Why Did Jesus Suffer?
In the forty or so years since I was a child, I have seen a significant shift in the emphasis that we take when we talk about God. When I was a little boy say between 8 - 12, just as I was beginning to pay serious attention in church, I became very aware of God’s holiness and His justice. These specific aspects of God certainly coloured the way I saw God generally. Quite frankly, I saw Him more as an angry God – a God who was quick to punish – and I know for myself and many of my peers our interest in salvation was largely generated by a fear of what we thought God would do to us if we didn’t somehow find forgiveness for the naughty, bad, gross, cruel things we were doing.
When I compare the last ten years of my life with the first ten years I am aware that more recently there has been greater emphasis on the love of God – what we might call “the positive side.” While God’s justice and holiness and judgment against sin are still mentioned, they are not much more than merely mentioned. What is emphasized and elaborated on are God’s patience, His love, His gentleness in dealing with His human creatures, His goodness. All of these come to the forefront in sermons, conversations, books, and music. Consequently, these are the things that shape our thoughts about God. Just as in my youth, the concept of the holiness of God was the one that overshadowed my understanding of spiritual reality, now the concept of the love of God is the one that prevails. I hasten to add that I do not believe one is right and the other wrong, or that one is more accurate and the other less. Both are necessary.
A while ago, I was talking with a younger person who has grown up with the emphasis on the love of God. It is the prevailing idea about God to which she has been exposed. Since she has some connections with traditional Christianity and it was near Easter, she raised a few questions with me. One of her concerns was “How could any father allow his child to suffer as Jesus did?” As I responded to her concern, I suggested that her struggle with this idea may stem from the rather unclear view of God’s holiness that is prevalent these days. We just don’t understand it.
I cast about for an illustration, all the while mindful that illustrations of what God is like taken from the physical universe are always flawed because God, being God, is naturally beyond description and certainly beyond comparison with anything in the natural world. However, I suggested that she think about God in terms of being absolute light – absolute, spiritual light. To help clarify what I was getting at I asked her to picture herself in a dark room, in a basement with no windows and experience the absolute darkness around her. There was no light at all either direct or reflected. I am talking about pure darkness in a confined space.
Then I suggested that she picture herself in that dark room lighting just one candle. Though feeble in itself the light from that candle would drive the darkness from the room. Darkness could no longer exist where that light was. Taking that on a much larger scale, thinking about the spiritual darkness which resides in us and around us in our environment, when we think of God as absolute spiritual light then we can accept that where God is darkness cannot be.
We tend to put moral values on this. We usually think about this in relation to crime and punishment as it were. But I think there is a sense where this goes beyond God being angry and destroying that which is sinful - in rebellion against Him. I think we can see it more as a law of physics that where God is in His purity, holiness, justice, glory, that spiritual darkness simply cannot exist.
Clearly during this little window in eternity which we know as time, evil does exist. True evil is out there. All of us have experienced it in one way or another. Yet this little time in the ageless duration of eternity does not represent the norm. For now, good and evil do coexist temporarily side by side, but it will not be always like this. We might think of it as an experiment that proves that good overcomes and that evil cannot prevail. Consider all the selfishness, rebelliousness, and sin in the world as darkness and think of God’s holiness and justice as light. Where He is, the darkness is destroyed. It cannot exist where His light shines.
All through the Bible there is a connection between sin and death. God is the source of life and when we rebel against Him death is the result. Right from the first sin of our first parents, humanity has generally been in a state of rebellion against God. This has given rise to a separation between God and humanity which results in the death of humanity because God is the source of life and when we are cut off from the source of life we die.
God did not create humanity for death; He created us for life. Death came only because Adam and Eve rebelled against God. They thought they could get a better deal for themselves than the one God had offered them. Remember He had offered them dominion over the world but they had decided to grasp after being gods themselves. It is only because they adopted this attitude and rebelled against God that they became estranged from Him. They had been cut off from the source of life and experienced the process of physical decline toward death when the elements of their physical bodies returned to earth of which they were made.
It is important that we understand God’s positive intentions for us. The fact that God made us to live should warm our hearts and give us some encouragement in the face of all the misery and ugliness that we see around us. Because God made us for life and truly loves us, He doesn’t want to see us destroyed. He doesn’t want His pure absolute spiritual light to eliminate us as it drives the darkness out of the universe. The Bible says that right from the very beginning of the creation of space that God had a plan in which He Himself would take on human sin. He knew that the logical consequence of our darkness was that His light would destroy us, so He decided to take on our darkness and be destroyed by His own light so that the irreversible connection between sin and death could be fulfilled. Then He could offer us forgiveness on the basis that the debt had been paid. The death that would occur as a result of sin would not be our death as human beings. God Himself, in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ, would die on the cross in our place.
When we begin to understand the holiness of God as well as His love, and the justice of God as well as His mercy, we can begin to understand what happened at the cross and why it was necessary. We can begin to see that it makes sense that Jesus had to die in our place. He had to die because there was an unbreakable connection between sin and death. Because we had sinned, we would have to die. God did not want us to die so He died in our place.
Ron Hughes
© April 2004
