan, sin and death on one side and Jesus defeated them all and proved superior, so faith in him can be gifted that same ability. One analogy (ransom theory) is what you see in Chronicles of Narnia—basically Jesus makes a deal with Satan, trades his life for all the other souls, and Satan agrees without realizing God planned to just start raising the dead anyway. All of these analogies have at least some scriptural support; none are slam dunks. The OPs question reveals probably a default that they have imagined penal substitutionary atonement and this are trying to reason out why taking a punishment that is known to be temporary would mean anything. But that’s asking a very specific question about a single analogy that is intended to help us visualize something that the Bible itself calls a divine mystery that we are incapable of actually understanding.
Impressive
This response deserves more upvotes, great answer.
There is a deep, deep chain of questions you can't answer here. They're all really silly too, a God cannot be all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving at the same time. Look, if you choose to believe in a God, that's fine, it's not at all wrong to imagine that the universe has some kind of subjective significance or that there is some higher layer to reality that involves the will of conscious entities. But you just can't reconcile that in a "human" way with human world rules. We are severely limited as a species, so trying to come up with storylines about deities is peak hubris and peak foolishness.
The real answer, as someone who used to be very Christian and very deep into apologetics, is that most "believers" simply do not think that deeply about it. Basically what I've noticed is belief is founded on one of two things 1. Simply accepting it and not thinking much about it (the vast majority of people) 2. Coming up with convoluted arguments so long and winding that by the time you've worked yourself to the end of the thought you've most forgot some of the foundational premises or other arguments you have which rely on certain premises that you've since contradicted (the few people whose brains go brrr so much they can't help but think deeply about it)
Same reason why Jesus wanted to go for a fast, even if he really didn’t need to: it was to test himself. God may had known what death was like, but the point of it was going through it as a human
I don’t follow the reasoning of your last sentence. God being all knowing would know what death is like in concept, but he would also know what it’s like to go through it as a human because that’s the whole point of omniscience. He’s supposed to know all. If a God had to place himself in a human body to experience something to know what it is like, would that even make him God?
There is no reasoning, it's simply speculation. None of us are God so these assumptions are simply wild guesses, and yours is as good as mine. God by our definition is all knowing and is not bound by time. He would simply know of everything at all times. So unless the Christian God is different from that definition of God, that prior explanation Blacodex pointed out is not correct.
You see the writers of the book didn't understand what omnipotent and all knowing really means. Bit of a mistake on their part.
This is 100% accurate. Objectively. But you’ll continue to be downvoted
There is no understanding. Every answer an apologist gives to a critical mind, 10 new questions arise. There's a reason all of their arguments turn away from the laws of logic and into every fallacy known to man, the most popular I know of being circular reasoning, argument from "authority," and confirmation bias. Then they'll turn around and strawman the hell out of your position and think they struck gold. Religious nuts are pathetic and deserve pity for being incapable of applying critical thinking skills across all aspects of life, including what you were told to believe from the moment of your conception.
I’m sure there’s many interpretations, but did this make god vengeful towards humanity? Or empathetic to the suffering that humans experience? Did Jesus “die for our sins” or is humanity destined to repent for having sinned by killing god?
Great answer man, I believe this is as close as we’ll get to understanding
The way I was taught (Southern Baptist) was that in old times, we would sacrifice lambs for our sins. Our sins dying along with the lamb, cleansing us of the sins. But God sent himself to Earth, as Jesus, to endure the temptations of sin, and most importantly, die. Jesus wasn't literally God, rather an aspect of him, and reflected that in life. He lived a life not unlike ours, though he was always overcoming sin and living a perfect life. He preached love between all of mankind and that the only salvation was accepting God's forgiveness for our sins. However forgiveness alone wasn't enough, you had to be cleansed of it enter God's kingdom. Just because you are forgiven doesn't mean you are cleansed of it. (Think like you're a child and you rolled around in mud. Your mom may be mad but forgives you, but you still aren't going to bed without taking a bath first) So when the time came, Jesus gave his life on the cross, taking upon himself all the sins of mankind. Past, Present, Future... all sin would be cleansed through his death. He would be the lamb of all of mankind, for all of history. It wasn't about experiencing death, it was about cleansing us of our sins. The death was simply needed to cleanse the world of sin. He died so that through him, we may be cleansed and be able to enter heaven, because God has already forgiven us regardless whether we ask for forgiveness or not. But how could Jesus enter heaven if he took on the sin of mankind, well thats the purpose of the Resurrection. He died and took sin down with him, and rose again to be clean once again and taken, body and soul, into heaven, as the Son aspect of God. (Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost) This is why its preached so heavily to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior, because he is the only pathway into heaven now, as his sacrifice has taken upon your sins. You can't just sacrifice a lamb anymore because your sins already died with Jesus, but you must take that path because its the path God himself gave you. You have to accept Gods forgiveness by accepting Jesus Christ's sacrifice.
Here's a better analogy. It's like saying a billionaire worked at a fast food restaurant for a day. If Bill Gates worked at McDonald's that would give him some perspective of working in food service (maybe he gets yelled at, maybe his body hurts, maybe he messes up the orders) but he still gets to go back to being a tech billionaire. In the end, that one day is no sacrifice at all. It would be laughable to claim otherwise. Now, back to the Jesus example. Giving up godhood permanently for the greater good would be a true sacrifice.
This was well said. The Superman analogy works, at least to get the point across.
What I don’t get then is why did god/jesus have to die, then resurrect himself, then go back to heaven, just to promise to come back yet again for a 3rd time? None of it makes any sense
Doesn't it all just go to illustrate that God isn't actually omniscient if he has to send Jesus to get an idea of the suffering that humans (including the Isrealites) had been experiencing for millenia? And thus how could God possibly be engaged enough with the happenings on Earth for omnipotence to be meaningful either?
God sacrificed himself, to himself, as a loophole to save all of mankind from himself.
So technically none of it needed to happen whatsoever.
The whole thing could have just been an email.
Churchgoing Catholic here, I laughed out loud- made my day - thanks for a great joke
My pleasure!
I was raised Christian, but never truly understood what that meant. At age 21 I decided to become a better Christian so I began attending Bible study to truly understand my religion. On the second or third class we discussed the holy trinity and I found myself wondering the same thing…”why was the sacrifice necessary?” I was unable to get any answer other than “because it was.” That was the beginning of the end of my faith. Ironic that my quest to become more serious about my religion made me leave it behind…but not unusual. My mom went back to college to become a pastor and came out with a severely weakened devotion…the people at the college were unfazed. They said learning about the history of the Bible always goes one of 2 ways.
And it didn't happen. It's all teaching stories that are rooted in even earlier stories.
Jesus of Nazareth is an actual historical figure and most scholars and historians agree that he was crucified. In fact, his life and crucifixion are the two aspects of Jesus’ life that we can confirm with certainty.
Why couldn't God just like forgive and forget ? He can incarnate and torture himself in a body but can't forgive? Just the religion on the whole is in rocky foundations logically. Even if we are sinful and depraved God can still forgive if he is all loving and powerful. You don't need to crucify yourself to prove you love someone.
Because god isn’t ONLY merciful and loving. He is those things, but he is also just, as in justice, and that’s just as important. Justice means that evil deserves to be punished. If we as society let a known serial killer go free to continue killing, that isn’t mercy or love. That’s injustice. So how do you square it if you want to be both just and merciful? Evil happened, justice demands a price has to be paid. So god pays it himself. He takes the responsibility and takes the punishment so that justice is served. Then he can offer mercy to those willing to accept it. The concept is called “substutionary atonement” and has been debated and written about, unsurprisingly, for approximately 2000 years. Thomas Aquinas wrote some of the definitive work on it if you want to read up on it.
Now, a more important question for me is why does he create humans, test them despite knowing the outcome and judge them based on something they did after he allowed them to?
So what he punishes himself for people doing bad things?
That doesn't really make sense to me. What was the cost? What did God's death achieve? And why am I still going to be punished if I do not believe, despite the fact that he supposedly died for me? I'm willing to accept that mercy. But I have no reason to believe it exists.
Instead of killing himself Jesus could be a slimy lawyer who convinces God the evil never happened? I read Aquinas its less a critique of that and the simple fact that God can't forgive so he needs blood from himself. A just person can forgive.
God spoke the Universe into existence and that's the big logical flaw you spotted, huh?
Well since the universe is expanding and farts fill up a room I think God farted the universe into existence
It was a Saturday night and God and his roommate Chugs were arm wrestling.
This guy watches Family Guy
Well, we don’t know how the universe came into existence so it’s just as likely that some god who’s not bound by this universe’s laws spoke it into existence as it is that it’s just always existed, or that we’re all in a simulation. We can use science to get all the way back to the big bang but why it happened or what came before- that’s anybody’s guess. So a god creating everything isn’t such a leap to me: we have as much evidence for intelligent design as we do non-intelligent design. None, only speculation
Matt dilahunty? Is that you?
This is only true if you believe in penal substitutionary atonement, which is popular among evangelicals and fundamentalists but isn't the majority opinion among all Christians. Nor was it believed by any Christian for the first 1.5 millennia of Christianity.
OP, you'd be better off asking a Christian sub about this like r/OpenChristian or r/ChristianUniversalism. But the answer is that Jesus wasn't a sacrifice *to God*, he was a sacrifice *for us*. He collectively saves all of human nature from death because we rise together with him. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christus_Victor
Us? I didn’t ask your Jesus to die for me. I’m fine where I’m at
Do you want to speak to his manager?
[удалено]
The logic I heard was that you had to accept God's forgiveness. In old days, you'd kill a lamb as a show of your acceptance, since sacrificing the lamb cleansed you of your sins. Think of it this way: God forgave you for your sins, and you showed him your acceptance by doing what you can to rid yourself of sin. Just because it's forgiven doesn't mean it isn't still there. So when Jesus died, he took upon all sins of mankind. Since your sins died with Jesus, you now simply have to accept God's forgiveness, and that is shown by following and accepting Jesus as your lord and savior. This means following the preaching of Jesus and if you stray, finding your way back to the righteous path. I'm an atheist but it makes sense in the terms of the rest of the teachings of the Bible.
> Since your sins died with Jesus, you now simply have to accept God's forgiveness, and that is shown by following and accepting Jesus as your lord and savior. If my sins died with Jesus then why do I have to do anything further? Either my sins are gone or they aren't, by Jesus's dying.
Theres 2 parts. Being cleansed and accepting forgiveness. Thats why. If you got mud all over the house and yourself, your mom may forgive you for making a mess, but you still have to clean up before being allowed to go to bed. Jesus said he'll help you with it, but you gotta at least provide him the mop and help out. Your sins are cleansed through him. By accepting him, you are asking him to be your savior, which he would be. He gave his life so that you may allow him to take them upon himself. But if you don't accept him, you're not relinquishing your sins to him. You have to allow him to take them, and the only way is following his word and accepting him. You need to try to be righteous, and when you fail (not if) you repent and ask for forgiveness. He will always accept it if you truly mean it and take those away as well. This isnt a logical thing, when he died for all of mankinds sins, he didnt actually claim all sins right then and there, he became a beacon for all sins to transfer to him. All sins would be cleansed, so long as the link is there.
It's not so cut and dry as that. Some Christian traditions believe that those who basically lived as God commanded could be given the chance of Heaven. There are some who think that everyone goes to Heaven eventually. It's variable.
I had a NDE and what I experienced was that all are forgiven. The thought had never crossed my mind before and was surprising to me.
"hell" is a place from Norse-Germanic mythology and appears nowhere in the Bible in the original languages. The Bible actually says everyone is saved (see: Philippians 2:9-11, 1 Timothy 4:9-11, Romans 11:25-32, etc.).
But not everyone goes to heaven (see: Matthew 7:21-23)
the bible talks about a place that we know is at least eternal separation from God. Jesus spoke more about it than he did heaven.
I'm pretty sure there's an understanding that people are born out of Christianity and live a different upbringing in the Bible. And it also states God is just and delivers his verdict individually, ofc athiests especially those who left Christianity would be screwed still though
«My God my God, why have you forsaken me» This is what Jesus is saying when he dies. The sacrifice was to be separated from God. When you are omnipotent/omnicient this is supposed to be really bad as it’s experiencing not being that way.
Psalm 22 starts with that but the next few verses say “Yet you are holy, enthroned on the praises of Israel, in you our fathers trusted; they trusted and you delivered them. To you they cried and were rescued; in you they trusted and were not put to shame”. The psalm is about having patience and trust in god in the face of suffering and oppression. Jesus quoted it, because he knew his followers would know what it meant, and that he was confident in God, that this was Gods will, to have trust that God is just and in control of all things.
It’s like George Carlin said - “he gave up a weekend? That was a sacrifice?”
I think the method of his death was more of the sacrifice rather than the time. Even if I could come back to life I wouldn’t sign up to be crucified.
And like, super crucified. They didn't normally use nails, they just tied you to the cross. Also the stabbing and the carrying the cross were all, I believe, unique to him.
Which is like a light breeze for an omnipotent being🤷🏻♀️ the "sacrifice" is still a stupid concept. Sacrifice implies losing something, the Jesus thing isn't a sacrifice at all
Well... it was a bad weekend.
It was a good Friday, though
That part has always cracked me up. He came back to life, and he was dead for a weekend, and THIS is the big sacrifice?
I noticed a trend recently of this quote going around.
Well it is Easter.
To be fair, it was like a three day weekend so....
This sub isn't going to give you a serious answer so here it is. The Romans didn't kill Jesus, Jesus chose to give up his life which happened when he said "it is finished". The sacrifice is that he bore God's wrath so that the people he came to save wouldn't have to.
What did god inflict on him in his wrath?
Separation from God. Fun fact, Hell isn't ever described directly as this fiery place, only as a separation from God. The only time a description of the Hell we think of appears in the Bible is in Revelations when talking about the Beast, The False Prophet, those not written in the book of life, Death and Hades being cast into a Lake of Fire and Brimstone. But its not ever called Hell.
The way you worded that is a nonsensical question... God inflicted the wrath reserved for the elect onto Jesus and he verbally acknowledged what it was like while on the cross, that he was forsaken by God.
So we don’t really know what was going on there, only that he was forsaken. I’m just trying to get a better understanding of what happened. If god hadn’t inflicted the wrath on jesus and inflicted it on us instead, what would that be like for us?
This will be a long explanation. In Christianity God is a trinity. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. When God revealed himself to Moses in the burning bush he said His name is "I am". In the Hebrew grammar I am has the three times past, present and future. So God is He who always was, He who is and He who always will be. Alpha and Omega. Beginning and End. That is a tremendous declaration since it means God is a being that transcends time and existence itself since he Always has been and Always will. When Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the garden of eden because of the devil's temptation, they stopped "being". To be is basically the essence of God himself, so from that moment onwards we stopped being in God, lost our sense of being and started looking for our sense of belonging in the world and mundane stuff. Jesus is the second person of the trinity, the verb of God who's incarnated into a human. The verb is that who gives action to the subject. God is ( was and will be). The subject is God and the verb to be. Jesus said to a pharisee, before Abraham was I am (declaring He is not only God but the action of being). So basically God gave himself into sacrifice, his being, his action and divine property of being itself so that we could be in Christ through his sacrifice in the cross. So everyone who was believed in Him throughout the time, finds salvation and can get our sense of being back. That's why there's never been a greater love than Jesus dying for us, He who was the embodiment of being itself lowered himself from a divine status to a human one, suffered and died like a cursed individual in the hands of his own people so that we could be saved through that selfless act of love and sacrifice.
Also the Holy Ghost was sent to us by Jesus as a paraclite, the one who consoles so that through it Jesus gives testament of his love for us even after his ascension to heaven.
I genuinely appreciate this detailed explanation. As it typically does, this raises logic questions for me about God's motivations and depiction as 'perfect'. As a root cause, it seems God himself is to blame for Adam and Eve disobeying him since they were apparently both designed by God and, according to that explanation, were part of God's being. It wasn't their fault that they had the ability to be tempted; God (intentionally?) created a design flaw but still blamed it on them, for which human 'sin' was then a foregone conclusion. That is, God created the concept of sin, built it into humans, and thus the whole debacle with Jesus could have been avoided by redesigning that instead of complicating it with a tortuous journey for God/Jesus/humans at large. It's amazing for me to extrapolate that this initial design flaw has then translated into thousands of years of both religiously-driven cruelty and kindness, even between Abrahamic religions.
Hi, I can definitely see why you think that. Let me try and explain those interesting points. You're right when you say that Adam and Eve were designed by God. According to Genesis we were created in his image and likeness. What does that entail? That both Adam and Eve were created "free". God is a free being and as such He did not created us with restrictions in mind. He gave us his spirit and reason to measure our actions and deduce the possible good and bad outcomes of them. They were not part of God but they were in a direct communication and in total sync with him, we were with Him and He was with us. However, we were tempted. What is temptation? At its core temptation is not trusting in God and believing that God restricts us from achieving our plans. God clearly said, if you do this, these consequences will happen. The snake (the devil) as the liar he is (also called Father of Lies) manipulated God's words and said to Eve, "it's not true that you will die, he just doesn't want you to be gods like him". It's reasonable to think that there was an oversight from God and that he might not be perfect after all. Thing is you can't really love without freedom. And this applies to human relationships as well. We can either be the jealous and overprotective bf and gf always afraid of being cheated on and restricting our SO from being free. Or we can be the loving kind and say, you know what I trust you and love you and I'll give you the freedom you deserve. Whatever happens, it depends of how that person uses their free will. God can't make a squared circle, it's a logic error. As such, he can't create a human that's not free, because that will be going against his nature (image and likeness). So it's true that, in His love for us he left that door open for a possible temptation. And still knowing perfectly well he went along with it. The concept of sin was introduced by us. Sin is the act of disobeying God's will. God has a will, it's how things should be, but he does not force his will on us because that would be going against our freedom. But God in his mercy has given us our salvation in the form of Christ. I always like to make the analogy of God being kind of like waze or google maps. It gives you the best and optimal route and we somehow believe our way it's better. But what do those apps do if you select an alternative ( and not so good) route? It recalculates everything and helps you get to your destination.
Jesus being son of god was voted on by humans during the counsel of nicea.
One of the reasons, at 10 years of age, I sat in church thinking “I think this is bullshit”
The holy Trinity is weirder than that. Although all three are the same God, they're not all the same. Jesus mortal life ended when he was crucified, just like your mortal life will end when you're going to die, but your immortal soul is immortal, and will be in heaven eternally.
No, the point was that he bodily resurrected
It's not so much a self sacrifice death the way we talk about it today. The point was that like the animal sacrifices before him he was the lamb sacrificed to atone for sin.
I dunno, man. Nothing makes sense to me. People will believe what they wanna believe. Myself, I tap out of that stuff.
After the Old Testament, God took a chill pill. He quit with His shenanigans and magically got Mary pregnant. So much is borrowed from other religions in Christianity. The Rite of Spring is a Pagan holiday. The sacrificial lamb, as it were. And spring is a time of regrowth. It’s all essentially a myth based on anthropomorphising spring. “He is Risen.” So are the flowers and plants, and the temperature outside. It’s all just Paganisms repurposed.
You're right, the sacrifice of Jesus only makes sense in the context of how other religions viewed sacrifice at the time. Greek mythology, for example, was filled of sacrificing animals and burning their meat (and all the punishments for humans who did it wrong or tried to trick the gods). Christianity inverted the concept of sacrifice, which must have been mind blowing at the time, but doesn't quite hit the same for a culture who doesn't get that concept.
It isn't, at max he sacrificed one weekend
Because it’s myth.
He was really close with his father, and on that day, his father abandoned him. It really sucked, plus there were nails in his hands and he was thirsty.
I dunno man. It goes further back than even that. If the Christian god is all-knowing, all-present, and all-powerful then most of it doesn't work. You cannot forgive someone else for something you did and have it mean anything. You cannot sacrifice something you can never lose.
It’s all complete and utter bullshit. Fuck religion. 😀
I mean, it was done to save humanity from gods own wrath/judgement, so if god thinks it was enough then it was. No use trying to understand it logically unfortunately.
Non Christian here. That’s one of the ones I never understood, the trinity. Haven’t heard a rational explanation of it either. Three different aspects of the same thing? So why did Jesus say “father why have you forsaken me”? Or “forgive them father.. etc”I mean it’s like Jesus never intended to be a god or something.
I've always been of the mind that death has meaning because we don't know that it isn't final. Every bit of evidence and fact indicates it is the final, horrifying conclusion. Religion would have us act "on faith" and believe that, despite all evidence to the contrary, there is something beyond that twiling veil. I, too, question what kind of a sacrifice it is for a being that is 100% sure it is literally a part of god, that it is truly 100% immortal, knows 100% that there is life and glory after death, literally speaks to and for god, who is its father and also itself, to "die" for the sins that it did not commit, for the salvation of those who do not deserve it but did commit those sins. Also, you and that god who is also your father and also you, whom has guaranteed literally and personally to you that this death shit don't ***really*** apply to you and that you're TOTALLY good dawg- you and that god, one and the same, are the ones that make up the rules that say that sin even exists, much less gave beings the ability to sin, and you're also the one keeping score of those sins and that they matter. I'm just curious, in those exact same shoes, who WOULDN'T make that sacrifice? You have 100% proof that death is only a temporary delay to a return unto eternal grace, glory, and power, and it's all for you, Damien- Just on the other side of that door. "Ah, but Jesus had to have faith, too!" Sure, but given he had a direct hotline to God, he was the product of immaculate conception and was heralded by prophets, AND he had the ability to perform miracles up to and including raising the dead, who wouldn't have faith with all of those privileges? ***I truly mean no disrespect with any of this. I wish I could believe. I'd love to have some measure of comfort instead of just the screaming void of non-existence. These are thoughts I've had since I was a child.*** What kind of sacrifice was it really for him? He had nothing to be scared of, and he knew it. That's why death is scary. We're expected to push all of that down and walk by faith, but it's like God didn't hold himself to that same standard. He gave Christ all of the cheat codes and behind-the-scenes footage, let him read the script, and then everyone applauds when he allows himself to be sacrificed for the sins of man for a limited period of horrific torture while he knows 150% that a perfect eternity awaits him as a literal eternal god-king. Like, given allll the evidence he had; conversing with God, having the ability to perform miracles, interacting with Satan in the desert, the visions and prophecies; who wouldn't have done the same thing when ultimately they have nothing to lose and everything to gain? Also, as the perfect omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creater of ALL, you've known all of this was going to happen, and how it was going to end, since before you even created the concept of time. Again, I guess with questions like these the answer is always going to be "You must let go of your doubt and experience faith!", and yet it's not like Jesus was just some unknowing rando that God monitored and rewarded after he made all the right moves unbeknownst to him. He knew beforehand all that would happen and, as part of the godhead, planned it all out. So like, not even holding itself to the same standards that its holding us imperfect cretins to.
If “God” made, from scratch mind you, humans and animals and plants and light and darkness and everything else in the universe then why isn’t he still making stuff? He get bored with his cReAtiViTy and just stopped?? Also, if Jesus died and then came back to life and he hasn’t died a second time….then WHERE THE FUCK IS HE?? Just go on walkabout for 2000 some odd years?? He isn’t “coming back” and I wish they’d shut up about it. Getting pretty old hearing about it year after year.
I've always wondered by Zeus would bother coming down to the mortal plane to impregnate human females with no clear goal - does he just look around, trying to find hotties? What's the deal, Zeus?! And wouldn't he have the power to NOT endow the offspring with some of his powers? The whole "demigod" thing seems like a loaded gun.
The average life expectancy around the time couldn't have been much more than the alleged age when he was punished.
He didn’t just die. He was tortured to death.
It isn’t, that’s the joke
Very simply the sacrifice was Jesus mortal existence he was no longer able to be a man with his death he rejoins God and is no longer a mortal man. While we all agree a heavenly existence is the end goal a mortal life is not without merit
Crucifixion is pretty brutal.
Christians claim that the protagonist of their story was in fact the messianic king of the Jews, prophecied by the Jewish prophets. Those Jewish prophets (the authority of whom must be taken as inviolable if any Christian claim is to succeed) made it clear that said king would usher in an era of everlasting peace between nations. Reconciling the state of the world over the last 2000 years, (not to mention the actions of the church) with what they say their guy is all about - that's how otherwise rational people end up convincing themselves that three is strictly equal to one
The nature of Christ is called the mystery of the Hypostatic Union if you want to look it up. It goes into questions like, "Did Jesus remember creating the world when he was like 3 years old?" Based on how his siblings call him crazy and stuff at certain times, my understanding is he set aside his memory of eternity past when he was born a baby. So walking around he was a sinless baby. But as he grew up, like he does with believers, the Holy Spirit told him the truth about God and himself, and he believed the Holy Spirit. Since he was sinless he spent every moment in tune with the indwelling Holy Spirit perfectly, and more or less re-learned who he was and such through the Holy Spirit. In that way you can see how much he sacrificed becoming like us: not only was he confined to a body but he gave up the eternal memories he had. But different people will have different interpretations. I think the resurrected Jesus regained his full godliness while retaining his redeemed humanity. In terms of his death, he was tempted in every way we are, so he had to fight doubt too, "What if I'm just crazy?" But he did it all without sin and believed God unto death. So he really is the best example to us.
Very well said.
jesus took a nap for our sins
Jesus is God, came to earth fully God and Fully Human, living the perfect life, sinless, giving his life willingly. Now what I have not seen mentioned is the BLOOD OF JESUS, which is so important. In the OT you’d have to sacrifice perfect lambs and use their blood for protection. Jesus is the perfect lamb the blood of Jesus saves us, he then died on the cross and rose again showing he is God. Now to be saved, Repent, turn away from your sin and believe in Jesus Christ, that he died and rose again. he is God and he loves you so much. “but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his BLOOD, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” -Romans 5:8
> In the OT you’d have to sacrifice perfect lambs and use their blood for protection. Jesus is the perfect lamb the blood of Jesus saves us, he then died on the cross and rose again showing he is God. Why does God care about things dying before he can forgive people for sins? That's pretty fucked up. If a friend of mine does something against me, and then apologizes, how fucked up would I be if I said he has to shoot a dog first before I forgive him? And that's the god you believe in?
It's all bullshit
yep
tl;dr its a bunch of preposterous nonsense believed by stupid people.
He sacrificed himself, as an offering to himself, to forgive his own creations, for breaking arbitrary rules that he made. I'd be skeptical too lol
I have to admit, even the kindest answers to this question from this sub border on the ridiculous. And then the apologetic reply is that this is "God's logic," and not comprehensive by mere humans. And then some of the responses are considered "acceptable," as long as you're from a specific denomination. I swear, if God exists, I wish I had a front-row seat to Judgement Day to see what "He" says to the masses as in "You chose the wrong denomination, folks, so all of you are going to Hell. But I knew this from the beginning of the Universe anyhow, and I didn't do anything to change things, you know, because of the LOLZ and stuff. Have fun burning!"
Since it’s not real, you can just make up any rules you want about it.
God sacrificed himself to himself to save us from himself. It doesn't make sense
Jesus is perfect and abhors sin. On the cross, the sins of the world were placed on Him and God judged him in the place of sinful men to pay for those sins. He experienced the wrath of God towards sin, which was horrible beyond comprehension.
The other thing is, God could have sent his message in literally any way. He CHOSE to do it by torturing someone and then blaming everyone else for it. He gave humans "free will" yet threatens anyone who doesn't behave according to his arbitrary rules with eternal torment. That's not an *actual* choice. It's coercion. It's like when the mob asks for "protection" money. Sure, you don't *have* to pay, but you really, really should. Furthermore, God created humans. Meaning all of our behavior is essentially his fault. If he didn't want us to act the way we act, why create us this way? It really seems like the motherfucker is deliberately trying to railroad people into choosing between living life naturally and being sent to hell or repressing all of your basic human impulses and needs (that God gave you) and living in fear. He could have cured disease, and fed the starving and ended death at any time, but... he didn't. Instead, he sent an avatar down to do some party tricks, then tortured it and blamed us for it. God is a monster. And if you ask me, Lucifer was entirely justified in demanding better treatment from the bipolar, histrionic, narcissistic, violent, child-killing sociopath who created him.
Well it's simple. It's a made up story.
They're not all the same being... unless you're Catholic
Actually, they're all the same being...unless you're not Catholic
Almost all Christians believe they’re the same being but different persons. Any church that uses the nicene creed (most of them) does. “I believe in one lord Jesus Christ… begotten, not made, consubstantial with the father… I believe in the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the father and the son.”
The last three words in your quote (“and the Son”) were, iirc, one of the causes of the Great Schism between Catholicism and Orthodoxy back in the 11th century. I’m not sure if the Orthodox Church ever adopted them.
Yes! The “filioque” as it’s called from the official Latin version. Orthodox Christians believe that the Holy Spirit proceeds directly from the father, not the father and the son. They still believe in the consubstantiality of all three persons of the trinity but have a slightly different theology on the relation between the three. So for these purposes it’s all the same. Christian metaphysics/theology is confusing.
But fascinating.
Very true!
"Make sure to change it up so the teacher doesn't know you copied mine"
They're all the same being, just in different form. That's what Christianity believes.
Not everyone Christian believes that. I was taught God is the father of Jesus, not that they're the same person
Well then they're mistaken. John 10:30: "My Father and I are one."
Also! In what world is Sunday three days after Friday. Jesus was crucified and it took several hours for him to die, so let’s say he is finally dead at like 5pm. He’s dead Friday evening, all day Saturday, and then is resurrected early morning Sunday (6am). So he’s dead during three days, but only dead for like a day and a half. I have a big problem with this!
I could be wrong but I thought the wording is more like "on the 3rd day" not "3 days later" On the 28th day there were a lot of zombies.
Like many things in the Bible, this makes perfect sense when put into historical and cultural context for the time it occurred. In this case, the key item is the definition of a day. Hebrew days ended/began at sundown… He was crucified on a Friday and died in the afternoon. This was the first day. When the sun set on what we would now call “Friday night”, the Hebrews started the next day (Saturday, aka “day two”). Day three began when the sun set on what we now call “Saturday night”. The empty tomb was discovered on a Sunday morning, hence it was “the third day”.
When does the first day start?
Sundown on Thursday.
Jesus was fully God and fully man. Christ had to go through the ordeal of crucifixion and death.
You can't actually kill god, so if he was "fully god" his death was just theatrics.
If we humans have immortal souls, the same could be said of us.
OK but why? I get the point was the pain of torture. But....so? Lots of people were tortured before that. Lots of people have been tortured after. Many arguably even worse. They don't get to come back.
From how I was raised, it was never about the actual death itself, rather that the sin dies with the person. Thus Jesus would come, live a life not unlike ours (though is sin free as he is a part of God, that being the son part of the holy trinity) then accept all the sin of mankind upon himself in his last moments, and die, cleansing the world of mankind's sin, allowing for mankind to be saved, so long as they accept God's forgiveness for their sins. God already forgave you by sending Jesus to cleanse you, all you need to do is accept it. How do you accept it? By accepting Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and trying to follow the righteous path set by Jesus/ God himself. "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life" Do I believe all this, not really, but when I was younger, I was a diehard Christian so I have a decent understanding of the teachings of my specific denomination of Christianity. (Baptist) So it might not line up with the thoughts of others like Catholics, but for us, its about acceptance of Jesus mainly and trying our best, repenting when we fail. Our practice of baptizing that we are named for is simply a symbol of our public acceptance of Jesus. This is why we're known for missionary trips, trying to spread the word. My former church would host trips to Africa to try to spread the word, while also helping isolated communities out by building schools, helping get access to clean drinking water, etc (I know I'm saying our or we like I consider myself part of the religion, but I've fallen away from it because it contradicts with too much scientific evidence. but its still a lovely sentiment to me)
It really doesn’t make much sense does it?
Because it's all just made up fairy tales?
Religion is dumb.
It's purposefully nonsensical. If they can get you to believe all that, they can get you to believe anything.
It's almost like someone just made this shit up...
Someone had to pay the price for sin and everyone has sin so God came in the flesh and died for sins were guilty of that way anybody who believes this fact will have ever lasting life
> Someone had to pay the price for sin Why does God have to see someone die before he'll forgive sins? Is he not all-powerful?
So God can do anything except forgive mankind because Adam took an apple without asking, so God had to send his son, who is also himself to the earth to get killed so that we can be forgiven for something we didn't even do? Sounds logical, yes.
I wish more people thought like you
Believers' answer is "don't ask. Don't think about it. Just believe what we say".
Doubly insane is that being omniscient, god knew this was going to happen in the first place. So he made this hullabaloo about not wanting to let humans into heaven, but he also knew what the outcome was going to be. So fucking stupid.
Yup. The whole fucking bullshit bible can be deconstructed so easily with basic observations like this. The whole Adam and Eve nonsense story doesn't make sense either, because: why would an omniscient God create humankind in the first place if he knew what the outcome would be, and why would he put a "tree of knowledge of good and bad" in there, knowing Adam and Eve would eventually eat the fruit? Worst fairy tale ever written. Zero stars. Do not recommend. It's all so fucking stupid, and people who follow it can't even explain it either. 🤷♂️
Amazon recommendations: People who bought into this story also bought into Life is Fair if You Are a Good Person, and Every Bad Person Gets What's Coming To Them, If Not in Life, in Hell!
That’s not lost on Christians. The point is God knew this plan of redemption was the way to bring the maximum amount of glory to himself. That’s the point of human history. It’s all about God not about humans
It still hurts like hell. Plus you lose experience points.
Don't try to fill the gaps. It doesn't balance. That's why faith is critical.
It's all a bunch of hooey!
It's all fiction. None of it makes sense. None of it has been proven. You can't make sense out of nonsense fiction. Don't try. Just walk away and never listen to anyone who claims it makes sense to them.
The way it was explained to me when I used to go to church is that during his crucifixtion he endured all of the pain of every single sinner who would have otherwise gone to hell. So he essentially experienced the infinite suffering all of the saints across history would have felt, literally taking their punishment for them. Always been an atheist, but dated a religious girl for quite a long time which is why I was in church hearing this stuff.
stupid religion
Because the bible doesn't make sense. It's a storybook with plot holes. Don't question that garbage, all you'll get is one of the many copy-paste 'answers m' to these plot holes that Christians possess.
Jesus is not unkillable. He is omnipotent, so he has the power to avoid being killed, but he purposely chose not to use it and instead willingly laid down his life. Theologians debate the details on how his sacrifice grants us salvation (called atonement theory), but the fact of the matter is that Jesus was willingly killed, even though he had the ability to prevent it.
Well that is because it is all fake
Dude came back 3 days later. He lost a weekend
It isn't. The story is nonsense
it’s all nonsense
None of it’s real
that novel has a bunch of plot holes