3g) Why did Christ need to Die?
The answer to what happens after our death is found in the Bible. You get
all the texts on the table at one time and you'll see the complete picture. The
intention of God's plan for us after our death, is
demonstrated in the death of Christ. Something very profound happened after
Christ died. God rethought of Him as He had done with Lazarus, but Lazarus was
re-created as a human who would die again. In contrast, Christ was
"re-created", in a different form. He ate fish (Lk
24:42-43) and He had flesh and blood (John 20:27 & Luke 24:39), but He
could also walk through walls (Lk 24: 36 & John
20:19, 26). This is no longer human. We have called this a "glorified
body". What it really is, I believe, is the form we all would have in
God's other reality, ie an extra-dimensional universe (4 D or more) where
you'll find the "spirits/angels or already glorified others" also.
This is the new world, where God is manifesting Himself now throughout eternity
as Christ in a Glorified body. We call this place, “heaven”, ie the third
heaven. Christ Glorified is there now as
the King of this kingdom of heaven. He
is “angelic” and the angel, “Who is like God”.
Therefore we can call Him “Michael”, the
With this resurrection, God has demonstrated His plan to us and to all His other thought worlds. We will not be raised up as mortal humans, but if we have chosen "Life", we will eventually be raised up as immortal glorified bodies. He has told us to follow His example and we too will get everlasting life. Of course for God, the only life is everlasting life. Everything else is death, as viewed from His eternal perspective. I suggest the following rationale for Christ's Death and Resurrection, which goes deeper into the situation than the vague, albeit true concept that He had to save us from our sins.
WHY CHRIST HAD TO DIE
1) Christ had to die so that He could be
raised from the dead.
2) He had to die because all people must die.
Christ was totally human. He had no supernatural abilities of Himself, even though He was the image of God, ie the one human, Who was like God. Review the explanation of the Trinity in section 3di and section 2b to understand how Christ was totally human and still God. By definition, humans cannot work miracles (John 11: 41-44; then John10:25). He had to demonstrate what everyone of us can do. If you need supernatural powers to emulate Christ, then none of us can do it. Note also, that the wages of sin is death, not just “Sleep”. If we died only to be raised again as humans, then we were only “sleeping”. Therefore, I say that Christ calls our first death a sleep only because He is not finished with us yet. We will be raised either to everlasting Life or to everlasting Death. However, before we can inherit the kingdom of heaven we must give up this human body and be changed into angelic form. The human body must cease to exist, ie die eventually, or else the wages of sin is not really death.
3) People had to kill Christ.
Mankind demonstrated just how far they had fallen away from a meaningful relation with their Creator, when they killed the image of that Creator in their world. This was a milestone point in God's demonstration, where we are proving that our bad choices lead to a corrupt nature, so much so that we eventually won't even recognize our Creator. The torture associated with His death serves to affirm just how far we've fallen away from Him. He affirms that we have choices by not overriding them with His supernatural power, regardless of how we insult Him. He has promised that we have free will, so enduring the way we treated Him on Earth, proves that He will not intervene against our free will, even when He would really like to.
4) He had to die to
demonstrate that He still wants a relationship with us.
If God is to give us a second chance, then He must pay the price for our collective decisions to break off that relationship. When we chose to separate ourselves from God, we started down a road of increasing character devolution that ultimately leads to our own death. After that physical death, our story would normally be over. We would have received what we asked for. By dying Himself, the human image of God fulfills the need for death as a consequence of sin in this human drama. He, who had no sin, takes on all the sins of mankind past, present, and future, as only the Creator can do. I don’t see this as accepting the punishment for our sins, because that punishment is death and we still die. This does not prevent us from dying, but it does show that our Creator understands the situation and cares for us enough to die "with" us. This indicates that there is somehow an escape clause in effect. We need to couple the death of Christ to His resurrection to understand the full picture. What is earned by Christ’ death is a chance at everlasting Life, even though we die a human death.
There is no way we would know that God loves us as we are going through this “Vale of Tears” on Earth. Many could justifiably feel that any God, Who would condone this grief, must not love us. Sacrifice is key to any relationship. So, He demonstrates His love for the whole human race and His desire to have a permanent relationship with us, when He as a human dies on our behalf. There is no greater love than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends (John 15:13), especially when those friends are the ones who are rejecting and killing him. This kind of “parental love” was demonstrated by Christ’s suffering and death. Because He died on our behalf, God is reconciled to any of us who want to have a permanent relationship with Him. If that's what we want, then we can now accept His sacrifice and eventually receive everlasting life with Him in heaven.
5) He had to die to fulfill the prophecies.
The prophecies and the sacrificial traditions indicated that there was a bigger plan involved than humans are capable of sensing from our perspective. There is an angel world looking in on us in this human drama (1Cor 4:9). There is a message involved that is intended for this angel world to understand. The only way we can know that God is behind this drama, is because only God can prophesy the future so accurately without error. Hence, we have reason to investigate this situation in order to understand God's purposes. Otherwise, why bother. If there were no prophecies about this death of Christ, then there is no reason to believe it was special and no reason to change our lives because of it. Only God can prophesy the future so accurately, therefore God must be behind the text we read in the Bible. If so, then we can distinguish this Bible as the Word of God. What other source of information can make that claim?
WHY CHRIST HAD TO BE RAISED FROM DEATH
1) His resurrection demonstrated that there is
a Thinker/Creator Being
Christ's resurrection demonstrated that there is some power outside of our human understanding that controls life and death. No human can raise himself from death. Only a Thinker/ Creator, can do this. It is not something that happens in a universe that is its own explanation.
2) It demonstrated that death is not the final
word
Christ was actually seen alive after His death (John 20:14, 19, 24-27; John 21, Lk 24), but He was more than a mere human. He had all the characteristics of a normal human, ie flesh and blood (Lk 24:36-44), but He could walk through our 3D walls like an angel (Jn 20:19, 26) .
3) It demonstrated that after a human death we
can be changed into something supernatural
The "Glorified" Christ could walk through walls (John 20:19,26). Humans can't do that. We must become like angels. We cannot follow the Glorified Christ into His world as we are in our human form (John 7:33-36; 8:21-22; 13:33). Hence, when Christ returns to take us with Him, we must be changed as Christ was (1Cor 15:50-57).
4) It demonstrated that the Plan of God
extends beyond our human existence
Christ's resurrection is the hope of our everlasting life (1Cor 15-12-34). He explained that even though we die, we may yet be given everlasting life on the Last Day, when the Glorified Christ returns to claim His own (1Thes 4:13-18). God can choose to change us into glorified beings (angels) as He did to Jesus the human. Then we can live with the glorified Christ and the other angels in heaven (John 14:1-4). He has told us that this is our decision, but if we choose Life, then He has this special plan for giving it to us. NOTE: The human Image of God has died for our sins, never to be human again. In His risen state, He is angelic, but He is the angel "Who is like God". He is angelic, but distinguished from the other angels, just as Christ was human, but He was the only human "Who was like God". For this reason, the Bible calls Him Michael, the archangel. The Image of God in angelic form is as He was before the creation of our human universe, only now and forever after, He will retain those holes in His hands. These will remind all who exist with Him in heaven of the Sin Drama that played out on this earth.
5) It demonstrated what we need to do to have
everlasting life ourselves
He sent His disciples out to preach the Good News of Christ's sacrifice on our behalf. They are in effect forgiving or not forgiving depending or whether the hearers accept or reject this news (John 20:21-23 & Matt 16:15-19). To accept His sacrifice is to indicate a desire to have a relationship with God through His "Son", ie that Image of Himself that the Creator once put in our world. NOTE: Christ's message was in the relationship that He maintained with the Creator during every aspect of His life (John 7: 16.17). This relationship gave Him special power (John 14:10-14), which He said we could tap into as well. Ultimately, His relationship with the Creator was what enabled the Creator to rethink of Christ after His human death. The Creator cannot allow Himself to intervene in our lives against our free will, or He would not have "free will beings". Hence, He must create a situation around us, and hope that we make the right choices ourselves. Our first collective choice was to choose death, ie choosing to separate ourselves from God. The situation that God created around us by sending the image of Himself into our world, was intended to show us the big picture and to encourage us to change our minds (John 3:16). Each of us has sinned so each of us must reconsider our choices.
It all
boils down to this: The Purpose of Life
on Earth is to decide to Trust God.
God has this terrific plan that will eradicate Sin without eradicating Free Will. This will allow His Created, Thinking Free-willed, Angelic Beings to live happily ever after, fully understanding the knowledge of “good” and “evil”, so they will only make choices that will enhance their lives. Unlike the naïve’ beings they were created as, they, like God, will one day recognize bad choices and avoid them, so Sin (the consequence of doing evil) will never arise again. The Plan requires Humans to live out the Great Controversy on Earth while the angelic beings watch and learn what works and what doesn’t, without ever sinning themselves. So, God has this great plan, but He wants us humans to be part of it too. Even though we die, yet He can give us everlasting life. Would you trust someone . who told you that this plan was for real? This is why God had to become a human. He had to do two things while here with us. He had to show us that He really cared about us (no greater love than to die for us). Then he had to raise Himself from the dead to prove He was God. If He is God, then He is fully capable of enacting His Plan.
So, anyone who elects to Trust God, will believe this Plan and live accordingly. But, I can see where it certainly helps to have a personal relationship with God through the Image He gave us in Christ. If we have a personal relationship with Christ, then we are able to trust Him. (In God We Trust). This is why we as Christians believe we need to have that Personal Relationship with God through Christ.
PS: The Bible tells us that Christ died to save us from our sins. With the above rationale, I can more clearly understand what is meant by that. We are not saved in this world, but even though we die a human death, yet we can inherit the kingdom of heaven and have everlasting Life eventually. If God had not revealed Himself in human form (as Christ) we would still not be able to relate to Him on a personal level as someone we know. Since He became human flesh, we can understand God’s motives and feelings about us. When He dies a human death at our hands He reveals His love for us in contrast to His complete power over us. This reveals that He has some bigger purpose in the works. After all, He is letting us go through this Vale of Tears, but He goes through it with us even to the point of His own sacrificial death on our behalf. There’s got to be a “Big Picture” reason behind this, so we can now have confidence that we merely need to trust in God and follow Christ’s example in developing our own personal relationship with Him, in order to effect the proper outcome. If Christ/God Himself can endure this grief for the sake of that greater outcome, then we too can endure our share of it. In the Bigger Picture, everything happening here makes good sense.
Some related Questions:
One question arises about Christ the human. How could He be totally human and walk on water? I suggest that Christ was still human, but God was intervening in a supernatural way. Whenever God thought of angels interacting with humans, He would have them appear to do supernatural things. Actually the Thinker was doing the miracles, but the observer would attribute them to the angel. To be consistent with the above hypothesis, God’s intervention in these cases must never violate our free-will choices. Instead, He can only change the situation around us and then allow us to make our own decisions about it. Note that Peter also walked on the same water and he certainly was not made supernatural. This is different than what happened after His resurrection, because at that point Christ Himself was changed into an angelic being.
For future discussions, please note that Christ the human did in fact die. To accept the consequences for the sins of humanity, He had to die, not merely sleep for three days. I contend that He is still dead, and that the human Christ will never again interact with this world of ours. From now on He will be manifested as angelic, ie a glorified body.
Christ laid in the tomb asleep, meaning that God was not finished with Him yet. When God recreated Christ, He was no longer human. He was extra-dimensional - a glorified body. The human Christ, having been raised to the glorified state, will never be human again. Neither will any of us who are going to be raised to Glory at the second coming of Christ, ever be human again. At that time we, like Christ, will be raised incorruptible and immortal, but not human. Our human bodies will remain dead – the natural consequences of sin.
For the record, I believe those not destined for
everlasting life will be raised to life again after the 1000 year
"millennium". I see them appearing as did Lazarus, in human form
again, so that they can die. When they
attack the City of
26 July 2001,
Updated 13 April 2003, 10 April 2004
For more on this and a response to any questions, please email any comments to nasamike@nasamike.com