Why Was Christ's Death Necessary?
But that conclusion immediately opens a further line of inquiry. If Christ's death was necessary, why was it necessary? Two questions demand an answer.
- First, why could God not, by sovereign prerogative, simply pardon sin apart from the death of Christ?
- Second, if such pardon is barred by the justice of God, as Paul's teaching suggests, how can the pardon of the guilty be reconciled with justice through the death of an innocent victim?
We should notice carefully that the incompleteness of any answer here does nothing to weaken the conclusions already reached. Those conclusions rest on abundant and decisive documentary evidence. We often have evidence strong enough to compel belief that something happened even when we cannot yet explain exactly how it happened. In such cases, confidence in the main fact naturally leads to further questions about its meaning and mechanism. So it is here: loyal acceptance of the teaching of Christ and His apostles leads us onward into reverent inquiry.
We must therefore look for an answer that fits all the facts. In other words, we need an explanation that can account for everything the writers of the New Testament say about the death of Christ. If we can find an explanation that does this, and if no other explanation accounts for the same body of evidence, then we may reasonably accept it, so far as it goes, as probably true. Much of human knowledge advances in this way: by forming hypotheses and testing them against the facts. By this inductive method, we move from what we directly observe to broader principles.
A Governmental Approach.
Scripture also supports the impartial administration of punitive justice. Proverbs 17:15 declares that both justifying the wicked and condemning the righteous are an abomination to the Lord:
One who justifies the wicked and one who condemns the righteous
are both alike an abomination to the Lord.
The reason is not hard to see. When the guilty go free, the innocent suffer. The safety of the state requires the certain and timely punishment of those who break its laws. The certainty of punishment is one of the strongest deterrents to crime. To weaken that deterrent is to disorganise society and begin to unravel it. The welfare of a nation depends on maintaining, as firmly as possible in public life and in the minds of its citizens, the connection between crime and punishment.
In human government, then, pardoning the guilty is not only unjust, because it violates a principle that underlies all law; it can also be unkind. Mercy shown to one individual may become cruelty to the community. Strict justice is often the greatest kindness, because it restrains those who are morally weak from crime, saves them from deeper moral ruin, and protects those who would otherwise suffer from their violence.
The impartial administration of justice secures respect for the ruler, and respect for the ruler strengthens government. By contrast, a ruler who refuses to enforce the punitive provisions of the law is regarded with contempt, even by those he pardons. That contempt weakens both the government and the state. The same principle appears in family life. It is often right that a disobedient child, even when repentant, should still experience the painful consequence of disobedience. In such cases, parental love itself requires discipline. A father who cannot punish may become an enemy to his son. Throughout human life, it is vitally important to preserve the connection between sin and sorrow, and between right conduct and happiness.
All this sheds light on God's government of the world. The principles of right and wrong that underlie all government are so deeply woven into human consciousness that they plainly carry a superhuman origin and authority. And the absolute necessity of government for human welfare shows it to be an ordinance of God. We cannot think of God as acting contrary to the principles of justice that are recognized across humanity and upheld by His own action. What would be unjust and contemptible in a human ruler cannot reasonably be thought consistent with the character of God. We are therefore compelled to conclude that the principles underlying good human government underlie God's government of mankind as well.
If this conclusion is sound, then the justice of God forbids pardon by mere prerogative. And that justice is not something opposed to divine love; it is one expression of the love that is the very essence of God and always seeks the highest good of His creatures. Every human analogy points in the same direction: the love of God requires the maintenance of the steady sequence of sin and sorrow through an impartial administration of law, and therefore forbids the pardon of sin by mere prerogative.
From another angle, we may say that the creation of free and intelligent beings made the threat of punishment necessary, for their highest good, as a deterrent to sin; and the truthfulness of God made the actual infliction of threatened punishment necessary as well. So both the justice of God and the truth of God, each flowing from His love, forbid the pardon of sin by mere prerogative.
These considerations provide at least a fair answer to the first question.
How Could Such a Transfer of Suffering Be Just?
A much harder question still remains. If it is inconsistent with the justice of God to pardon sin by mere prerogative, how is that inconsistency removed, or even lessened, by the death of the innocent in order to save the guilty from the punishment their sins deserve? We must admit at once that such a transfer of suffering would not be permitted in human government and would not ordinarily serve the purposes of justice there. Yet, according to the explicit teaching of Paul and the implied teaching of the other New Testament writers, God did in fact ordain this very thing as the means of saving the world.
That difference between human justice and divine justice therefore demands close attention. Nor is the question answered simply by the New Testament teaching that the death of Christ reveals the love of God and, by revealing that love, awakens love in return. Romans 5:8, 2 Corinthians 5:15, and 1 John 4 all speak in this way. Important as that truth is, it does not explain Paul's teaching in Romans 3:26, Romans 7:4, and Colossians 2:14 about the relation between Christ's death and the justice of God. Nor does it explain the necessity that moved Christ, as recorded in passages such as Matthew 16:21, to go up to Jerusalem and place Himself in the hands of those who would kill Him. Love does not choose a needless sacrifice, or a sacrifice needed only to display itself, or one that secures by great cost what could have been secured by less. We may admire generosity, but we regret expenditure that serves no real end. When, however, a great good that could not otherwise be ours is secured at great cost, then the sacrifice deepens our gratitude. The very costliness of the means God used to harmonize the justification of sinners with His own justice strongly suggests that nothing less costly would have accomplished the same purpose.
So the question returns with full force: why was so costly a revelation of divine love necessary for human salvation?
To answer that question, we turn again to Romans 3:25-26. There Paul says that God set forth Christ as a sacrifice of atonement through faith in His blood in order to demonstrate His righteousness; that He was moved to do this because His earlier forbearance toward sin might appear to obscure that righteousness; and that the final aim of this demonstration was to harmonize the justification of believers with His own justice. In other words, the immediate purpose of Christ's death was to make the justice of God visible in the face of past forbearance, which might seem to hide it, and in the face of the Gospel, which announces that God receives into His favor all who believe the words of Jesus. The closing words of verse 26 imply that the justice of God itself required this manifestation. It would have been unjust for God to let His justice remain hidden while pardoning sin without providing, through the death of Christ, a public demonstration of it.
A Demonstration of the Justice of God.
The question before us, then, is this: does the death of Christ, as a means of human salvation, provide a demonstration of the justice of God? If it does, then justice itself required it as a condition of salvation. Justice always demands to be openly displayed, even for the good of those who are governed.
Justice is the divine attribute that underlies the sequence of sin, sorrow, and death. Whatever reveals the inevitability of that sequence reveals God's impartial administration of His own law. I will try to show that the death of Christ, following His union with a race already struck by the deadly curse of sin, does indeed reveal this inevitability. In that way it reveals God's impartial rule in a manner that calls forth deep reverence and serves a definite moral purpose.
Let us look again at the sequence of sin and sorrow. Our conviction that these belong together is rooted so deeply in our moral nature that we can hardly doubt the sequence itself has been established by the Author of our being. It also appears to be universal and inevitable. We see, moreover, that sin often brings sorrow not only to the sinner but also to others, including innocent people, and especially to those most closely connected with the guilty. That result is so common that it too must belong to the order God has established. And this far-reaching effect of sin shows, even more clearly than the suffering of the guilty themselves, the terrible and deadly power of evil. In that sense, the pain inflicted on the innocent through this divinely ordered moral sequence may be called a kind of vicarious punishment of sin.
Hard as it is, the suffering brought on innocent people by the sins of others contributes to the moral education of the race. A world in which no one suffered except for his own fault would be a far less effective school of moral discipline. If that is so, we may reasonably conclude that even this severe connection between sin and innocent suffering was ordained by the wisdom and love of God for the good of mankind.
The Son of God and the Human Race.
At the incarnation, the Son of God entered into an even closer relation with our race. He took on flesh and blood and accepted the conditions of human bodily life. He shared the very nature on which (as we shall see as we continue our explorations) the sentence of death rests because of human sin. Unless the incarnate Son had been shielded by special divine intervention, this union necessarily involved suffering and death. It also brought Him into close contact with human sin, a contact that could not but be infinitely painful to the pure human spirit of Jesus. In Him, pure human nature fully experienced, while remaining unstained by sin, the painful and shameful consequences of evil. The inevitable result of this nearness to humanity was mental anguish, bodily suffering, and finally death. These consequences of the incarnation were foreseen and willingly accepted by the Son of God.
This intimate union of the Creator Son with humanity was probably part of the original purpose of creation and may well have been necessary for its fulfillment and for the highest good of mankind. We may reasonably believe that an intelligent creature reaches full development and happiness only in the closest possible union with the Creator. Had humanity not sinned, that union would have involved neither suffering nor death. But because humanity did sin, the union of the Son of God with man, so necessary for man's highest development, brought with it all that Christ in fact endured.
The Son of God became man. By direct experience He came to know bodily pain. His pure human spirit felt, as only the pure can feel, the shame and degradation of sin. And the witness He bore to God's claims on humanity exposed Him to the violence of evil men. No hand from heaven intervened to spare Him from the consequences of entering a body subject to death and a race ruled by sin. In Him, sin worked out its full consequences until the sinless One hung dead upon the cross. In other words, in the incarnate Son, the sequence of sin and suffering, established by Himself as Creator, remained unbroken and ran its full course, even though in doing so it struck the Son Himself with infinite agony.
This manifestation of the sequence of sin and sorrow serves a great moral purpose. God's forbearance in not swiftly inflicting the full punishment of sin in earlier ages, and His proclamation of pardon for all who believe the good news announced by Christ, might seem to suggest that He tolerates sin itself, as though it were not essentially evil and deadly. The cross of Christ decisively forbids that conclusion. That sin slew the Author of life when He came, for our salvation, in some sense under its power, is the strongest possible motive for avoiding all contact with sin.
In this Way, the Death of Christ Reveals the Justice of God.
A well-known illustration has often been drawn from a story about Zaleucus recorded by Valerius Maximus. According to the account, the lawgiver's own son was found guilty of adultery, a crime punishable by the loss of both eyes. To preserve the force of the law while sparing his son total blindness, Zaleucus ordered one of his son's eyes to be put out and one of his own. The story, whether true or not, at least suggests this much: the voluntary suffering of the innocent may sometimes serve the interests of justice as effectively as the full punishment of the guilty. If the account is genuine, the mutilated face of Zaleucus would have proclaimed his determination to administer his own law impartially. In view of such self-sacrifice, no one would dare break the law in the expectation of escaping punishment. In that sense, the self-inflicted suffering made the partial remission of the penalty morally harmless. In a similar way, the death of the Son of God reveals, even more clearly than the death of all the guilty would have done, God's determination to maintain the sequence of sin and suffering. And just as the ancient story honors Zaleucus, so Christians in every age have seen in the death of Christ a manifestation of divine justice that has called forth their profound reverence. In their view, this vindication of divine justice renders morally harmless the forgiveness of sins proclaimed in the Gospel.
Even in ordinary life, the suffering of the innocent caused by the sin of others sometimes serves a moral purpose. Dissolute parents, for example, have at times been awakened to the depth of their own guilt by the suffering they inflicted on their children. In such cases, innocent suffering has exerted a real moral effect.
Another illustration of the moral effect of refusing to pardon the guilty, even when that refusal eventually cost innocent lives, occurred some years ago in Greece. A party of English travelers were captured by brigands near Marathon. Their captors offered to release them in return for a large ransom and a full pardon. The king was eager to save the captives and willing to pay a great price to do so. But he could not pardon the guilty. To allow the robbers to keep their gains in peace would have encouraged similar crimes and made life in Greece more insecure. Indeed, the unrest that had helped bring about the fall of King Otho had been greatly intensified by his frequent pardons of criminals and the insecurity that followed. The Englishmen were murdered. Yet the king's refusal to pardon the brigands dealt a blow to brigandage in Greece from which it never recovered. It became clear at once that the guilty could no longer count on mercy. In this case, the capture had not been foreseen and the death of the innocent was not voluntary. Still, the interests of justice and of the nation were served by the death of innocent men caused by the sin of others. In that respect, the case offers a limited parallel to the New Testament teaching about the death of Christ.
Christ's Death and Our Sin.
So far, we have spoken of Christ's death simply as the result of His entrance into mortal human life. But for the ends of justice, it was also necessary that His death stand in conspicuous connection with human sin. That end was achieved by His violent death on the cross. For beyond dispute, He died because He was good and had preached righteousness among people who were evil. This all-important connection between His death and our sin would not have been made plain if Christ had fled from His enemies and later died a natural death. It was therefore necessary, for the manifestation of divine justice and for our salvation, that He should place Himself in the hands of His enemies. In this sense, we may understand His words in passages such as Matthew 16:21 and Luke 24:46, that He must go to Jerusalem and be put to death.
Whatever judgment may be made of this attempt to explain what the New Testament writers do not fully explain, the documentary evidence still compels us to believe that Christ taught He was about to die willingly in order to save men from the punishment due to their sins, and that Paul taught God gave Christ to die in order to harmonize the justification of sinners with His own justice and to demonstrate that harmony openly. We have also seen that Paul's teaching most fully explains, and indeed best accounts for, the teaching of the rest of the New Testament concerning Christ's death. The analogy of human government gives strong reason to think that God could not pardon sin by mere prerogative. And the death on the cross of Him who became man in order to fulfill humanity's original and glorious destiny reveals the moral sequence imposed by God for human good. In that real sense, the death of Christ, as a means of saving the human race, reveals the justice of God; and that revelation is necessary to vindicate His justice in the very act of pardon.
This explanation is necessarily imperfect, but it helps bring the New Testament teaching about the death of Christ into clearer harmony with the rest of its teaching, with the moral intuitions of humanity, and with the principles that govern justice in human life.
This post is based upon Lecture XXII from J. A. Beet's book Through Christ to God: A Study in Scientific Theology (1893), re-written with the assistance of Microslop CoPilot. The original text may be found at the Internet Archive here: Through Christ to God.
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