Why Jesus Had to Die

Message Title: Why Did Jesus Have To Die? 

Mark 15 

 The life of Jesus was directed towards one goal greater than any of those remarkable things He did: His destiny was to die in obedience to His God and Father. The work of Jesus on the cross becomes the center of all history. Everything before it looked ahead to what God the Son would accomplish on the cross. Everything after it looks back to the work that had to happen. 

1.Jesus had to die to fulfill all the types, promises, and prophecies of the Old Testament.  

2.Jesus had to die to finish all the sacrifices and ceremonies of the priesthood. 

3.Jesus had to die to completely identify with humanity. 

4.Jesus had to die to satisfy the justice of God.  

5.Jesus had to die to defeat the power of Satan, sin, and death. 

6.Jesus had to die to demonstrate the love of God. 

Why did Jesus have to die? 

Reason ONE: Real Forgiveness Is Costly Suffering 

When someone wrongs you, there is an indelible sense a debt has been incurred. There are only two options here. 

1.Make the perpetrator suffer for what they have done. 

2.Forgive – refuse to make them pay. 

• When the evil is serious, forgiveness means bearing the cost – absorbing the debt yourself.  
• Should it surprise us then that when God determined to forgive us, he went to the cross himself in the person of Jesus? 
• He did not inflict the pain on someone else. 
• Human forgiveness works this way because we unavoidably reflect the image of our Creator. 

Reason TWO: Real Love is a Personal Exchange. 

All real life-changing love involves some form of this kind of exchange. Consider parenting: You must pour yourself into your children – your freedom must be limited so that theirs can grow. (You must decrease so that they may increase!) 

John Stott in “The Cross of Christ” writes that substitution is at the heart of the Christian message. 

“The essence of sin is we human beings substituting ourselves for God, while the essence of salvation is God substituting himself for us. We . . . put ourselves where only God deserves to be; God . . . puts himself where we deserve to be.”