Probably one of the most common questions that you hear from people who don’t fully understand Christianity is this question: “why did Jesus have to die?”. The answer that most Christians seem to hold to is that 1) humans are rebelling against God, 2) Humans deserve punishment for their rebellion, 3) Humans cannot escape the punishment for their rebellion on their own, 4) Jesus was punished in the place of the rebellious humans, 5) Those who accept this sacrifice are forgiven for their rebelling.
Are humans rebellious?
Some people think that humans are not really rebellious at all, but it’s actually easy to see. You can see it just by looking at how people spend their time. Some of us have no time for God at all, and instead try to fill our lives with material possessions and experiences in order to have happy feelings. Some of us embrace just the parts of God that make us feel happy, like church and singing and feelings of comfort, while avoiding the hard parts of that vertical relationship; reading, thinking and disagreeing with people who don’t believe the truth about God. And so on.
This condition of being in rebellion is universal, and all of us are guilty of breaking the law at some point. All of us deserve to be separated from God’s goodness and love. Even if we wanted to stop rebelling, we would not be able to make up for the times where we do rebel by being good at other times, any more than we could get out of a speeding ticket by appealing to the times when we drove at the speed limit, (something that I never do, in any case).
This is not to say that all sinners are punished equally – the degree of punishment is proportional to the sins a person commits. However, the standard is perfection. And worse than that, the most important moral obligation is a vertical moral obligation. You can’t satisfy the demands of the moral law just by making your neighbor happy, while treating God like a pariah. The first commandment is to love God, the second is to love your neighbor. Even loving your neighbor requires you to tell your neighbor the truth – not just to make them feel good. The vertical relationship is more important than the horizontal one, and we’ve all screwed up the vertical relationship. We all don’t want God to be there, telling us what’s best for us, interfering with our fun. We don’t want to relate to a loving God if it means having to care what he thinks about anything that we are doing.
Who is going to pay for our rebellion?
The Christian answer to the problem of our rebellion is that Jesus takes the punishment we deserve in our place.
However, I’ve noticed that on some atheist blogs, they don’t like the idea that someone else can take our punishment for us to exonerate us for crimes that we’ve committed. So I’ll quote from this post by the great William Lane Craig, to respond to that objection.
Excerpt:
The central problem of the Penal Theory is, as you point out, understanding how punishing a person other than the perpetrator of the wrong can meet the demands of justice. Indeed, we might even say that it would be wrong to punish some innocent person for the crimes I commit!
It seems to me, however, that in other aspects of human life we do recognize this practice. I remember once sharing the Gospel with a businessman. When I explained that Christ had died to pay the penalty for our sins, he responded, “Oh, yes, that’s imputation.” I was stunned, as I never expected this theological concept to be familiar to this non-Christian businessman. When I asked him how he came to be familiar with this idea, he replied, “Oh, we use imputation all the time in the insurance business.” He explained to me that certain sorts of insurance policy are written so that, for example, if someone else drives my car and gets in an accident, the responsibility is imputed to me rather than to the driver. Even though the driver behaved recklessly, I am the one held liable; it is just as if I had done it.
Now this is parallel to substitutionary atonement. Normally I would be liable for the misdeeds I have done. But through my faith in Christ, I am, as it were, covered by his divine insurance policy, whereby he assumes the liability for my actions. My sin is imputed to him, and he pays its penalty. The demands of justice are fulfilled, just as they are in mundane affairs in which someone pays the penalty for something imputed to him. This is as literal a transaction as those that transpire regularly in the insurance industry.
So, it turns out that the doctrine of substitutionary atonement is not as mysterious or as objectionable as everyone seems to think it is.
WINTERY KNIGHT 
Good post. I remember reading somewhere that the fallenness or moral imperfection of humans is the most empirically obvious aspects of the gospel. We all know it’s true. You just have to look around you and do a little introspection. A very common truism that hardly anybody denies is that, “Nobody is perfect.” But there are people who will deny it when the subject of the gospel comes up.
I’ve found a lot of people when faced with the gospel will want to put humans on a bell curve. They’ll admit that nobody is perfect, but then say that most of us are good enough. I remember a teacher of mine in college saying, “I’ve never murdered anybody or committed adultery.” He was setting the bar pretty low for what it meant to be a good person.
I’ve heard other people object that God’s standard of moral perfection is unreasonably high. This objection implicitly refutes the previous two objections since it admits that nobody can meet God’s moral standards. I can kind of relate with this objection, too. Anybody who has actually tried to be morally perfect finds out pretty quickly that it’s unachievable. I remember when I was a kid being inspired by Benjamin Franklin to write a list of 13 virtues, then to try to live consistently with them, one at a time, one week each, until I mastered all 13. It was a lot more difficult than I expected it to be. It’s like trying to stop having sugar in your diet. You don’t realize how much of what you’re eating has sugar until you try to cut it all out.
But anyway, I kind of like this objection because it’s the perfect set-up to explain the grace of God. Of COURSE we can’t live up to God’s standard. That is why God’s grace is necessary for our salvation. Our inability to become morally perfect is all the more reason to throw ourselves at the mercy of God and to give him all the glory for our salvation. It’s why we have to give up trusting in ourselves and trust completely in what Christ did on our behalf and to know that when we stand before God, we do so clothed in HIS righteousness rather than our own.
Besides that, it’s not as if God could simply lower the standards. If God himself is the standard by which good and evil are distinguished, then all of our moral obligations come from him. To say, “You must do this,” but at the same time to say, “But you don’t really have to” is to engage in contradiction. The moral law is similar to any civil law in the fact that it demands perfection. It doesn’t matter how often you stop at red lights and pay your taxes. If you speed just one time, the government is within its rights in giving you a ticket with a fine because you’re a law-breaker.
I suppose one objection to that analogy is the fact that we have lots of laws that aren’t enforced.
One other objection I hear sometimes is, “Well, why can’t God just forgive us without there having to be a payment? He’s God after all. Who is going to tell him he can’t?” My answer to this is just that it would go against his nature. God can’t be perfectly holy and arbitrary at the same time. What would you say to that objection?
Sam
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I think your response to the objection is the perfect response, to be honest. God is the standard.
When I think about what I had planned to achieve with my life, then didn’t because of various reasons, it’s not hard for me to see that I have not loved God as hard as I could. How is that going to get fixed? I’m very grateful to be on a team where I get a fresh uniform every day.
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