Why did God need Jesus to be killed?

[Machadaynu]

Not much to add to the title I suppose.

It's just never made sense to me that an omnipotent God would need to do anything he didn't want to, therefore he must have wanted to have Jesus killed.

He could have forgiven us without him being killed - or he isn't omnipotent.

He could have made a world that remained without sin, rather than letting Satan mess this one up in the first week - or he isn't omnipoitent

He could have invented another way of making a symbolic gesture that didn't involve murdering his son - maybe he could have made the earth spin backwards or something to signify a new start.

I just don't understand God thinking "well, I don't need to murder my son, but I think I will anyway because that will show people how loving I am"

So why did he claim to need to have Jesus killed?

How do you feel it all changed after the gruesome murder of Jesus?

I have no idea why. Find it all pretty senseless myself.

I believe that God living and dying allowed God to understand and relate to humanity in a new way. I don't think the "gruesome murder" aspect was necessary, although death of some sort would be part of the package, and execution would be the most likely thing to happen in that place and at that time, given the things Jesus was saying.

"I believe that God living and dying allowed God to understand and relate to humanity in a new way"

I would have thought being omniscient and omnipotent would have given him a clue, to be honest!

as seeker says - God already knew everything - he is the Alpha and the Omega - he knows everything.

He didn't need Jesus to die to know what it was like to be human - and if he did I find his judgement of humans for the thousands of years previously to be morally bankrupt.

I can know all about a topic in theory but it's not till I do it for myself that I can really know what it feels like. Of course I'm a long way from omnipotent, but it's like someone else said upthread that Jesus can't possibly be fully God and fully human because there are things about being God that are just not the same as being human. So becoming human, and limiting himself to doing things in ways that humans have to operate would teach God something about the reality of being human that He could only know in a theoretical kind of way before.

It does require the idea that God can actually change over time, but I don't see what the point of any exixtence without the possibility of change would be, so the idea of God changing seems to make sense to me.

So your God isn't omnipotent or omniscient, then, AMum?

I think God is supposed to be constant because he is perfect, and any change would therfore have to make him imperfect, or imply he wasn't previously perfect.

Maybe if the Old Testament 'God' was in fact an anthropomorphism of the laws of physics, you could extrapolate something from this?

The laws of physics, like 'God', just are, and are outside boundaries of time, control, and full human understanding. They affect everything that happens to us, the weather, earthquakes, tides, biology, chemistry, psychology etc. To call this force 'God' and give it something approximating human intentions (it can be 'forgiving' or 'unforgiving' for example) seems a natural step for the human brain.

So Christ comes along and aligns himself with this 'God' (in a metaphorical or non-metaphorical sense, who knows), but is more progressive / liberal / loving than the great thinkers / people in charge of the time. He accumulates followers, but also upsets people and is killed. His followers rationalise his killing by saying it is all part of a plan, that he was truly divine because like all of us, he was under the control of and thus part of the laws of physics (God), yet he appeared to defy them by coming back to life, so must be outside of them, and therefore (like the laws of physics) somehow in 'control' and divine. If he can do it, then it gives hope that anyone can do it (defy the laws of physics / be Godlike), and indeed Christianity shows us the ways in which we CAN move towards divinity and everlasting life.

So maybe that is the point?

If God really wanted to know about being a human, shouldn't he have lived a long life, married, had children, grown old, and then died?

I mean, what has he really learned about being human except youth and the fact that pain hurts?

Mach I think it happened, sure, I think Jesus was crucified by the Romans. But I think the dogma surrounding the physical events were applied retrospectively. But sure, certainly I am not an orthodox Christian. I don't even think I can officially class myself as one since I don't believe Jesus was god incarnate any more than any of us is. Actually I don't even believe in an omnipotent god.

I'll get me coat.

machadaynu I think I already said upthread that I don't think that God can be omnipotent by the strictest definition. I don't think He can be omniscient by the strictest defnition either, because I think your understanding of something that you actually live through yourself is always going to have a quality and texture that something you know about from even the closest observation of other people is going to lack.

And I don't think that existence without change would have a point - why ever do anything, or try anything out, if you aren't prepared to even consider the possibility of it affecting you in some way? So if perfection has to be unchanging, then I don't see that God could be perfect either. Because if God was totally unchanging, why even bother creating anything anyway?

cote but He could only live a long life by not rocking the boat and teaching people the important stuff, so even if God had learned and changed by doing it, humanity would know nothing about it and wouldn't try to work out a new religion to adapt to it.

What seeker said in 10:57:23 post.

wildstrawberry I like it when "unofficial" Christians, and others, chat round this stuff, as it brings up the questions and weirdnesses of it much more than statements of theology do. They usually require you to believe a whole raft of things before they make even the faintest sense, and by then you've forgotten the original question...

"If God really wanted to know about being a human, shouldn't he have lived a long life, married, had children, grown old, and then died?"

And being a woman for a while might have been a good idea too!

I think one problem is that there are the 'unofficial' christians, who think about things in an original way to try and make sense of them, which is very interesting, and the 'official' christians who believe in sacrifice redemption incarnation etc etc, and the official ones STILL aren't making sense to me. I sometimes think I grew up with a very crude understanding of christianity and surely there are thoughtful, intellectually honest people who would call themselves christians- so I guess I am looking for someone like that who also takes the official line to explain it all to me.

I'm still waiting for that, and I've got 2 years of theological college under my belt. Don't hold your breath....

Hello, I'm back. :) One of the issues re trying to answer the question 'why did Jesus die?' is that there is no one single 'official party line' on it. As I said, Jesus died; more or less incontrovertible historical fact. What that meant to the followers of Jesus unfolded over time; remember the New Testament was written over decades, and it wasn't until 420-odd years after Jesus' death that the Christians reached the 'fully God and fully man' answer. If you think of the death of Jesus as a bit like the Mona Lisa; an enigmatic thing that evokes lots of different responses, that is a good way forward. And of these lots of different responses, many are metaphorical; we were in debt and Jesus bailed us out; we were slaves and he freed us; we were lost and ge found us; we were in the judicial dock and he found us 'not guilty'; we had forsaken the God of Israel but God vindicated Jesus as the fulfilment of Israel; we are the 'firstfruits' of all creation, which will all ultimately be redeemed; we have been given a 'once for all' sacrifice so that the sacrificial Temple systems need no longer apply. And there's still more.

People were stretching their imaginations to understand this
extraordinary thing, that in Jesus, the Messiah would die. It didn't make sense, unless there was a deeper sense that entailed a complete re-thinking of everything that God had ever meant to the people of Israel, and within this re-thinking, seeing Jesus as not thf opposite of those beliefs (as it would appear on the surface) but as the fulfilment of everything.

Unsurprisingly, there are disagreements between Christians as to the significance of Jesus' death; the most hotly contested of these is the idea of 'penal substitiutionary atonement' (I.e. God punishing Jesus instead of punishing us). It's a popular view but it is not, and never has been, the 'official party line' of 'what Christiand believe.' In my church (C of E), the words we use in our prayers and hymns try to reflect as many facets of Christian contemplation on Jesus' death as possible. So there you go, that's my answer! :) sorry not to bs able to give you a one-statement soundbite, but that'd be unforgivably reductive and facile if I did.

What purpose do you imagine there is in, say a child being born to parents who are starving so then those parents have to watch their innocent child starve to death before they too die?

What is the purpose of that suffering?

Strange question. The answer is in natural law, not theology.

Machadaynu, do you understand what I'm saying? (Sorry if that sounds patronising, just not sure if you are hearing me or not.)

Do you see a link between the death of Jesus and the death of a child of starving parents? If so, what link do you see?

ah, now, this is news to me. Obviously I realised there were differences between christians ( so my history education not entirely wasted) but thought that was all about interpretations of the mass, church leadership etc. Had no idea there were profound differences of opinion re the death of Jesus. Thanks.

Because Jesus wanted to show us that this world is an illusion -- that we are all parts of God, and that suffering is what we undergo when we identify with being human.

Jesus did not die for our sins. Jesus showed us that death is not what we think it is; nor is life.

It never ceases to amaze me the mind gymnastics that Christians have to put themselves through in order to make sense of what is, actually, a remarkably silly story.

An omniscient God knows everything, including everything that's going to happen. He knows what I shall be doing at 4.17pm on Thursday, February 19th 2014. This means that he is well aware in advance of every bad thing that we're all going to get up to. So what's with the "forgiveness" then? Why, exactly, does he have to "forgive" us for anything we do when it's all his fault?

In a universe ruled by an omniscient being, there can be no such thing as "free will" - it's a contradiction in terms, an impossibility. If anyone should be forgiving anyone, it should be us forgiving him. We're all just puppets playing out his grand plan and can take no responsibility for any of it.

And, frankly, if he did need to forgive us - he's not smart enough to come up with a better way than having himself sacrificed to himself? By having his "son" tortured & murdered in the most horrific & disgusting way - at the same time as telling us all that killing is wrong???

And, sorry - Jesus' existence and death are most certainly not historically "incontrovertible". Most historians (although certainly not all) believe that there probably was a man at the root of all the myths but this is based on inference & knowledge of the time, not evidence. There's actually no evidence whatsoever that the man Jesus ever lived at all - so a long, long way from "incontrovertible".

Crikey - I'd be interested in your comments if you reworked your statement as if there is no separation between God and Jesus, and God and us. Which reinstates the free will.