I’ve heard the question all my life, how does the death of a man over 2000 years ago relinquish me of my sins? The only answers I’ve heard are “You have to have faith” which doesn’t explain a thing or even worse, “Because it does”. People swallow the faith explanation without any understanding whatsoever, but it gives them comfort and that is in essence of what church is about, so you keep donating. You pay; we comfort you.
The explanation I will give is understandable; I certainly don’t want anyone to think that this website is the end all of all discussions but I have put my explanation past AI (Artificial Intelligence) and it made enough sense so that a computer could understand it without any faith whatsoever on how the death of Jesus can absolve you of your sins.
I wish the explanation was a simple sentence as offered by the modern church, but buckle up, it’s going to be one hell of a ride. For the explanation, we need to go way back long before Jesus and we need to start by understanding the law. The first laws for man you could say came from the court of God, a court man has no access to but we must obey by the laws handed down to us, the ten commandments came from the court of God, written in stone by Gods own hand and given to man (Moses). The first official laws but before that I guess you could call them rules, strict rules on sin and payments for these sins. The Bible doesn’t actually say when these rules came into place but rules based on what you would call “common sense” or “common decency” were always there. For example, there was no law issued in the Garden of Eden on murder that is written into scripture but you just know it’s wrong. Cain had no defence of “But God, you didn’t tell me I couldn’t kill my brother Able”!
So the rules were understood before the Ten Commandments were issued and it was one of the churches roles to demand a payment for breaking the rules, sin followed by the offering of a blood sacrifice. This is mentioned enough times in scripture so that we may understand that this system is the law. All this is certainly written as it were law, just the origin of these laws is not written. Yes, you could argue over this point and if this site becomes successful, I’d love nothing more than to be able to afford “chat forums” and we could all discuss this until the cows come home but for now just accept the possibility that the blood sacrifice is (not was) a point of law from the court of God that man cannot change.
Let’s move on, God is clear that his laws are eternal and cannot be changed. But we move forward to when man could start having an input into self-governance, Gods people cried out to God for kings (other peoples did have kings) and God granted this to his people but with a very strict single law (yes, it’s written). You can add to the laws as long as your additions do not contravene laws already in existence. That one common point of law has continued to this day, we call it “legal precedence”. We have different levels of courts from highest to lowest, the lower courts cannot make a legal judgement that contradicts and ruling from a court higher than itself. So to clarify, the court of God gave in the Ten Commandments “Thou shalt not commit murder”, no court of man can legally overwrite that original law that came from the highest court that we have no access to. But our lower courts could add to that law if it did not contravene the original law. Hence, we added “manslaughter” which kind of allows for a defence based on a good excuse. For example, they had a gun and were going to shoot me so I pushed them off a cliff, manslaughter with an excuse that can avert a sentence upon you.
Okay, lets start to bring the pieces together with a quick side observation related and to answer another question. What was the role of the early church/temple? The community’s church was the back bone of the people, it assured laws, sin and punishment were adhered to but very importantly it was the community’s safety net. Everyone was required to donate a percentage of their produce to the church and build up its stores of wealth, so that in times of need like drought or famine, any calamity to hit the community, the church could sustain the community through utilisation of its stores. A wealthy church could sustain a city through extended periods of hardship.
In dealing with the law, the church priests would determine what blood sacrifice would atone for your sin, they would put weight to the sin and demand an appropriate blood sacrifice be offered. So, a minor sin might cost you a dove for example but a major sin might cost you a calf or even your finest bull depending on the severity of the sin, regardless, law stipulates a blood sacrifice must be offered for all sins.
The way blood sacrifices were done in these temples, you would take your calf for example and offer it to the temple, it was sacrificed upon the alter and the blood must be returned to the ground (not consumed, this is where the Jehovah’s witness religion gets it’s doctrine against blood transfusions not being allowed, mis understanding scripture, abstaining from the blood is in reference only to the sacrifice, don’t consume the blood from the sacrifice), once sacrificed, certain portions are then designated a burnt offering to God, “And the scent pleased God etc” while the vast majority of the sacrifice now belonged to the temple priests.
So if you think about it like this, way back then you are looking for a place to settle down with your family, you travel from town to town on your donkey’s looking for a nice town to bring up your kids. You would check the local temple’s priests, if they were all big well fed overweight priests then you would know this town was filled with debauchery and those priests are constantly feasting from all the blood sacrifice’s constantly being offered at the temple for sins. But if you come across a town where the temple priests really looked like they needed a good feed, a bit on the anorexic side, then this is the town you get off your donkey and settle down to raise a family.
We are nearly there to tie all this information together to understand the death of Jesus. Now this system of blood sacrifice really has no place in modern society, it is no longer fit for purpose. Way back then the blood sacrifice was a great burden to you, you might only be able catch 2 doves that day from a whole day of effort and one of those doves is to be offered at the temple as a blood sacrifice. That night when you sit with your family for your evening meal, you explain to your children why we are all going hungry tonight because you sinned and the food that should be feeding your family right now is feeding your local priest instead. The blood sacrifice actually meant something, it was a great price to pay that cost you dearly. In todays society, I’ll just buy that lamb and put it on my credit card, drop it off at the temple on my drive to work, sweet, sin done and dusted. What about the vegetarians? They wont offer a dove, instead it will be a vege-burger. It’s been said you can’t get blood from a stone, neither can you get blood from a vege-burger. That system is no longer fit for purpose as you can see, but the law is the law and it is unchanging, the law must be fulfilled and the law calls for a blood sacrifice for all sins. Jesus can be the final blood sacrifice but he was never going to be your free ticket into Heaven, it must come at a price to YOU. Jesus did not go through being scourged and humiliated, degraded and sacrificed so you can just rock up at any church on any given Sunday and claim I am saved. Yes, that is exactly what the church teaches you, all you have to do is believe in Jesus and your sins are atoned for, if only it were so simple.
You must pay a personal price for all your sins or no payment has been received on your behalf, Jesus will not know you. I am so angry right now with so many for thinking just believing is enough but I’ll try to keep it civil. The death of Jesus means a lot to me as to many of you but to most it’s just a free ride into Heaven. If the death of Jesus and all he went through doesn’t literally tear your heart out then you have paid zero price, to you his death was in vain. You need to read him, feel him and if you can’t physically cry out in pain for him with real tears then he is nothing more to you than a character in a story you read. When someone close to you dies, a brother, a child, whoever, what they went through leading to that death can increase your pain tenfold if it was extremely tragic. My brother was buried alive at just 21 years old and that hurt a lot, he suffered greatly. How he died I’m sure affected the amount of pain I felt, and that’s exactly how it has to be with Jesus, forget the rest of the world as I want to narrow this down so there is no mistake whatsoever. The bond has to be personal, not just a scripture spoken and you accept. Look at it like this, you and a very close personal friend are taken prisoner by one very sick individual and this sick individual makes it clear that one of you is going to be tortured beyond belief before the other is let free without a scratch. Your friend volunteers to be tortured and you have to watch every sickening detail for hours on end until their broken body can take no more and lets out its last dying breath and you walk away without even a scratch. How do you feel about what they had to go through so you may live. Now read Jesus again and understand that even before the crucifixion he was chastised, scourged to within an inch of death, beaten to a bloody mess before he even had to carry his own cross to his final death. You need to understand Jesus went through this for you personally, no one else, it’s all about you and him and no one else. If you can’t actually feel his pain then I’m sorry but he won’t know you because you never truly knew him. You must feel that your greatest love has been torn from you in the most horrific way possible and only then does his blood become your blood sacrifice, the law has been fulfilled, Amen.
I’d like to touch briefly and reach out and explain Jesus to all those that know of him but believe it’s okay to ignore a prophet sent by God. The prophet Mohammad acknowledges that Jesus was also a prophet of God. Whether we are a Christian or a Muslim, scripture teaches us to be discerning against any that may claim to be a prophet to decide are they a prophet or not, nowhere in any of our scriptures does it even imply we can ignore a prophet sent by God. Jesus has been misunderstood by Christians, so a God sent another prophet, the prophet Muhammad. It’s a two-way street; Christians need to know what the prophet Muhammad teaches, and Muslims need to know what the prophet Jesus teaches. To ignore a prophet sent by God is in fact saying to God “I am smarter than you God, I will decide who I will listen to even though you sent them to teach me”!
Now Christians make their error about Jesus in the opposite direction, The Council of Constantinople in 381 AD in effect brings God down to the level of humans through the unsubstantiated claim in scripture of the holy trinity, the Godhead, three in one. The Father the Son and the Holy Ghost as one single entity. Man cannot raise ourselves to the level of God but the holy trinity lowers God to our level of mortality by claiming he has a human essence. I have sat through church services where God isn’t even mentioned once. They worship the creation, not the creator, God is clear that he is a jealous God yet these church services worship the cross and Jesus and pray to Jesus rather than through Jesus.
In this site, I have touched on the Buddhist faith, Christian and Muslim and also written for the atheist, it’s not that one of these groups doesn’t have any faith but rather for them, they have beliefs in a different system. I am trying to give faith or show that all our faiths are in fact related. I’ve invested a lot of myself into this site and if successful I really do want chat forums so we can all discuss these issues and more because I’m not totally right but hope together we can all get a lot closer to God than what we already are.
Since we were just discussing sin, law etc., I’ll slip in another answer to a question posed on the homepage that kind of fits in here. Can a gay man enter into the Kingdom of God according to scripture? Now scripture says your life will be placed on a set of scales; your good deeds and your sins will be weighed against each other. Scripture also tells us all sins have weight, but it doesn’t give any weight to any particular sin, only God knows by what weight all your sins will be measured as well as what weights will be allocated to all your good deeds. It’s kind of hypocritical that for so long the church will tell you that you can be a serial killer, simply believe in Jesus and you are saved but if you ever dare put your penis into another man’s bottom then you will burn in hell. By scripture, we simply can’t know what weights we are placing on each side of the scale. Yes, being gay is a sin, but Heaven will be full of sinners of different degrees. Being gay will be weighed against you, no church can tell you with any knowledge of how much weight you must place on the other side of the scales to balance them in your favor and indeed enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.
