#STRask - Was Jesus’ Death Really a Sacrifice if He Knew He Would Rise Again?

Episode Date: June 24, 2024

Questions about why God the Father required a sacrifice (and whether Jesus’ short-term death was really a sacrifice), whether Jesus’ disciples ever offered sacrifices at the temple, and what it means to say that sin causes separation from God if God is omnipresent. Why did God the Father require a sacrifice, and if Jesus knew he would rise again in three days, was his death really a sacrifice? Did Jesus’ disciples ever offer sacrifices at the temple, and if not, why not? How can I explain the idea that “sin causes separation from God” to someone who believes that it denies God’s omnipresence and denies Jesus interacted with sinners?

Hello and welcome to another episode of Hashtag STR Ask from Stand to Reason with Greg Kokel. Starring Greg Kokel, the great... Don't talk like that. No. You're the star, Amos. Okay. Okay, enough of that nonsense. All right.

Now, Greg, this first question I get all the time, and we answer it from time to time, but I think it's been a few years. It's a very popular question. This one comes from David D. Why did God the Father require a sacrifice? Also, if Jesus knew that after he would die, he would rise again in three days and then ascend into heaven, was it really a sacrifice? Well, let me deal with the second one first level that we are going to go to heaven after we die. And it doesn't mean that the pain of the death or the difficult circumstances leading up to it is somehow mitigated by the fact, oh, I know I'm going to be with the Lord. You know, I mean, they're two separate things.

Jesus knew he was going to be raised from the dead, but he still went through the pain of the crucifixion, and he anguished about it. In fact, I'm just reading the Gospel of John now, and I'm in Passion Week. The Upper Room Discourse just started. That starts in John 13. But maybe it was at the end of John 12. He's just reflecting on—that was actually Palm Sunday, John 12—and he's reflecting on what he's about to go through. And he says, I'm so grieved about what I'm about to face. And he says, am I to ask God, save me from this hour? When it's this very hour that God sent me into the world, the Father sent me into the world for, to do this task. But it's clear that he's struggling emotionally. to do this task. But it's clear that he's struggling emotionally. So he knows what is ahead of him in the long run. And actually, the writer of Hebrews said, for the joy set before him,

he endured the cross, despising its shame. So he knew what was going to come. That's in Hebrews 12. He knew what was to come. Yet, nevertheless, he had to go through the passion to get to what was to come. And, yes, there's a certain sense that we can have a satisfaction and this vibrant hope about what's to come later for the joy set before him, but we still endure what comes before, just like he did. So, I don't think the fact that Jesus knew that he was going to go, he was going to be resurrected, takes anything away from the whole, the passion itself. I mean, read through it or watch a movie that depicts it well like The Passion of the Christ and begin to get a sense, a little bit, of what Jesus had to endure. And by the way, that was just at the hands of man. What we can see in a film is just what Jesus suffered at the hands of men,

can see in a film is just what Jesus suffered at the hands of men, not what he suffered at the hands of the Father, pouring out his wrath on Jesus for the sins of the world. Plus, if, you know, asking, was it really a sacrifice? You're not, I think it's a little bit of an equivocation on the word sacrifice, using it in the sense of, did he really lose anything? Well, that's a different question than, was his death a sacrifice? And the answer is yes, of course, because the sacrifice was death. The death of the animal was a sacrifice in the temple, and the death of Christ was the sacrifice that would appease God's wrath. And so, yes, the sacrifice actually happened. Whether or not Jesus knew he would be raised again, that doesn't mean he didn't die. So he actually died and he

served as a sacrifice. Yeah, but it's more than just death because, I mean, that was the culmination of it all. It was the way in which he died that at the hands of men and then at the hands of the Father that made the payment complete such that at the end he could say, to tell us I translated, it is finished. But the point was, it's not just over. Now I did, I'm ready to die. It's not just over. It is completed. It is accomplished, is the point. And so that has to be factored in. I'm wondering if David is responding to a challenge from an atheist, because I remember this coming up from an atheist once in the past. Oh, what's the big deal? You know, he rose again from the dead, according to you guys. What's the big deal that

he died? Now, I don't think that David's question is cavalier like that, but some people have it that way. That's their attitude. And, well, take a look at what exactly was entailed. His grief and grieving, and it's fresh in my mind because I was just reading John 11, the raising of Lazarus, which happened the week before, and then subsequent events leading up. And Jesus is getting darker and darker and more anguished knowing what he has to face. And it's not just at the hands of men, but it's at the hands of the Father. Now, for those people who are uncomfortable with that idea,

all I'm asking you to do is read Isaiah 53. Now, I've just written a longest piece about this. It'll be coming out. Maybe it's already out when this broadcast comes out. But it's a solid ground called Why the Blood. That's the title. And it has to do with this whole question of substitutionary atonement. And maybe this goes to the first part of the question.

Why did there have to be a sacrifice? Is that how it's worded? Why did God the Father be a sacrifice? Is that how it's worded? Why did God the Father require a sacrifice? It's because he's good. That's why. He's good. Immorality, rebellion, acts of evil must be punished. And when even a reflection on human government, when governments don't punish evildoers, we already know something's wrong with that.

We object to that. Wait, you mean he got off scot-free? He got away with that? We know he's guilty. There's a loophole in the law, and he gets to walk? Now, what is happening there? We're expressing an intuition about justice, and the intuition is that people who do bad things ought to be punished, okay? And, of course, the difficulty is we've all done bad things, which means we all deserve to be punished. Now, if God were just to kind of

wave it off as if it's nothing, or even if he said, it's something really big, but I'm going to treat it as nothing and not do anything to the perpetrators. Okay. Well, this would not be good. This would be treating the good exactly as the—I should say, treating the evil person exactly as God would treat the good person. All right. Or, I mean, relatively evil and relatively good. I'm using this, nobody's good, ultimately.

I understand that, but I'm appealing to people's moral intuitions here, okay? So, what God's love motivates, a desire to rescue, but his justice motivates a desire to punish. but his justice motivates a desire to punish. And so how do these two things stay in balance with each other? And the way they stay in balance is that God is able to punish a substitute, who ultimately was Jesus himself, in order to extend mercy and grace to the one who's actually guilty. 2 Corinthians 5.21, He made him, the Father made Jesus, who knew no sin,

to become sin on our behalf, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. So that's the great exchange. That's the trade. Jesus takes our sin and the wrath that goes with it, and we take his righteousness and the affirmation that goes with it, the approval that goes with it. Okay, that's called justification. That's the trade. And so then he gets the punishment that we deserve. And the way I put it, like we've done in all the realities here this last season, and

I've closed with a gospel-type presentation, I just said very simply to those students, here's the simple calculus. Either Jesus pays or you pay. There is a debt. It's our debt. It has to be paid one way or another. If Jesus pays, then it's done. Then we are released and forgiven. If Jesus isn't the one who pays because we haven't put our trust in him, then there's only one left to pay for the crimes we have committed. And that's each of us for our own crimes such as they are. So I think the passage that kind of encapsulates what you're saying, Greg, would be in Romans 3, where it says that—let's see here, so I can read it exactly here. He's making fun of my little Bible, everyone. Yeah, I've got my magnifying glass, which I need for my Bible.

Amy's got micro dot there, but she can still read it. micro dot there, but she can still read it. Okay, so he says the cross was to demonstrate his righteousness, because in the forbearance of God, he passed over the sins previously committed. For the demonstration, I say, of his righteousness at the present time, so that he would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus. So that's what it's accomplishing. It's allowing him to be just while at the same time being the justifier by grace. And I also just want to point out quickly that the – and I can't remember where this is. I was trying – I think it's in Ephesians somewhere.

But it talks about the eternal purpose of God being for Jesus to die on the cross. So the question, why did God the Father require a sacrifice? It's in 1 Peter 1. There's a Jesus foreknown since the foundation. But then there's another one that actually talks about the eternal purpose was for him to – and then I think there's even a passage that says he was slain before the foundations of the world. So the idea, why did he require sacrifice? And then I think there's even a passage that says he was slain before the foundations of the world. So the idea, why did he require sacrifice?

Well, that's the whole point of everything. This was the centerpiece of the entire creation. Before the foundation of the world, his eternal purpose was to reveal the grace and love of God on the cross, to reveal the kind of love that loves enemies, that loves sinners, that self-sacrificial love. All of this was the goal of creation. So to ask why he required a sacrifice, that's the whole point, because he's revealing himself through that. And the way he reveals himself through that is by being just and the justifier. Incidentally, I think this is a challenging point for a lot of people. It is one of the areas that is really under attack by progressive Christianity and also other outsiders.

And that's one of the reasons I wrote this piece recently called Why the Blood, Solid Ground. And also I address this in the story of reality, because one needs to understand the nature of the problem before they can understand how Jesus is the solution to that problem. So in the story of reality, I work out some of those details in that. So, you know, that might be a place people go to find more information. Why the blood came out on May 1st. So everyone can, you can go back through our articles or just look through our solid grounds and you can find that. Because Greg does go through all the setup leading up to the cross that predicted all of, you know, his death on the cross as a sacrifice, etc. So, I think it's really helpful. Let's go to a question from Everlasting.

Why didn't Jesus' disciples ever offer sacrifices at the temple? Maybe they did, but it isn't recorded. I know that Jesus didn't because he was sinless, but his disciples weren't. Did Jesus never mention it because he was going to be the ultimate sacrifice for them? Well, this is an argument from silence. That is, the text is silent on this, and it's difficult to draw conclusions from silence unless, in a certain sense, the silence is deafening, okay? Unless the silence is deafening. In other words, when you'd expect there to be a very strong statement about something and there's not a strong statement about that, then I think it's fair to raise the issue, why wasn't something said? But I don't think the silence is deafening in this regard. The only time even—Paul doesn't even talk about the sacrificial system.

I was just reading this the other day in a book about the law, and actually it was on the airplane last night. Paul almost never makes reference to the sacrificial system. You have a lot of that developed in the book of Hebrews. It's not clear entirely who the author of that is, but it was accepted as apostolic and sound fairly early on. Nevertheless, this whole situation isn't discussed much. Now, Jesus went up for the Passover. We do know that, and for the different celebrations. So, he was a Torah-observant Jew, okay? And so, he was doing the things that were characteristic that the law required or that were characteristic that the law required or

that were characteristic of the culture of the Hebrews as evidenced in the law, like Passover, for example. And when he was born, he was taken to the temple in the appropriate time, circumcised at the right time, and then there were sacrifices that were made that were appropriate for the child opening the womb. And so every time we have a picture of a touchstone with something pertaining to the law, we see Jesus and his family in conformity with it. The fact that it doesn't mention that he went up for Yom Kippur or whatever the annual sacrifice or whatever, I don't know that that's relevant. Yeah, I would assume he was taking part in all of the nation's sacrifices and festivals and all of those things since he was under the law. Yeah, and I was thinking also about his birth because

they did do a sacrifice for, although I don't know if that, yeah. Now, Greg, do you think there were sacrifices even for uncleanness? Like if you, right, if you touched a dead body, did you have to, were there sacrifices or were there just, was there just some sort of a ritual? No, well, I'm kind of out of my ken on that. There were rituals that applied to it. And Jesus clearly violated those statutes. Let me put it this way. And again, I just read this recently, and it was kind of interesting, that if you touch somebody who is unclean, then you became unclean, like a person with leprosy. But Jesus was clean, and he touched the leprous person, and the leprous person became clean. So the dynamic was in reverse there because of who Jesus was. So I don't know how that works out with the details of the law, whatever. But if Jesus,

if you touch an unclean thing, you have to become cleansed. You go through ritual washings and stuff like that. But it turned out Jesus' touch was the cleansing touch. He didn't need to be cleansed because he was the cleanser who cleansed the leprous people and healed them so they were no longer leprous. Or raised the dead, touching the dead, you know, talitha koumi, let a girl arise, you know. Yeah, but I don't think there's any reason to think the disciples didn't sacrifice. No. Do you? Yeah.

No. Okay. Now, here's a question from STR Fan, and you had a similar question on the other show, but I'm going to include this here also because I think it came from a different person. So, how can I explain the idea, sin causes separation from God, to someone who believes that it denies God's omnipresence and denies Jesus interacted with sinners. Well, this is a problem of language, okay?

And words are not hardly ever univocal. Maybe the word univocal is univocal. It has one meaning, univocal, one voice. It means one thing. Most univocal. It has one meaning, univocal, one voice. It means one thing. Most are equivocal. Most words have a variety of meanings. Open up any dictionary and you see all the various ways that words can be used, okay? And so when we try to explain theological elements, we have to use language to do so. And sometimes the language could be misunderstood. So the language of—and even the Scripture uses this kind of language, but we have to understand that lots of times it's analogical. When we say that God cannot be in the presence of sin,

I think there is a passage that sounds like that, but that's a standard way of people talking about it. And God can't count on sin. He can't be in the presence of sin. Well, wait a minute. The devil went right in front of God. He's sin personified, and there he is in Job talking to God. So how could that be possible? And this just shows the limitations of our language. When we say God cannot be in the presence of sin, what we're referring to is a

perfect holiness and a justice that requires—and this goes back to an earlier question, actually—that requires God have a—or I should say the result of which this holiness is a—how did Alistair Bragg put it? It's a settled disposition of hostility and anger and wrath towards sin, okay? So, with regards to sin, God is always angry about that. He has wrath towards that. That's his settled disposition, okay? And so, all we mean, or we ought to mean when we say, well, God cannot countenance sin or be in the presence of sin. We just mean that kind of thing. God's dangerous, and he is dangerous to sinful people, which means he's dangerous for all of us. Okay, that's the point, all right? We don't mean that

there can't be some kind of sin that God cannot, in a certain sense, and I hesitate to say this because it's also a distortion, to be physically around or to be personally in the presence of. That's not the point because God's omniscient, God's awareness, conscious awareness, even is present in hell where all the sinful lost are in, in some place of agony, before their final disposition in the Lake of Fire in Revelation 20. So, I mean, all of these bad people have gone somewhere, and God is aware of that. All right? Jesus is the God-man.

He certainly is in the presence of sin. But notice when he talks about it. In John chapter 3, he said, look, I didn't come to judge. I came to save. But judgment awaits you if you don't take advantage of this. He who believes is not judged. He who does not believe, the wrath of God abides on him. That's John 3.36, but he continues that theme as we move through the gospel of John. So, there's the sense that Jesus isn't going to be judging, but there is a judgment coming. And the judgment that comes is going to be from him. Because Paul tells us in Acts 18 at the Areopagus, when he gives that speech, that God has appointed

a man to judge humanity, having supplied proof by raising that man from the dead. So, the great white throne judgment will have Jesus sitting in the judge's chair to bring judgment. He came to save, but for those who refused his offer of salvation and continued their rebellion, then he becomes their judge. Okay. So there is Jesus in the presence of all that evil. The point is, when we use that kind of language, is that God is not going to wink, so to speak, at sin. He is going to deal with it one way or another. And this brings us back to that aphorism I offered a little earlier. Either Jesus pays or we pay. That's the calculus. I think the mistake that this, that STR fan's friend is making here,

when you say sin causes separation from God, maybe he's picturing we're in this separate room. We've been moved into this separate room. But that's not the case. It's simply a break in the relationship. It's a broken relationship that needs to be restored. So imagine, say you have two roommates living together, and one of them does something to the other one and harms the relationship. Well, now there's a separation between them that has to be repaired. That doesn't mean they can't interact with each other. It doesn't mean one can't plead with the other to repent and apologize and all of that. It just means the relationship is broken. So that's the simple way of putting it. It's not that you're cordoned off from ever interacting with God. Because as he notes here, it's clearly not the case because Jesus interacted with sinners.

So this is a manner of speaking, and we have to understand these languages or these terms or illustrations or way of talking are analogical, and they're equivocal. They mean different things in different circumstances. They're not univocal, having a single meaning, and in this case, being some kind of spatial distancing. Yeah. Well, thank you, David, and Everlasting and STR fan. We love hearing from you. So send us your question on X with the hashtag STRask or on our website at str.org. This is Amy Hall and Greg Koukl for Stand to Reason.