Exodus 22 — Thoughts

Why Did Jesus Have to Die?

Why did Jesus have to die? Couldn’t God have forgiven our sins by simply ignoring them

This chapter gives us a clue to the answer. Here, God gives a series of laws to His people, and all of them, in some way, focus on justice.

The laws God gives aren’t arbitrary. They’re based on His character. He wants to see justice done in Israel because He, Himself, is just. And we see His justice in the Old Testament.

A common criticism of the Bible is that the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath. But God must be a God of wrath if He is also going to be a God of justice. Simply ignoring our sin, looking the other way when we hurt ourselves and each other, would be a great injustice.

So when God brings wrath against sinners, He is actually meting out justice. Ultimately, this means death. He is the God of life, so when we reject Him by sinning, we are actually rejecting life. At that point, what else is left for us but death? This is why Paul writes that “the wages of sin is death.”

Justice demands death for sin, but God doesn’t want that for us. So He came to earth as a human, lived the perfect life we couldn’t live, and then died in our place for our sins on the cross.

God’s wrath isn’t limited to the Old Testament. We see it just as much in the New Testament — only His wrath doesn’t fall on sinners there. It falls on Jesus instead. All the wrath and death for sin we see across the Old Testament now falls on only one person and in only one moment, on the cross.

Without Jesus' death, there could be no justice. And without justice, there could be no forgiveness. The only way for us to be shown mercy for our sin is for the just wrath against our sin to fall on Jesus instead.

That is why Jesus had to die.

(Originally written May 23, 2022)