What’s So Important About Jesus Christ

Well, Jesus died for our sins on the cross, so that we can be forgiven and have everlasting life. We’ve been taught that, but what does it actually mean, and why is it so important? Why did Jesus have to die, and couldn’t God have brought forgiveness without it? These were the questions I had when I first met other Christians when I went to university. To be asking such questions in many evangelical circles is tantamount to telling the world that you’re not actually a Christian, so people won’t readily admit to not really understanding the significance of it.

Now, it’s easy to trot out the standard doctrine about Jesus being without sin: the spotless lamb, the sacrifice for our sins. That there is no forgiveness without the shedding of blood, and that only Jesus was an acceptable sacrifice for the sins of humanity because only he was without sin. But we live in a culture where none of that really means anything, and it begs the question: so what?

I have to admit that even though I have known the the theory of it in increasing detail over the years, it is only relatively recently, with all the healing, that I am really starting to actually understand why things had to happen the way they did. Even now, I would say that there are many unanswered questions regarding why things are like they are. What I am writing below is based on the Bible, without which we would really have no reference point, and we would be subject to any trendy flight of fancy that might come along. You are free to disagree with what I write, and we could spend hours in endless theological debate, but that may not achieve very much. Here goes, anyway…

Firstly, who is God? God is three inseparable individual beings who have 100% unity in the way they think and see things, but they have distinctive roles. God the Father is the ultimate originator of everything, has overall care of everything and upholds all the physical, moral and spiritual laws in which the universe exists. God the Son (Jesus Christ) is our spokesman and representative. He became one of us, and has taken full responsibility for our current state of affairs. He was involved in our creation, his life is God’s message to mankind, and all who choose to come under his covering will be joined to him for ever. Whilst the Father and Son are currently not present on the Earth, their agent, the Holy Spirit, is. Everything God does on Earth in this era is done though him, and he lives inside all those who have chosen to put themselves under the Son’s covering.

Now, God knows everything and is everywhere. He also knows the past present and future, and that very fact poses quite a few fundamental why questions. In my imagination I have him looking at a model village in front of him, with a just a single road running through the middle of it. The road represents the time line of history from beginning to end and the village is all the things that happen along that time line, including all the things that God has influenced and caused to happen. From his perspective he operates simultaneously on all or any point in history. From our perspective, we can only influence the point where we are, and we do not have any means of knowing the future, except for statistical likelihoods and what God specifically tells us.

God is also all powerful, and can do anything he chooses. This begs the question, “Why then does he allow evil to take place and all the consequential suffering?” The answer has to do with choice and free will, and this is fundamental to why things are like they are. More on this to come.

God created everything that exists. Not only the physical universe, which in the end is just energy arranged in different formats, but also spiritual beings of different kinds and with different abilities. There is a whole hierarchy of beings whose existence is only in the non-physical realm (most of the time), and then there’s mankind just one notch below all of that. To all those spiritual beings (including mankind), he has given the ability to think and choose, but in doing so, he has one basic thing which he has been saying to all of them from the moment they were created: “We (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) have made you, all of you, and we have created you to live within a set of bounds and laws, which we know work and will work for your individual and corporate benefit if you choose to remain within them. We want you to have the same joy that we have had together for all eternity. Will you be part of this and go along with the way I have made things to be?” The very nature of the free will that God has given means that, from his perspective, there is no guarantee as to whether each individual will chose God’s way or try something different.

The sad reality is that God’s key number one right-hand spiritual being thought he would try and set up an independent state within all of this. This sparked a war in heaven, which he ultimately lost. He got chucked out of his position close to God along with one third of all the spiritual beings: those that he had won over to his cause. Today, we refer to this being as Satan.

So where does mankind fit in all of this? From the story at the beginning of the Bible we know that the whole of the human race is descended from just two people, and that the whole of mankind’s predicament originated from a single foolish decision that they each made. The impression you get is that these people were pretty naïve and gullible, and if God had given them just one extra grain of sense between them, they would have told Satan to get packing. So if these relatively newly created people, who hadn’t even got down to making babies it would seem, were wandering around not really understanding what the consequences would be, why did God let Satan into their presence in the first place? Couldn’t he have send him straight to the abyss or the fiery pit, without passing Go or collecting £200? Surely he knew what was going to happen? Surely it’s God’s fault that all of this has happened, and so he should take responsibility for what has happened? It’s almost like God created mankind with the deliberate intention of things turning out the way they have.

Let’s unravel that. Firstly, it was not a foregone conclusion that mankind would choose to believe Satan rather than God. After all, they had been warned of the consequences, and they knew who was all-powerful. Nevertheless, you can’t say God didn’t know what was going to happen, and so he must bear some of the blame. After all, it looks as if mankind was pretty much set up to fail, and to fall into the obvious trap. The good news is that God had laid out a plan before this all took place, and that he himself would take all the blame and consequences of what happened. But the rules still have to be upheld. The whole eternal ecosystem only works one way, so any solution must conform to the rules. It’s the death penalty for any being who breaks the rules in the slightest way. And the definition of death is separation from God and his way of doing things, the result of which is permanent pain and anguish.

Satan’s tragedy is that he is left with no get-out clause. He was aware of all the eternal principles of the way everything holds together, and yet he wanted to be God. There is no way he could claim diminished responsibility as he knew exactly what he was doing and did so deliberately. Who knows what would have happened if the other two-thirds of the heavenly beings had not chosen to stick with God and had not defeated Satan and his minions. Mankind, on the other hand, was created without much of this knowledge and the case for diminished responsibility is there. But if this is the case there has to be someone on whom the whole blame can be placed, someone to say that he was responsible for creating mankind and allowing him into the state he is in, yet at the same time had never been involved in trying to set up Satan’s alternative realm. Jesus, who did have direct involvement in mankind’s creation, chose to take that responsibility, and in doing so chose to take on all the consequences that go with that: death, with the separation and anguish that accompanies it. He chose to do this in a very tangible way. He chose to exactly parallel on Earth what was taking place in the heavenly realms (which is why he himself is God’s message to mankind). He became a man, leaving behind his eternal knowledge and becoming as naïve as we are, yet without the predisposition to rebel. He chose an era in history where the public death penalty was most hideous and tortuous, and allowed himself to be executed even though hadn’t committed a single crime or moral transgression in the whole of his life. When Jesus was crucified, he died two deaths: the physical one where his spirit was separated from his body, and the spiritual one where he was separated from God, with all the pain and anguish that that entails.

Some people might want to take issue with my use of the phrase diminished responsibility, as if we are somehow not fully responsible for our own actions. If we don’t take responsibility for our own actions before God, we can’t pass on that responsibility to Jesus. I take the view that God is not so much out to punish all transgressors; the spiritual laws take care of that without God having to lift a finger. Outside of Christ’s covering we will take the full consequences of our actions, whether we have deliberately chosen to do wrong or have done so unwittingly. It’s more that God is looking for any way he can show mercy on us without violating his own principles. Remember, Jesus prayed from the cross for his executioners, “Father, forgive them because they don’t know what they are doing”.

So, every person ever born has inherited a terminal illness, due to the actions of our ultimate ancestors. Although it is theoretically possible to obey all of God’s moral code, in practice no-one achieves this because of the separation that exists between mankind and God. However, whereas it is Satan’s journey to be pushed further and further from God until he ends up in the fiery pit of hell, it is mankind’s destiny to be re-united with God and to enjoy his presence for ever. In fact, it even looks like God created mankind for the specific purpose of displacing Satan and his followers, so as to take the place closest to God which Satan forfeited. Nevertheless, there is a free choice involved, and although God wants everyone to make the right choice, sadly not everyone will. In order for Jesus’ death to work on our behalf, we have to take that on board for ourselves, and make the decision to come under his jurisdiction. We have to turn from our way of living that is independent of God, to one where we make concious decisions to do what he wants. Otherwise, we are just exposed to the judgement and fate that awaits Satan. In doing so, we are let completely off the hook, and God treats us as if we had never decided to go our own way in the first place. He does this despite the fact that our ongoing thoughts and behaviour in this era are still contrary to the laws and principles that he has set up. He treats us from the perspective of the state in which we will ultimately end up, even though we haven’t got there yet. He is legally able to do this because Jesus has taken the responsibility for all aspects of us that are still out of line. If we find ourselves in a pickle because of what we have done, our case can still be pleaded on the basis of what Jesus has done, and God the Father can legitimately direct circumstances in our favour if we ask.

All this puts mankind in quite a fortunate position. It seems that God’s created beings have difficulty in taking God’s word for it that trying to break the fundamental laws will lead to separation and despair. It seems that so many of these beings have to taste the pain before they believe it’s there. So we get to taste that pain before we, as individuals, have technically done anything that might warrant it as a punishment (this is because of what our forebears have done – more on that in another section). We are all suffering the consequences of first other people’s sins and then our own. Yet, against the backdrop of being acquainted with the consequences of sin, we are all given the opportunity to escape, both for all eternity and in the present era.

Back to the question: why does God allow all the suffering? Firstly, because sin leads to death and that’s a fundamental law that cannot be broken, like the laws of physics. Secondly, it’s that very suffering, especially the unfairness of it, that makes people want to find God and the escape. That has certainly been very true in my case. And here’s another thought: how would you know if God did stop the suffering? When was the last time Britain had a mass-murderer like Hitler or Stalin or Saddam Hussein in charge? The godliness and prayers of Christians in this country down the centuries have indeed stemmed the tide of wickedness, and we haven’t finished yet.

But what about those who’ve never heard the Gospel? Will they be automatically cast into the pit of hell because they haven’t received Christ? The Bible says these people are a law unto themselves (that’s where this phrase comes from). Essentially that means they will be judged by their own standards, which isn’t really very good news. When Jesus died and his spirit left his body, he went to a kind of holding cell reserved for all those who have died without accepting Christ (or at least not having heard the Gospel). The Greek word for this is Hades, and the Hebrew is Sheol, and are found in the New and Old Testaments respectively. While there, he preached to all those present. My understanding of this is that everyone who had died without knowing the rescue deal was given one last opportunity to take it. With God existing at all points in time simultaneously, I expect this last opportunity is also given to those who have lived and died in the period of time after Jesus’ death. If this is the case, then it begs the question: why does God go to the trouble of sustaining a world so full of evil, and have Christians go around preaching a gospel at great personal cost, only to be rejected (and even killed) so much of the time? Why not cut the whole thing short, present the gospel just once by someone who is really good at it (i.e. Jesus himself) and then sort everyone into two camps at that point? One point to consider first of all is that God does actually know what he is doing, and we don’t, so maybe we need to get over it and just trust God. Who is so arrogant that they believe the can teach God wisdom? Leaving that aside, we need to remember that so many Christians have only become so after having rejected the Gospel outright many times. If they had only had the one opportunity, they wouldn’t have made it through. So the harvest of souls is much greater with things the way they are. There is another thing that is going on in this era, and all the more so as it is drawing to a close. Evil in all its forms is being shown up for what it really is, and the separation between good and evil, righteous and unrighteous is becoming very plain. In the next era, no-one will want to rebel and we will have the annals of the current era to prove what happens if you do.

Of course, none of this would have any validity if Jesus hadn’t been raised from the dead and proved the fact to those around at the time. With his taking responsibility for our condition, we get to go where he ends up.

So, Jesus came to Earth with an agenda and a set of priorities. It wasn’t so much that he wanted us to copy his morally upright behaviour, though he had plenty to say on that. No, it’s that he wants us to be on a journey coming closer and closer to God, drawing others along into that same journey. His desire is to specifically target certain types of person, the victims of this world, and to heal them. He does want everyone to be saved, but his heart is particularly towards those who are messed up. Brilliant! That’s me.

I used to view getting healed as like throwing a pair of dice with the hope of getting a double six. There would be preaching in a meeting and then a call for everyone with a particular ill to come to the front. You would get prayed for, and most of the time nothing would happen and nothing would change. However, I’ve now learned a few principles that mean I can hit the jackpot most of the time, and I don’t have to go to endless meetings to get it. That’s what this web site is about.